Colonization

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Colonization (

coloniality and often colonies, commonly pursued and maintained by colonialism.[1][2][3]

Colonization is sometimes used synonymously with settling, as with colonisation in biology, but while colonization historically involved settling, this particular form is called settler colonialism. In this case, colonization is structured and enforced by the settlers directly, while their or their ancestors' metropolitan country maintains a connection or control through the settler's colonialism. In settler colonization, a minority group rules either through the assimilation or oppression of the indigenous peoples,[4][5] or by establishing itself as the demographic majority through driving away, displacing or outright killing the indigenous people, as well as through immigration and births of metropolitan as well as other settlers.

The European colonization of Australia, New Zealand, and other places in Oceania was fueled by explorers, and colonists often regarding the encountered landmasses as terra nullius ("empty land" in Latin).[6] This resulted in laws and ideas such as Mexico's General Colonization Law and the United States' manifest destiny doctrine which furthered colonization.

Despite countless declarations and referendums from the United Nations on the independence of colonial countries and peoples, implemented since 1946, there are still colonies in the world, including Puerto Rico[7][8][9] and Guam.[citation needed] The United Nations maintains a list of dependent territories with no sufficient self-government.

Etymology

The term colonization is derived from the Latin words colere ("to cultivate, to till"),[10] colonia ("a landed estate", "a farm") and colonus ("a tiller of the soil", "a farmer"),[11] then by extension "to inhabit".[12] Someone who engages in colonization, i.e. the agent noun, is referred to as a colonizer, while the person who gets colonized, i.e. the object of the agent noun or absolutive, is referred to as a colonizee,[13] colonisee or the colonised.[14]

Pre-modern colonizations

Classical period

In ancient times, maritime nations such as the city-states of Greece and Phoenicia often established colonies to farm what they believed was uninhabited land. Land suitable for farming was often occupied by migratory 'barbarian tribes' who lived by hunting and gathering. To ancient Greeks and Phoenicians, these lands were regarded as simply vacant.[citation needed] However, this did not mean that conflict did not exist between the colonizers and local/native peoples. Greeks and Phoenicians also established colonies with the intent of regulating and expanding trade throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East.

Another period of colonization in ancient times was during the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire conquered large parts of Western Europe, North Africa, and West Asia. In North Africa and West Asia, the Romans often conquered what they regarded as 'civilized' peoples. As they moved north into Europe, they mostly encountered rural peoples/tribes with very little in the way of cities. In these areas, waves of Roman colonization often followed the conquest of the areas. Many of the current cities throughout Europe began as Roman colonies, such as Cologne, Germany, originally called Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium by the Romans, and the British capital city of London, which the Romans founded as Londinium.

Middle Ages

The decline and collapse of the Roman Empire saw (and was partly caused by) the large-scale movement of people in Eastern Europe and Asia. This is largely seen as beginning with nomadic horsemen from Asia (specifically the Huns) moving into the richer pasture land to the west, thus forcing the local people there to move further west and so on until eventually the Goths were forced to cross into the Roman Empire, resulting in continuous war with Rome which played a major role in the fall of the Roman Empire. During this period there were large-scale movements of people establishing new colonies all over western Europe. The events of this time saw the development of many of the modern-day nations of Europe like the Franks in France and Germany and the Anglo-Saxons in England.

In West Asia, during

Northern Africa, Mesopotamia, and the Levant.[15][16][17][18][19]

The Vikings of Scandinavia also carried out a large-scale colonization. The Vikings are best known as raiders, setting out from their original homelands in Denmark, southern Norway, and southern Sweden, to pillage the coastlines of northern Europe. In time, the Vikings began trading and established colonies. The Vikings first came across Iceland and established colonies there before moving onto Greenland, where they built settlements that endured until the 15th century. The Vikings launched an unsuccessful attempt at colonizing an area they called Vinland, which is probably at a site now known as L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland and Labrador, on the eastern coastline of Canada.

Modern colonialism

World empires and colonies in 1550
World empires and colonies in 1800

In the Colonial Era, colonialism in this context refers mostly to Western European countries' colonization of lands mainly in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania. The main European countries active in this form of colonization included

Imperial Japan also engaged in settler colonization, most notably in Hokkaido and Korea
.

While some European colonization focused on shorter-term exploitation of economic opportunities (

World empires and colonies in 1936

Colonization may be used as a method of absorbing and assimilating foreign people into the culture of the imperial country. One instrument to this end is linguistic imperialism, or the use of non-indigenous colonial languages to the exclusion of any indigenous languages from administrative (and often, any public) use.[21]

Post-colonial variants

Soviet Union

A protest sign from the second half of the 20th century criticising U.N. reaction to Soviet colonial expansion

In the 1920s, the Soviet regime implemented the so-called

korenization policy in an attempt to win the trust of non-Russians by promoting their ethnic cultures and establishing for them many of the characteristic institutional forms of the nation-state.[22] The early Soviet regime was hostile to even voluntary assimilation, and tried to de-Russify assimilated non-Russians.[23] Parents and students not interested in the promotion of their national languages were labeled as displaying "abnormal attitudes". The authorities concluded that minorities unaware of their ethnicities had to be subjected to Belarusization, Polonization, etc.[24]

By the early 1930s, the Soviet regime introduced limited Russification;[25] allowing voluntary assimilation, which was often a popular demand.[26] The list of nationalities was reduced from 172 in 1927 to 98 in 1939,[27] by revoking support for small nations in order to merge them into bigger ones. For example, Abkhazia was merged into Georgia and thousands of ethnic Georgians were sent to Abkhazia.[28] The Abkhaz alphabet was changed to a Georgian base, Abkhazian schools were closed and replaced with Georgian schools, the Abkhaz language was banned.[29] The ruling elite was purged of ethnic Abkhaz and by 1952 over 80% of the 228 top party and government officials and enterprise managers in Abkhazia were ethnic Georgians (there remained 34 Abkhaz, 7 Russians and 3 Armenians in these positions).[30] For Königsberg area of East Prussia (modern Kaliningrad Oblast) given to the Soviet Union at the 1945 Potsdam Conference Soviet control meant a forcible expulsion of the remaining German population and mostly involuntary resettlement of the area with Soviet civilians.[31]

Russians were now presented as the most advanced and least chauvinist people of the Soviet Union.[25]

Baltic states

A protest sign from the second half of the 20th century calling on U.N. to abolish Soviet colonialism in the Baltic states

Large numbers of ethnic Russians and other

Soviet military and NKVD personnel, as well as functionaries of the Communist Party and economic migrants from kolkhozes.[34]

The most dramatic case was Latvia, where the amount of ethnic Russians swelled from 168,300 (8.8%) in 1935 to 905,500 (34%) in 1989, whereas the proportion of ethnic Latvians fell from 77% in 1935 to 52% in 1989.

Latvian SSR, for example, transferring 15.961 billion rubles (or 18.8% percent of its total revenue of 85 billion rubles) more to the USSR budget from 1946 to 1990 than it received back. And of the money transferred back, a disproportionate amount was spent on the region's militarization and funding of repressive institutions, especially in the early years of the occupation.[36] It has been calculated by a Latvian state-funded commission that the Soviet occupation cost the economy of Latvia a total of 185 billion euros.[37][38]

Conversely,

Western Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic Republics being the main source of capital.[39] Estonian researcher Epp Annus acknowledges that the Soviet rule in the Baltic states did not possess every single characteristic of traditional colonialism since the Baltic states were already modern industrial European nation states with an established sense of national identity and cultural self-confidence prior to their Soviet invasion in 1940 and proposed that the initial Soviet occupation developed into a colonial rule gradually, as the local resistance turned into a hybrid coexistence with the Soviet power. The Soviet colonial rule never managed to fully establish itself and began rapidly disintegrating during perestroika, but after the restoration of independence, the Baltic states similarly had to deal with problems of a characteristically colonial nature, such as pollution, economic collapse and demographic tensions.[40]

Jewish oblast

Sign on the JAO government headquarters

In 1934, the Soviet government established the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the Soviet Far East to create a homeland for the Jewish people. Another motive was to strengthen Soviet presence along the vulnerable eastern border. The region was often infiltrated by the Chinese; in 1927, Chiang Kai-shek had ended cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party, which further increased the threat. Japan also seemed willing and ready to detach the Far Eastern provinces from the USSR.[41] To make settlement of the inhospitable and undeveloped region more enticing, the Soviet government allowed private ownership of land. This led to many non-Jews to settle in the oblast to get a free farm.[42]

By the 1930s, a massive propaganda campaign developed to induce more Jewish settlers to move there. In one instance, a government-produced Yiddish film called Seekers of Happiness told the story of a Jewish family that fled the Great Depression in the United States to make a new life for itself in Birobidzhan. Some 1,200 non-Soviet Jews chose to settle in Birobidzhan.[43] The Jewish population peaked in 1948 at around 30,000, about one-quarter of the region's population. By 2010, according to data provided by the Russian Census Bureau, there were only 1,628 people of Jewish descent remaining in the JAO (1% of the total population), while ethnic Russians made up 92.7% of the JAO population.[44] The JAO is Russia's only autonomous oblast[45] and, aside of Israel, the world's only Jewish territory with an official status.[46]

Israel

According to Elia Zuriek, in his book "Israel's Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit", Israeli settlements in the West Bank is an additional form of colonization.[47] This view is part of a key debate in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Law professors Steven Lubet and Jonathan Zasloff describe the "Zionism as settler colonialism" theory as politically motivated, derogatory and highly controversial. According to them, there are important differences between Zionism and settler colonialism, for instance: (1) Early Zionists did not seek to transport European culture into Israel, they sought to revive the culture of an indigenous people of the land, the culture of their ancestors (e.g., they left their European languages behind and adopted a Middle Eastern/Semitic one: Hebrew); (2) No settler colonial movement ever claimed to be "returning home"; (3) Jews had already been living in the "colonized" region for thousands of years. Both professors also point out that the academic journal where Wolfe published his essay fails to mention the Islamic military campaign that captured the region in the 7th and 8th centuries.[48]

Indonesia

The transmigration program is an initiative of the

Papua New Guinea

Philippines

Due to marginalisation produced by continuous Resettlement Policy, by 1969, political tensions and open hostilities developed between the Government of the Philippines and Moro Muslim rebel groups in Mindanao.[51][failed verification]

Myanmar

Subject peoples

Many colonists came to colonies for slaves to their colonizing countries, so the legal power to leave or remain may not be the issue so much as the actual presence of the people in the new country. This left the indigenous natives of their lands slaves in their own countries.

The

Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Canada) as colonization through depriving the youth of First Nations in Canada of their languages and cultures.[52]

During the mid 20th century, there was the most dramatic and devastating attempt at colonization, and that was pursued with Nazism.[53] Hitler and Heinrich Himmler and their supporters schemed for a mass migration of Germans to Eastern Europe, where some of the Germans were to become colonists, having control over the native people.[53] These indigenous people were planned to be reduced to slaves or wholly annihilated.[53]

Many advanced nations currently have large numbers of

guest workers/temporary work
visa holders who are brought in to do seasonal work such as harvesting or to do low-paid manual labor. Guest workers or contractors have a lower status than workers with visas, because guest workers can be removed at any time for any reason.

Endo-colonization

Colonization may be a domestic strategy when there is a widespread security threat within a nation and weapons are turned inward, as noted by Paul Virilio:

Obsession with security results in the endo-colonization of society: endo-colonization is the use of increasingly powerful and ubiquitous technologies of security turned inward, to attempt to secure the fast and messy circulations of our globalizing, networked society...it is the increasing domination of public life with stories of dangerous otherness and suspicion...[54]

Some instances of the burden of endo-colonization have been noted:

The acute difficulties of the Latin American and southern European military-bureaucratic dictatorships in the seventies and early eighties and the Soviet Union in the late eighties can in large part be attributed to the economic, political and social contradictions induced by endo-colonizing militarism.[55]

Space colonization

An astronaut fixing machine on Mars and another heading back to the base
Artist conception of astronauts working outside, near a large modular habitat

Colonization or settlement of Mars is the theoretical migration of humans to Mars and the establishment of long-term human presence on the planet. The prospect has garnered interest from public space agencies and private corporations and has been extensively explored in science fiction writing, film, and art. Organizations have proposed plans for a human mission to Mars, the first step towards any colonization effort, but thus far no person has set foot on the planet, and there have been no return missions. However, landers and rovers have successfully explored the planetary surface and delivered information about conditions on the ground.

planet-wide dust storms. The barren landscape on Mars is covered by fine, toxic dust and intense ionizing radiation. Mars has in-situ resources, such as underground water, Martian soil, and ore, which could be used by colonists. Opportunities to generate electricity via wind, solar, and nuclear power
using resources on Mars are poor.

Justifications and motivations for colonizing Mars include curiosity, the potential for humans to provide more in-depth observational research than uncrewed rovers, an economic interest in its resources, and the possibility that the settlement of other planets could decrease the probability of

low gravity
, the isolation that accompanies Mars' distance from Earth, a lack of water, and cold temperatures.

Commitments to researching permanent settlement have been made by public space agencies—
ISRO, the CNSA, among others—and private organizations—SpaceX, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing
.

See also

Colonization
Other related

Notes and references

  1. ^ "Colonialism, Coloniality and Settler Colonialism". UnLeading. August 11, 2022. Retrieved December 27, 2023.
  2. ISBN 9780203992586."Colonization is associated with the occupation of a foreign land, with its being brought under cultivation, with the settlement of colonists. If this definition of the term “colony” is used, the phenomenon dates from the Greek period
    . Likewise we speak of Athenian, then Roman 'imperialism'."
  3. ^ "colonization noun - Definition, pictures, pronunciation and usage notes". Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary at OxfordLearnersDictionaries.com. Retrieved 2023-03-29.
  4. .
  5. ^ Howe, Stephen (2002). Empire: A Very Short Introduction. United States: Oxford University Press. pp. 21–31.
  6. ^ Painter, Joe; Jeffrey, Alex (2009). Political Geography. London, GBR: SAGE Publications Ltd. p. 169.
  7. ISSN 0921-3740
    .
  8. .
  9. .
  10. ^ Oxford English Dictionary Second Edition on CD-ROM (v. 4.0). Oxford University Press. 2009.
  11. .
  12. .
  13. ^ Riordan, John P. STAFF COLL FORT LEAVENWORTH KS SCHOOL OF ADVANCED MILITARY STUDIES, 2008.
  14. ^ Freeman, Luke. "Lesley A. Sharp. The Sacrificed Generation: Youth, History, and the Colonized Mind in Madagascar. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xvii+ 377 pp. Photographs. Maps. Appendixes. Glossary. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $65.00. Cloth. $27.50. Paper." African Studies Review 46.2 (2003): 106-108.
  15. ^ Pact Of Uma
  16. ^ "North Africa - Arab Muslim Conquest, Islamization, Arabization, and Berber Rebellion | Britannica". www.britannica.com. Retrieved May 29, 2023.
  17. ^ Select Spread Of Islam, The
  18. ^ Kessler, P. L. "Kingdoms of the Arabs - Syria". The History Files. Retrieved May 29, 2023.
  19. ^ "At the Prophet’s death, according to the Muslim historians, the religion that he had brought was still confined to parts of the Arabian Peninsula. The Arabs, to whom he had brought it, were similarly restricted, with perhaps some extension in the borderlands of the Fertile Crescent. The vast lands in southwest Asia, northern Africa, and elsewhere, which in later times came to constitute the lands of Islam, the realms of the caliphs and, in modern parlance, the Arab world, still spoke other languages, professed other religions, and obeyed other rulers. Within little more than a century after the Prophet’s death, the whole area had been transformed, in what was surely one of the swiftest and most dramatic changes in the whole of human history. By the late seventh century, the outside world attests the emergence of a new religion and a new power, the Muslim empire of the caliphs, extending eastward in Asia as far as and sometimes beyond the borders of India and China, westwards along the southern Mediterranean coast to the Atlantic, southwards towards the land of the black peoples in Africa, northwards into the lands of the white peoples of Europe. In this empire, Islam was the state religion, and the Arabic language was rapidly displacing others to become the principal medium public life." Lewis, Bernard. THE MIDDLE EAST: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years, Touchstone Simon and Schuster, New York, 1995. pp 54-55
  20. . Retrieved 2013-08-04. [...] Georgia represented a break from the past. As one scholar has noted. it was 'a preview of the later doctrines of "systematic colonization" advocated by Edward Gibbon Wakefield and others for the settlement of Australia and New Zealand.' In contrast to such places as Jamaica and South Carolina, the trustees intended Georgia as 'a regular colony', orderly, methodical, disciplined [...]
  21. ^ "Tomasz Kamusella. 2020. Global Language Politics: Eurasia versus the Rest (pp 118-151). Journal of Nationalism, Memory & Language Politics. Vol 14, No 2".
  22. .
  23. .
  24. .
  25. ^ .
  26. .
  27. .
  28. .
  29. ^ Summary of Historical Events in Abkhazian History, 1810-1993 Abkhaz World, 15 October 2008, retrieved 11 September 2015.
  30. ^ The Stalin-Beria Terror in Abkhazia, 1936-1953, by Stephen D. Shenfield Abkhaz World, 30 June 2010, retrieved 11 September 2015.
  31. Wilson Center
    . Retrieved 2 May 2018. Joyous letters were written back home to the collective farms to encourage more people to come, but it was hard to convince people, so the local collective farm boards were given quotas of how many they needed to send to Kaliningrad and other places. They often sent people who were perceived as less useful for the farm – pregnant women, alcoholics, and the less educated, for example.
  32. ISSN 0024-5089. Archived from the original
    on 2021-11-09. Retrieved 2021-01-22.
  33. ^ David Chioni Moore (23 October 2020). "Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique". Cambridge University Press. Retrieved 26 January 2021.
  34. (PDF) from the original on 17 March 2023.
  35. .
  36. ^ Krūmiņš, Gatis. "The Investments of the USSR Occupying Power in the Baltic Economies – Myths and Reality" (PDF). Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences. pp. 18–19. Archived from the original (PDF) on 8 April 2022.
  37. ^ "Soviet occupation cost Latvian economy €185 billion, says research". Public Broadcasting of Latvia. LETA. 18 April 2015. Retrieved 23 October 2020.
  38. ^ "Damage to Latvian economy during soviet rule estimated at EUR 185 bln". The Baltic Course. 19 April 2015. Retrieved 23 October 2020.
  39. . Retrieved 24 February 2021. The Soviet government did much more: it established a system to transfer capital from the rich regions of the Union (western Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, later the Baltic countries) to the developing regions of the east and south.
  40. .
  41. .
  42. .
  43. ^ Arthur Rosen, [www./75mag/birobidzhan/birobidzhan.htm], February 2004
  44. ^ "Информационные материалы об окончательных итогах Всероссийской переписи населения 2010 года". Archived from the original on 2012-06-01. Retrieved 2013-04-19.
  45. Constitution of the Russian Federation
    , Article 65
  46. ^ Спектор Р., руководитель Департамента Евро-Азиатского Еврейского конгресса (ЕАЕК) по связям с общественностью и СМИ (2008). под ред. Гуревич В.С.; Рабинович А.Я.; Тепляшин А.В.; Воложенинова Н.Ю. (eds.). "Биробиджан — terra incognita?" (PDF). Биробиджанский проект (опыт межнационального взаимодействия): сборник материалов научно-практической конференции. Биробиджан: ГОУ "Редакция газеты Birobidzhaner Shtern": 20. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |agency= ignored (help)
  47. .
  48. ^ "Is Israel Really a Settler Colonial State?". Haaretz. Retrieved 2022-06-13.
  49. ^ "Govt builds transmigration museum in Lampung | The Jakarta Post". June 4, 2010. Archived from the original on 2010-06-04.
  50. ^ "Screen Australia Digital Learning - Origins of the Bougainville Conflict (2000)". dl.nfsa.gov.au. Retrieved 2018-12-13.
  51. ^ "The CenSEI Report (Vol. 2, No. 13, April 2-8, 2012)". Retrieved 26 January 2015.
  52. .
  53. ^ a b c Howe, Stephen (2002). Empire: A Very Short Introduction. United States: Oxford University Press. pp. 59–60.
  54. Gearoid O Tuathail (2000) "Thinking Geopolitical Space: The spatiality of war, speed and vision in the work of Paul Virilio", in Thinking Space, Mike Crang & Nigel Thrift editors, Routledge
    , quote page 368

Bibliography