o o o o o Music Reading Notes Robert J C Young Concepts in History Colonialism and Imperialism in Postcolonialism An Historical Introduction Oxford Blackwell 2004 15 29 The argument of this book is that postcolonial critique and the historical basis of its theoretical formulations is the product of resistance to colonialism and imperialism Both colonialism and imperialism involved forms of subjugation of one people by another the Spanish and Portuguese empires in Central and South America operated on two principles the extraction of riches and the conversion of the indigenous population o militant Spanish drive for conversion to Christianity o Different nations had different methods goals for colonization The term empire has been widely used for many centuries without however necessarily signifying imperialism Here a basic difference emerges between an empire that was bureaucratically controlled by a government from the centre and which was developed for ideological as well as financial reasons a structure that can be called imperialism and an empire that was developed for settlement by individual communities or for commercial purposes by a trading company a structure that can be called colonial Colonization was pragmatic and until the nineteenth century generally developed locally in a haphazard way for example the occupation of islands in the West Indies while imperialism was typically driven by ideology from the metropolitan centre and concerned with the assertion and expansion of state power for example the French invasion of Algeria Colonialism functioned as an activity on the periphery economically driven from the home government s perspective it was at times hard to control Imperialism on the other hand operated from the centre as a policy of state driven by the grandiose projects of power Thus while imperialism is susceptible to analysis as a concept which is not to say that there were not different concepts of imperialism colonialism needs to be analysed primarily as a practice hence the difficulty of generalizations about it In historical terms imperialism operated in two major forms the Roman Ottoman and Spanish imperial model and that oflate nineteenth century Europe Colonialism also took two major forms French colonial theorists typically distinguished between colonization and domination the British between dominions and dependencies modem historians between settlement and exploitation colonies Harmand 191 0 This grim but straightforward distinction constitutes the fundamental difference within the practice of colonialism namely between colonies that were predominantly established for the purpose of forms of settlement such as British North America Australia and New Zealand French Algeria or Portuguese Brazil and those directly or indirectly administered ones generally situated in the tropics that were established for economic exploitation without any significant settlement such as American Philippines and Puerto Rico British India Dutch East Indies French India and New Caledonia German Togo or Japanese Taiwan colonialism involved an extraordinary range of different forms and practices carried out with respect to radically different cultures over many different centuries The stress on the diversity of colonialism is strictly appropriate it was imperialism that constituted a global political system French colonialism which was indeed comparatively systematic British colonialism on the other hand never was It was just as eccentric and as idiosyncratic as any other British institution as heterogeneous as the unwritten constitution of the United Kingdom itself Colonization as Europeans originally used the term signified not the rule over indigenous peoples or the extraction of their wealth but primarily the transfer of communities who sought to maintain their allegiance to their own original culture while seeking a better life in economic religious or political terms very similar to the situation of migrants today o o o o o Robert J C Young Translation in Post colonialism A Very Short Introduction Oxford Oxford University Press 2003 138 47 Mikael Baaz et al Defining and Analyzing Resistance Possible Entrances into the Study of Subversive Practices Alternatives Global Local Political 41 no 3 2016 137 53 o Resistance studies is
View Full Document