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Music Reading Notes:- Robert J. C. Young, “Concepts in History: Colonialism and Imperialism,” in Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 15–29o 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.o Both colonialism and imperialism involved forms of subjugation of one people by another.o 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 Christianityo Different nations had different methods/goals for colonizationo 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, theFrench 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.o 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; modemhistorians between settlement and exploitation colonies (Harmand 191 0). This grim but straightforward distinction constitutes the fundamental difference within the practice ofcolonialism, 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 PuertoRico, British India, Dutch East Indies, French India and New Caledonia, German Togo, or Japanese Taiwan.o colonialism involved an extraordinary range of different forms and practices carried out with respect to radically different cultures, over many different centuries.o The stress on the diversity of colonialism is strictly appropriate: it was imperialism that constituted a global political system.o 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 itselfo 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, whileseeking a better life in economic, religious or political terms - very similar to the situation of migrants today.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): 137–53o Resistance studies


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UNC-Chapel Hill MUSC 286 - Music Reading Notes

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