At its most benign, colonialism is "the control of one power over a dependent area or people." (Merriam-Webster, 2021) The word “benign,” however, couldn’t be farther from the truth. It was, is, the act of colonizing a there or them for the amassing of resources in the form of goods or labor. Resources, of course, are needed to produce valuable goods or services, that are needed to be “powerful” within various economic and political systems – with capitalism being the most recent and dire.

From a geographical standpoint, colonialism is the "combination of territorial, juridical, cultural, linguistic, political, mental/epistemic, and/or economic domination of one group of people or groups of people by another (external) group of people.” (Murrey, 315) It is seen from the lens of exploration which resulted in control over land, labor, and imagined geographies. This resulted in territorial domination through “the stripping of a group of people or a person of their lands, territories, or other possessions, often by force” resulting in dispossession. (Murrey, 317) Implied here, is the inherent “Othering” that resulted from early colonial geographers’ way of ordering the world and carving spaces in the name of discovery. “Othering was an essential yardstick that opened up the possibility of animalizing non-European humans and, ultimately, inferiorizing them” and resulted in dire consequences for the colonized. (Clement, 746)

From a sociological perspective, colonialism, along with racism, are seen “as inherent vectors of capitalism and Western modernity and even could be considered as a precursor to critiques of international development thinking and practices.” (Viveros-Vigoya, 477) A notable examination by sociologists is the “structural violence” that has taken place because of colonialism. It is argued that “invasion is a structure, not an event.” (Maddison, 288) Structure, here, is the manifestation of violence in the political, economical, and societal environment of the colonized. The rise of industrialization in the 16th to 18th centuries coincided with the increase of colonization of places and peoples. With the production of valuable goods becoming a desire by rich nations, so did the value of resources needed for the production (capital) and the labor needed to produce. This manifested most terribly in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the systemic violence perpetrated upon indigenous peoples in the Americas. Indeed, “the exploitation of racial and spatial difference has been foundational to the development of capitalism at urban, regional, national, and global scales (McClintock, 3.)

Twenty-five years ago, searching the keyword "colonialism" likely resulted in the historical or anthropological discourse around the specific set of events that constituted the wave of European colonization in the 15th century during the Age of Discovery or colonial expansion that took place in the 19th century in the African continent. However, "colonialism" in 2021 demands a deeper, more holistic look. It refers to the idea of expansion and the set of systems, policies, networks, and thought that accompanied the colonizers and were applied to the colonized. The effects of "colonialism" – the legacy of exploitation, 'othering,' of violence - are now packaged with the noun.

Colonialism