## 1. Definition and Outline



Colonialism is not a modern phenomenon. World history is full of
examples of one society gradually expanding by incorporating adjacent
territory and settling its people on newly conquered territory. In the
sixteenth century, colonialism changed decisively because of
technological developments in navigation that began to connect more
remote parts of the world. The modern European colonial project
emerged when it became possible to move large numbers of people across
the ocean and to maintain political control in spite of geographical
dispersion. This entry uses the term colonialism to describe the
process of European settlement, violent dispossession and political
domination over the rest of the world, including the Americas,
Australia, and parts of Africa and Asia.



The difficulty of defining colonialism stems from the fact that the
term is often used as a synonym for imperialism. Both colonialism and
imperialism were forms of conquest that were expected to benefit
Europe economically and strategically. The term colonialism is
frequently used to describe the settlement of North America,
Australia, New Zealand, Algeria, and Brazil, places that were
controlled by a large population of permanent European residents. The
term imperialism often describes cases in which a foreign government
administers a territory without significant settlement; typical
examples include the scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth
century and the American domination of the Philippines and Puerto
Rico. The distinction between the two, however, is not entirely
consistent in the literature. Some scholars distinguish between
colonies for settlement and colonies for economic exploitation. Others
use the term colonialism to describe dependencies that are directly
governed by a foreign nation and contrast this with imperialism, which
involves indirect forms of domination. Like colonialism, imperialism
also involves political and economic control over a dependent
territory. The etymology of the two terms, however, provides some
clues about how they differ. The term colony comes from the Latin word
*colonus*, meaning farmer. This root reminds us that the
practice of colonialism usually involved the transfer of population to
a new territory, where the arrivals lived as permanent settlers while
maintaining political allegiance to their country of origin.
Imperialism, on the other hand, comes from the Latin term
*imperium*, meaning to command. Thus, the term imperialism
draws attention to the way that one country exercises power over
another, whether through settlement, sovereignty, or indirect
mechanisms of control.



The confusion about the meaning of the term imperialism reflects the
way that the concept has changed over time. Although the English word
imperialism was not commonly used before the nineteenth century,
Elizabethans already described the United Kingdom as "the
British Empire." As Britain began to acquire overseas
dependencies, the concept of empire was employed more frequently.
Imperialism was understood as a system of military domination and
sovereignty over territories. The day to day work of government might
be exercised indirectly through local assemblies or indigenous rulers
who paid tribute, but sovereignty rested with the British. The shift
away from this traditional understanding of empire was influenced by
the Leninist analysis of imperialism as a system oriented towards
economic exploitation. According to Lenin, imperialism was the
necessary and inevitable result of the logic of accumulation in late
capitalism. Thus, for Lenin and subsequent Marxists, imperialism
described a historical stage of capitalism rather than a
trans-historical practice of political and military domination. The
lasting impact of the Marxist approach is apparent in contemporary
debates about American imperialism, a term which usually means
American economic hegemony, regardless of whether such power is
exercised directly or indirectly (Young 2001).



Given the difficulty of consistently distinguishing between the two
terms, this entry will use colonialism as a broad concept that refers
to the project of European political domination that began in the
early sixteenth century. While the national liberation movements of
the post-World War II era brought formal colonization to an end in
many parts of the world, Indigenous peoples still live in
settler-colonial states, and there are on-going struggles to reclaim
control of traditional territories. Post-colonialism will be used to
describe the political and theoretical struggles of societies that
experienced the transition from political dependence to sovereignty.
This entry will use imperialism as a broad term that refers to
economic, military, political domination that is achieved without
significant permanent European settlement.


## 2. Natural Law and the Conquest of the Americas



The Spanish conquest of the Americas sparked a theological, political,
and ethical debate about the use of military force to acquire control
over foreign lands. This debate took place within the framework of a
religious discourse that legitimized military conquest as a way to
facilitate the conversion and salvation of indigenous peoples. The
idea of a "civilizing mission" was by no means the
invention of the British in the nineteenth century. The Spanish
conquistadores and colonists explicitly justified their activities in
the Americas in terms of a religious mission to bring Christianity to
the native peoples. The Crusades provided the initial impetus for
developing a legal doctrine that rationalized the conquest and
possession of lands that were held by non-Christians. Whereas the
Crusades were initially framed as defensive wars to reclaim Christian
lands that had been conquered, the resulting theoretical innovations
played an important role in subsequent attempts to justify the
conquest of the Americas. The core claim was that the "Petrine
mandate" to care for the souls of Christ's human flock
required Papal jurisdiction over temporal as well as spiritual
matters, and this control extended to non-believers as well as
believers.



The conversion of the native peoples, however, did not provide an
unproblematic justification for the project of overseas conquest. The
Spanish conquest of the Americas was taking place during a period of
reform when humanist scholars within the Church were increasingly
influenced by the natural law theories of theologians such as St.
Thomas Aquinas. According to Pope Innocent IV, war could not be waged
against infidels and they could not be deprived of their property
simply because of their non-belief. Under the influence of Thomism,
Innocent IV concluded that force was legitimate only in cases where
infidels violated natural law. Nonbelievers had legitimate dominion
over themselves and their property, but this dominion was abrogated if
they proved incapable of governing themselves according to principles
that every reasonable person would recognize. The Spanish quickly
concluded that the habits of the native Americans, from nakedness to
unwillingness to labor to alleged cannibalism, clearly demonstrated
their inability to recognize natural law. This account of native
customs was used to legitimize the enslavement of the Indians, which
the Spanish colonists insisted was the only way to teach them
civilization and introduce them to Christianity.



Some of the Spanish missionaries sent to the New World, however,
noticed that the brutal exploitation of slave labor was widespread
while any serious commitment to religious instruction was absent.
Members of the Dominican order in particular noted the hypocrisy of
enslaving the indigenous peoples because of their alleged barbarity
while practicing a form of conquest, warfare, and slavery that reduced
the indigenous population of Hispaniola from 250,000 to 15,000 in two
decades of Spanish rule. Given the genocidal result of Spanish
"civilization," they began to question the idea of a
civilizing mission. Bartolome de Las Casas and Franciscus de
Victoria were two of the most influential critics of Spanish colonial
practice. Victoria gave a series of lectures on Indian rights that
applied Thomism to the practice of Spanish rule. He argued that all
human beings share the capacity for rationality and have natural
rights that stem from this capacity. From this premise, he deduced
that the Papal decision to grant Spain title to the Americas was
illegitimate. Unlike the position of Pope Innocent IV, Victoria argued
that neither the Pope nor the Spaniards could subjugate the Indians in
order to punish violations of natural law, such as fornication or
adultery. He noted that the Pope had no right to make war on
Christians and take their property simply because they were
"fornicators or thieves." If this were the case, then no
European king's dominion would ever be safe. Furthermore,
according to Victoria, the pope and Christian rulers acting on his
mandate had even less right to enforce laws against unbelievers,
because they were outside of the Christian community, which was the
domain of Papal authority (Williams 1990).



Despite this strongly worded critique of the dominant modes of
justifying Spanish conquest, Victoria concluded that the use of force
in the New World was legitimate when Indian communities violated the
Law of Nations, a set of principles derivable from reason and
therefore universally binding. At first it might sound contradictory
that the Indians' supposed violation of the natural law did not
justify conquest but their violation of the Law of Nations, itself
derived from natural law, did. Victoria emphasizes that the Law of
Nations is binding because "there exists clearly enough a
consensus of the greater part of the whole world" (391) and
because the principles benefit "the common good of all."
This distinction seems to rely on the assumption that other principles
usually associated with natural law (such as the prohibitions on
adultery and idolatry) only affect those who consent to the practices,
whereas violations of the Law of Nations (e.g. prohibitions on
peaceful travel and trade) have consequences for those who do not
consent. Ultimately, Victoria's understanding of the Law of
Nations led him to defend the practice of Spanish colonialism, even
though he emphasized that warfare should be limited to the measures
required to attain the legitimate objectives of peaceful trade and
missionary work. Within Victoria's critique of the legality and
morality of Spanish colonialism was a rationalization for conquest,
albeit a restrictive one.


## 3. Liberalism and Empire



The legitimacy of colonialism was also a topic of debate among French,
German, and British philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant, Smith and Diderot were
critical of the barbarity of colonialism and challenged the idea that
Europeans had the obligation to "civilize" the rest of the
world. The colonial system of slavery, land theft, and feudal labor
was antithetical to the principles of freedom and self-government. The
rise of anti-colonial political theory, however, required more than a
universalistic ethic that recognized the shared humanity of all
people. Given the powerful economic interests in the control of
Indigenous land and the exploitation of Indigenous labor, universalism
proved to be a relatively weak basis for criticizing colonialism.



One of the key issues that distinguished critics from proponents of
colonialism and imperialism was their view of the relationship between
culture, history and progress. Many of the influential philosophers
writing in France and England in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries had assimilated some version of the developmental approach
to history that was associated with the Scottish Enlightenment.
According to the stadial theory of historical development, all
societies naturally moved from hunting, to herding, to farming, to
commerce, a developmental process that simultaneously tracked a
cultural arc from "savagery," through
"barbarism," to "civilization."
"Civilization" was not just a marker of material
improvement, but also a normative judgment about the moral progress of
society. (Kohn and O'Neill 2006)



The language of civilization, savagery, and barbarism is pervasive in
writers as diverse of Edmund Burke, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill.
It would therefore be incorrect to conclude that a developmental
theory of history is distinctive of the liberal tradition;
nevertheless, given that figures of the Scottish Enlightenment such as
Ferguson and Smith were among its leading expositors, it is strongly
associated with liberalism. Smith himself opposed imperialism for
economic reasons. He felt that relations of dependence between
metropole and periphery distorted self-regulating market mechanisms
and worried that the cost of military domination would be burdensome
for taxpayers (Pitts 2005). The idea that civilization is the
culmination of a process of historical development, however, proved
useful in justifying imperialism. According to Uday Mehta, liberal
imperialism was the product of the interaction between universalism
and developmental history (1999). A core doctrine of liberalism holds
that all individuals share a capacity for reason and self-government.
The theory of developmental history, however, modifies this
universalism with the notion that these capacities only emerge at a
certain stage of civilization (McCarthy 2009). For example, according
to John Stuart Mill (hereafter Mill), savages do not have the capacity
for self-government because of their excessive love of freedom. Serfs,
slaves, and peasants in barbarous societies, on the other hand, may be
so schooled in obedience that their capacity for rationality is
stifled. Only commercial society produces the material and cultural
conditions that enable individuals to realize their potential for
freedom and self-government. According to this logic, civilized
societies like Great Britain are acting in the interest of
less-developed peoples by governing them. Imperialism, from this
perspective, is not primarily a form of political domination and
economic exploitation but rather a paternalistic practice of
government that exports "civilization" (e.g.
modernization) in order to foster the improvement of native peoples.
Despotic government (and Mill doesn't hesitate to use this term)
is a means to the end of improvement and ultimately
self-government.



Mill, a life-long employee of the British East India Company,
recognized that despotic government by a foreign people could lead to
injustice and economic exploitation. These abuses, if unchecked, could
undermine the legitimacy and efficacy of the imperial project. In
*Considerations on Representative Government* (1861), Mill
identifies four reasons why foreign (e.g. European) peoples are not
suited to governing colonies. First, foreign politicians are unlikely
to have the knowledge of local conditions that is necessary to solve
problems of public policy effectively. Second, given cultural,
linguistic, and often religious differences between colonizers and
colonized, the colonizers are unlikely to sympathize with the native
peoples and are likely to act tyrannically. Third, even if the
colonizers really try to treat the native peoples fairly, their
natural tendency to sympathize with those similar to themselves (other
foreign colonists or merchants) would likely lead to distorted
judgment in cases of conflict. Finally, according to Mill, colonists
and merchants go abroad in order to acquire wealth with little effort
or risk, which means that their economic activity often exploits the
colonized country rather than developing it. These arguments echo
points made in Edmund Burke's voluminous writings assailing the
misgovernment in India, most notably Burke's famous Speech on
Fox's East India Bill (1783). Recent scholarship, however, has
challenged the view of Burke as an opponent of imperialism. Daniel
O'Neill has argued that Burke was a staunch supporter of the
British Empire in the eighteenth century (2016). According to
O'Neill, Burke's defense of empire was ideologically
consistent with his conservative opposition to the French
Revolution.



Mill's solution to the problem of imperial misgovernment was to
eschew parliamentary oversight in favor of a specialized
administrative corps. Members of this specialized body would have the
training to acquire relevant knowledge of local conditions. Paid by
the government, they would not personally benefit from economic
exploitation and could fairly arbitrate conflicts between colonists
and indigenous people. Mill, however, was not able to explain how to
ensure good government where those wielding political power were not
accountable to the population. In this sense, Mill's writing is
emblematic of the failure of liberal imperial thought.



Nineteenth century liberal thinkers held a range of views on the
legitimacy of foreign domination and conquest. Alexis de Tocqueville,
for example, made a case for colonialism that did not rely on the idea
of a "civilizing mission." Tocqueville recognized that
colonialism probably did not bring good government to the native
peoples, but this did not lead him to oppose colonialism since his
support rested entirely on the way it benefited France. Tocqueville
insisted that French colonies in Algeria would increase France's
stature vis-a-vis rivals like England. Colonies would provide
an outlet for excess population that caused disorder in France.
Tocqueville also suggested that imperial endeavors would incite a
feeling of patriotism that would counterbalance the modern centrifugal
forces of materialism and class conflict.



Tocqueville was actively engaged in advancing the project of French
colonization of Algeria. Tocqueville's first analysis of French
colonialism was published during his 1837 electoral campaign for a
seat in the Chamber of Deputies. As a member of the Chamber of
Deputies, Tocqueville argued in favor of expanding the French presence
in Algeria. He traveled to Algeria in 1841 composing an "Essay
on Algeria" that served as the basis for two parliamentary
reports on the topic (Tocqueville 1841). Unlike the more naive
proponents of the "civilizing mission," Tocqueville
admitted that the brutal military occupation did little to introduce
good government or advance civilization. In an apparent reversal of
the four-stages theory of the Scottish Enlightenment, he acknowledged
that "we are now fighting far more barbarously than the Arabs
themselves" and "it is on their side that one meets with
civilization." (Tocqueville 1841: 70) This realization, however,
did not imply a critique of French brutality. Instead, Tocqueville
defended controversial tactics such as the destruction of crops,
confiscation of land, and seizure of unarmed civilians. His texts,
however, provide little in the way of philosophical justification and
he dismisses the entire just war tradition by stating, "I
believe that the right of war authorizes us to ravage the
country." (Tocqueville 1841: 70). In Tocqueville's
writings on Algeria, the French national interest is paramount and
moral considerations are explicitly subordinate to political
goals.



Tocqueville's analysis of Algeria reflects little anxiety about
its legitimacy and much concern about the pragmatics of effective
colonial governance. The stability of the regime, he felt, depended on
the ability of the colonial administration to provide good government
to the French settlers. Tocqueville emphasized that the excessive
centralization of decision-making in Paris combined with the arbitrary
practices of the local military leadership meant that French colonists
had no security of property, let alone the political and civil rights
that they were accustomed to France. Tocqueville was untroubled by the
use of martial law against indigenous peoples, but felt that it was
counterproductive when applied to the French. For Tocqueville, the
success of the French endeavor in Algeria depended entirely on
attracting large numbers of permanent French settlers. Given that it
was proving impossible to win the allegiance of the indigenous people,
France could not hold Algeria without creating a stable community of
colonists. The natives were to be ruled through military domination
and the French were to be enticed to settle through the promise of
economic gain in an environment that reproduced, as much as possible,
the cultural and political life of France. After a brief period of
optimism about "amalgamation" of the races in his
"Second Letter on Algeria" (Tocqueville 1837: 25),
Tocqueville understood the colonial world in terms of the permanent
opposition of settler and native, an opposition structured to ensure
the economic benefit of the former.


## 4. Marxism and Leninism



In recent years, scholars have devoted less attention to the debates
on colonialism within the Marxist tradition. This reflects the waning
influence of Marxism in the academy and in political practice.
Marxism, however, has influenced both post-colonial theory and
anti-colonial independence movements around the world. Marxists have
drawn attention to the material basis of European political expansion
and developed concepts that help explain the persistence of economic
exploitation after the end of direct political rule.



Although Marx never developed a theory of colonialism, his analysis of
capitalism emphasized its inherent tendency to expand in search of new
markets. In his classic works such as *The Communist
Manifesto*, *Grundrisse*, and *Capital*, Marx
predicted that the bourgeoisie would continue to create a global
market and undermine both local and national barriers to its own
expansion. Expansion is a necessary product of the core dynamic of
capitalism: overproduction. Competition among producers drives them to
cut wages, which in turn leads to a crisis of under-consumption. The
only way to prevent economic collapse is to find new markets to absorb
excess consumer goods. From a Marxist perspective, some form of
imperialism is inevitable. By exporting population to resource rich
foreign territories, a nation creates a market for industrial goods
and a reliable source of natural resources. Alternately, weaker
countries can face the choice of either voluntarily admitting foreign
products that will undermine domestic industry or submitting to
political domination, which will accomplish the same end.



In a series of newspaper articles published in the 1850s in the
*New York Daily Tribune*, Marx specifically discussed the
impact of British colonialism in India. His analysis was consistent
with his general theory of political and economic change. He described
India as an essentially feudal society experiencing the painful
process of modernization. According to Marx, however, Indian
"feudalism" was a distinctive form of economic
organization. He reached this conclusion because he believed
(incorrectly) that agricultural land in India was owned communally.
Marx used the concept of "Oriental despotism" to describe
a specific type of class domination that used the state's power
of taxation in order to extract resources from the peasantry.
According to Marx, oriental despotism emerged in India because
agricultural productivity depended on large-scale public works such as
irrigation that could only be financed by the state. This meant that
the state could not be easily replaced by a more decentralized system
of authority. In Western Europe, feudal property could be transformed
gradually into privately owned, alienable property in land. In India,
communal land ownership made this impossible, thereby blocking the
development of commercial agriculture and free markets. Since
"Oriental despotism" inhibited the indigenous development
of economic modernization, British domination became the agent of
economic modernization.



Marx's analysis of colonialism as a progressive force bringing
modernization to a backward feudal society sounds like a transparent
rationalization for foreign domination. His account of British
domination, however, reflects the same ambivalence that he shows
towards capitalism in Europe. In both cases, Marx recognizes the
immense suffering brought about during the transition from feudal to
bourgeois society while insisting that the transition is both
necessary and ultimately progressive. He argues that the penetration
of foreign commerce will cause a social revolution in India. For Marx,
this upheaval has both positive and negative consequences. When
peasants lose their traditional livelihoods, there is a great deal of
human suffering, but he also points out that traditional village
communities are hardly idyllic; they are sites of caste oppression,
slavery, misery, and cruelty. The first stage of the modernization
process is entirely negative, because poor people pay heavy taxation
to support British rule and endure the economic upheaval that results
from the glut of cheaply produced English cotton. Eventually, however,
British merchants begin to realize that Indians cannot pay for
imported cloth or British administration if they don't
efficiently produce goods to trade, which provides an incentive for
British investment in production and infrastructure. Even though Marx
believed that British rule was motivated by greed and exercised
through cruelty, he felt it was still the agent of progress. Thus,
Marx's discussion of British rule in India has three dimensions:
an account of the progressive character of foreign rule, a critique of
the human suffering involved, and a concluding argument that British
rule must be temporary if the progressive potential is to be
realized.



Lenin developed his analysis of Western economic and political
domination in his pamphlet *Imperialism: The Highest Stage of
Capitalism* (1917) (see Other Internet Resources). Lenin took a
more explicitly critical view of imperialism. He noted that
imperialism was a technique which allowed European countries to put
off the inevitable domestic revolutionary crisis by exporting their
own economic burdens onto weaker states. Lenin argued that
late-nineteenth century imperialism was driven by the economic logic
of late-capitalism. The falling rate of profit caused an economic
crisis that could only be resolved through territorial expansion.
Capitalist conglomerates were compelled to expand beyond their
national borders in pursuit of new markets and resources. In a sense,
this analysis is fully consistent with Marx, who saw European
colonialism as continuous with the process of internal expansion
within states and across Europe. Both Marx and Lenin thought that
colonialism and imperialism resulted from the same logic that drove
the economic development and modernization of peripheral areas in
Europe. But there was one distinctive element of Lenin's
analysis. Since late capitalism was organized around national
monopolies, the competition for markets took the form of military
competition between states over territories that could be dominated
for their exclusive economic benefit.



Marxist theorists including Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, and Nikolai
Bukharin also explored the issue of imperialism. Kautsky's
position is especially important because his analysis introduced
concepts that continue to play a prominent role in contemporary world
systems theory and post-colonial studies. Kautsky challenges the
assumption that imperialism would lead to the development of the areas
subjected to economic exploitation. He suggests that imperialism is a
relatively permanent relationship structuring the interactions between
two types of countries. (Young 2001) Although imperialism initially
took the form of military competition between capitalist countries, it
would result in collusion between capitalist interests to maintain a
stable system of exploitation of the non-developed world. The most
influential contemporary proponent of this view is Immanuel
Wallerstein, who is known for world-systems theory. According to this
theory, the world-system is a relatively stable set of relations
between core and peripheral states. This international division of
labor is structured to benefit the core states (Wallerstein
1974-1989) and transfers resources from the periphery to the
core.


## 5. Theories of Decolonization and Post-colonial Theory



Frantz Fanon was one of the leading theorists of the struggle for
decolonization. His two most influential works focused on anti-black
racism and the impact of colonial violence. *Black Skin, White
Masks* (2008 [1952]) describes racialized subjectivity and the
structural conditions that sustain racial domination. Drawing on
existentialism, psychoanalysis, and literary theory, Fanon
demonstrates the constitutive effects of European colonialism on
identity. It details the traumatic consequences of immersion in a
cultural framework that pathologizes blackness, thereby dividing the
racialized subject. *Wretched of the Earth* (1961) was the
most influential philosophical account of the anti-colonial struggle
and the challenges of post-colonial governance. The book provides a
complex account of the relationship between violence and liberation.
Violence is the foundation of the colonial regime, and therefore
inevitably plays a role in its overthrow, but Fanon also explores its
psychological dimension. Revolutionary violence can be a productive
redirection of the internalized violence characteristic of the
experience of oppression because it can bring about structural change.
It is also a praxis that generates political agency, group cohesion
and national identity. *Wretched of the Earth* also includes
incisive reflections on the way that colonial states continue to exert
economic power after independence. According to Fanon, the economic
exploitation typical of colonialism can be secured in a new way
through the leadership of the comprador bourgeoisie, a segment of the
indigenous managerial class that is allied with foreign economic
interests. He also suggests that collective identity based on
ethnicity or national consciousness can have harmful effects, when it
functions ideologically to mask class differences in service of elite
economic interests. Fanon's Marxist-influenced approach to
anti-colonial critique is part of a black radical traditional that
includes other Caribbean thinkers such as Eric Williams, whose book
*Capitalism and Slavery* (1994) demonstrated that the wealth
extracted from sugar plantations bankrolled the industrial revolution
and C.L.R James's *The Black Jacobins* (1989), which
retold the story of the Haitian Revolution from the perspective of the
victorious revolutionaries. These books were foundational for
theories of racial capitalism, a position that holds that racialized
exploitation and capital accumulation are mutually reinforcing.
(Robinson 2000)



Another seminal critic of colonialism is Mahatma Gandhi. He is
remembered for his leadership of the Indian independence movement, his
critique of British colonialism, and his theory of political
resistance. Among his theoretical innovations is the concept of
*satyagraha*. While the literal meaning is closer to
"holding on to truth," the term is often used to describe
non-violent resistance or civil disobedience. According to Gandhi, it
is through the practice of non-cooperation with oppression that the
force of truth is animated. The central place of non-violence in
Gandhi's theory and practice reflects the influence of the Hindu
concept *ahimsa*, or avoiding harm, but this principle was
transformed in the context of anti-colonial struggle. Gandhi was a
prolific writer who was deeply engaged in theoretical and political
debates. Among his influential writings was the book *Hind
Swaraj* (1997), published in 1909. It takes the form of a dialogue
between a Reader and an Editor. The text provides an account of
British domination in India, an analysis of the meaning of
*swaraj* (self-rule), a discussion of political strategy, and a
critique of Western civilization. Gandhi denaturalizes "Western
civilization" by showing that the underlying materialism is not
normatively justified and the alleged benefits of colonialism (modern
medicine, technology) are actually harmful to the human condition. He
also shows that the colonists fail in their own terms, pointing out
that the European colonists claimed to bring civilization but cemented
their rule by engaging in brutal violence.



Contemporary literary theorists have also drawn attention to practices
of representation that reproduce a logic of subordination that endures
even after former colonies gain independence. The field of
postcolonial studies was influenced by Edward Said's
path-breaking book *Orientalism*. In *Orientalism* Said
applied Michel Foucault's technique of discourse analysis to the
production of knowledge about the Middle East. The term orientalism
described a structured set of concepts, assumptions, and discursive
practices that were used to produce, interpret, and evaluate knowledge
about non-European peoples. Said's analysis made it possible for
scholars to deconstruct literary and historical texts in order to
understand how they reflected and reinforced the imperialist project.
Unlike previous studies that focused on the economic or political
logics of colonialism, Said drew attention to the relationship between
knowledge and power. By foregrounding the cultural and epistemological
work of imperialism, Said was able to undermine the ideological
assumption of value-free knowledge and show that "knowing the
Orient" was part of the project of dominating it.
*Orientalism* can be seen as an attempt to extend the
geographical and historical terrain of the poststructuralist critique
of Western epistemology.



Said uses the term orientalism in several different ways. First,
orientalism is a specific field of academic study about the Middle
East and Asia, albeit one that Said conceives quite expansively to
encompass history, sociology, literature, anthropology and especially
philology. He also identifies it as a practice that helps define
Europe by creating a stable depiction of its other, its constitutive
outside. Orientalism is a way of characterizing Europe by drawing a
contrasting image or idea, based on a series of binary oppositions
(rational/irrational, mind/body, order/chaos) that manage and displace
European anxieties. Finally, Said emphasizes that it is also a mode of
exercising authority by organizing and classifying knowledge about the
Orient. This discursive approach is distinct both from the materialist
view that knowledge is simply a reflection of economic or political
interests and from the idealist view that scholarship is disinterested
and neutral. Following Foucault, Said describes discourse as a form of
knowledge that is not used instrumentally in service of power but
rather is itself a form of power.



The second quasi-canonical contribution to the field of post-colonial
theory is Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern
Speak?" (1988). Spivak works within Said's problematic of
representation but extends it to the contemporary academy. Spivak
questions the idea of transparent subaltern speech. When well-meaning
scholars want to let the subaltern "speak for themselves"
they hope that removing the intermediary (the expert, the judge, the
imperial administrator, the local elite) will enable some authentic
truth based on experience to emerge. But experience itself is
constituted through representation; therefore denying the problem of
representation does not make it go away but only makes it harder to
recognize. The central claim of the essay is that
"representation has not withered away." Since power is
everywhere, even in language itself, transparency and authenticity are
impossible; this means that the messy and controversial work of
interpretation is necessary.



Aijaz Ahmad has argued that, despite Spivak's claims to be
working within the Marxist tradition, her essays exhibit contempt for
materialism, rationalism, and progress, the core features of Marxism
(Ahmad 1997). According to Ahmad, Spivak is concerned with narratives
of capitalism rather than the institutional structures and material
effects of capitalism as a mode of production. Spivak's sharp
criticism of movements that essentialize subaltern subjects casts
doubt on the basic premise of Marxist politics, which privileges the
proletariat as a group with shared, true interests that are produced
by the capitalist system.



Vivek Chibber (2013) and Dipesh Chakrabarty (2007) have taken up these
issues. In his influential book *Provincializing Europe*,
Chakrabarty argues that distinctively European concepts such as
disenchanted space, secular time, and sovereignty inform the social
sciences. When these standards are treated as universal, the third
world is seen as incomplete or lacking. Chibber challenges the
position. Chibber advances a critique of Subaltern Studies and defends
universal categories such as capitalism, class, rationality, and
objectivity. He argues that these categories need not be reductionist
or Eurocentric and that they are useful in illuminating the motivation
of political actors and the structural constraints faced by leaders in
countries such as India.



This debate reflects a tension that runs through the field of
postcolonial studies. Although some thinkers draw on both Marxism and
poststructuralism, the two theories have different goals, methods, and
assumptions. In the humanities, postcolonial theory tends to reflect
the influence of poststructuralist thought, while theorists of
decolonization focus on social history, economics, and political
institutions. Whereas postcolonial theory is associated with the
issues of hybridity, diaspora, representation, narrative, and
knowledge/power, theories of decolonization are concerned with
revolution, economic inequality, violence, and political identity.



Some scholars have begun to question the usefulness of the concept
post-colonial theory. Like the idea of the Scottish four-stages
theory, a theory with which it would appear to have little in common,
the very concept of post-colonialism seems to rely on a progressive
understanding of history (McClintock 1992). It suggests, perhaps
unwittingly, that the core concepts of hybridity, alterity,
particularity, and multiplicity may lead to a kind of methodological
dogmatism or developmental logic. Moreover, the term
"colonial" as a marker of this domain of inquiry is also
problematic in so far as it suggests historically implausible
commonalities across territories that experienced very different
techniques of domination. Thus, the critical impulse behind
post-colonial theory has turned on itself, drawing attention to the
way that it may itself be marked by the utopian desire to transcend
the trauma of colonialism (Gandhi 1998).


## 6. Recognition and Revolt in Settler-Colonial States



Indigenous scholars have articulated a critique of post-colonialism,
noting that the concept obscures the continued existence of settler
colonialism. Decolonization within setter states is framed through an
ethics of reconciliation, which recognizes the historical and ongoing
effects of colonization and aims at establishing a mutually respectful
framework for a sustainable nation to nation relationship between
settler and Indigenous peoples. The theoretical literature on settler
colonialism includes a diverse range of positions that offer different
assessments of approaches focused on reconciliation and resurgence. A
point of controversy in contemporary Indigenous political theory
literature is the extent to which it is desirable to participate in
colonial and political institutions in order to transform them. A
central tension that underlies this controversy is whether
institutional accommodation aimed toward reconciliation advanced an
idea of self-determination that is defined through Indigenous
interests, cosmologies, and ethics or further reproduces the
conditions of domination that only perpetuate the historical
settler-colonial relationship.



Scholars such as Dale Turner suggests that it is possible to achieve
successful reconciliation through Western practices of democratic
deliberation and procedures. In *This is Not a Peace Pipe: Toward a
Critical Indigenous Philosophy* (2006), Turner emphasizes that the
way to undermine the power dynamics that perpetuate the conditions of
colonialism is through participation within the legal and political
institutions of the state. He argues that "word warriors,"
who mediate between Indigenous communities and legal and political
institutions, should ensure the preservation and expansion of
Indigenous rights within the larger community. Turner further suggests
that an effective relationship between settler states and Indigenous
peoples will only emerge from a dialogue grounded in democratic
presumptions of equality and respect. This dialogue entails that
Indigenous peoples, in order to establish claims of cultural
distinctiveness, must learn how to engage within settler states'
legal and political discourses in more effective ways (2006:5).



In their essay "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor" (2012)
Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang criticize settler worldviews for failing to
acknowledge the distinct, totalizing effect of settler colonialism.
They emphasize that settler colonialism operates through the
exploitation and expropriation of Indigenous worlds by privileging
colonial economies while simultaneously involving the use of
particularized modes of control, such as schools and policing, to
ensure and legitimize progress and development in accordance with
settler epistemologies and ontologies. In this sense,
settler-colonialism is a structure rather than an event (Wolfe 1999)
that reinforces the total appropriation of Indigenous life and land.
Tuck and Yang describe contemporary approaches to reconciliation as
"moves to innocence" that reconcile settler guilt while
securing the future of settler colonialism.



A prominent idea that is brought up in the struggle for Indigenous
self-determination is the Doctrine of Discovery. Settlers claimed
discovery from the normative political and legal view of *terra
nullius*, which translates to "empty land." Scholars
of Indigenous resurgence argue that doctrines of discovery and terra
nullius persist in the present period within recognition-based methods
of reconciliation, and they stifle movements of self-determination.
Theorists of Indigenous resurgence advance an understanding of
decolonization that refuses contemporary settler-colonial methods of
institutional and cultural accommodation while reviving Indigenous
legal and political institutions and ways of being. Leanne
Betasamosake Simpson points out that rebuilding needs to start from
within, and Indigenous people require not only the re-establishment of
pre-colonial history and languages but also the introduction of
Indigenous custom and forms of governance that re-center a grounded
normativity, which is a norm guided by ancestral land-based
relationships and practices. This can build on the oral tradition of
storytelling, which is a framework that informs social experience.
Most recently, in *Short History of Blockades* (2021) Simpson
argues that practices of blockading represent both a negation of
settler colonial states and the affirmation or amplification of
Indigenous futurity that directly addresses the implications of
continual dispossession and domination by rebuilding relations of
self-determination.



In *Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of
Recognition* (2014), Glen Coulthard deepens the theoretical
framework of resurgence and refusal by arguing that the current
framework of reconciliation tends to dehistoricize and neutralize acts
of dispossession, violence, and displacement of Indigenous peoples
from their lands and culture. For Coulthard, settler colonialism is an
ongoing process emergent in settler institutions and structures of
recognition, not merely the legacy of past injustices. This is evident
in unsettled land claims, the dispossession of land, the limitations
placed on Indigenous governments, and the displacement of Indigenous
ways of life that are tied to access to traditional territories.
Rather than relying on recognition from within the colonial-settler
relationship, Coulthard calls for an Indigenous sovereignty informed
by an intellectual, social, political, and artistic movement that
embodies a "self-reflective revitalization" of traditional
values, principles, and cultural practices.



The title of Coulthard's book alludes to *Black Skin, White
Masks* (2008), the path breaking work by Frantz Fanon. Writing in
1950s, Fanon challenged the abstract universalism of Western
philosophy, showing how universalism serves to structure a
hierarchical relationship between settler and colonized. Fanon's
critical theory challenges the assumption that European notions of
progress truly advance justice and secure mutual benefit. In *Black
Skin, White Masks*, Fanon focuses on the development of Black
consciousness by exploring the psychological alienation and
displacement caused by colonial domination. He describes a divided
self who identifies with French culture even while experiencing
exclusion from the ideals of universalism, equality, and reason.
Coulthard's reading of Fanon informs his view that cultural
recognition by the colonial state is not a solution. Following Fanon,
he concludes the paternalist recognition serves to legitimize the
colonial state and further divide Indigenous subjects.



While international recognition-based models have gained momentum
since the 2007 United Nations Declaration of Rights of Indigenous
Peoples (UNDRIP), their potential to establish Indigenous sovereignty
and self-determination remains contested. Scholars such as Sheryl
Lightfoot (2016) highlight the revolutionary potential of
international movements to enable a collective voice where local
struggles may strategically coalesce on a global platform. Others are
critical of UNDRIP as it remains formulated within a Westphalian
system that fails to universally recognize the sovereignty of
Indigenous law and practices in cases where it conflicts with settler
law or territorial sovereignty (see Hayden King).



In her book *Restructuring Relations: Indigenous
Self-Determination, Governance, and Gender* (2019) Rauna Kuokkanen
is skeptical of the ability of human rights frameworks, such as
UNDRIP, to inform and express Indigenous self-determination. Drawing
from Indigenous and feminist political and legal theory, Kuokkanen
highlights the way human rights frameworks and current models of
Indigenous self-government are limited in their ability to adequately
address violence against women because of their focus on civil and
political rights. As an alternative, Kuokkanen proposes a relational
theory of self-determination that recognizes that social and political
orders as interconnected and interdependent, which she contrasts with
a rights-based framework that fosters values of autonomy. Kuokkanen
positions self-determination as a core value and traces the way
certain ideas and rights of self-determination both structure social
and political experience and how this value could be transformed if
informed and developed through Indigenous ontologies based on the idea
of integrity of both the land and the body alongside a freedom from
bodily harm and violence.



Resurgence scholars aim to unsettle settler perspectives of
civilization through the revitalisation of Indigenous practices of
responsibility and relations with the natural world. Theorists within
this field reject all stadial theories of human development and the
idea that history's direction is irreversible. Similar to
Gandhi, some Indigenous thinkers critique modern civilization as a
profound sickness destroying what is meaningful in human life,
characterizing modern civilization as ailing and on the threshold of
self-destruction (Henderson, 2017). These thinkers challenge the idea
of a single authoritative account of politics guided by the ideas of
Enlightenment rationality. Instead, they make a case for a new way of
doing politics that provides an alternative to the materialism and
consumerism of modern Western societies that develops through a close
study of the values destroyed through colonialism. John Borrows
(2008), for example, challenges settler understandings that shape
human relationships and obligations to the earth by re-telling the
idea of seven generations that exists in many Indigenous legal and
political traditions. According to this approach, when making
judgments in the present, we have duties of obligation to seven
generations in the past and seven generations in the future.



Along the lines of colonial and post-colonial thinkers, like Gandhi,
Aime Cesaire, Fanon, Indigenous political theorists do
not necessarily advocate for a reversion to historical or traditional
ways of living. Rather, Indigenous thinkers describe a new humanism
within the context of settler colonialism that requires politics
guided by a practice of truth-seeking from various perspectives. In
their work *Resurgence and Reconciliation: Indigenous-Settler
Relations and Earth Teachings* (2019), Michael Ash, John Borrows,
and James Tully compile a collection of work that brings forward a
theoretical framework of reconciliation that is empowered by practices
of resurgence. Decolonization in this sense is likened to the activity
of the ancient sweetgrass braiders, which brings various independent
strands of branches, roots, filaments and fibre together in a strong
braid. This act of weaving - a predominantly female
apprenticeship - necessitates a deep understanding of
community life and its history, with a knowledge of patterns,
impressions, and conventions in both the natural and human world
(2019:10).



Indigenous political theory has developed into a robust scholarship
that calls for the radical responsibility of Indigenous nations for
their own self-determination. This scholarship advocates for the
emergence of a new set of values that develops not through privileging
a European conception of universalism but by sketching a conception of
universalism that emerges from the co-existence of many particulars.
This emergent universalism assembles different worlds and ideas of
civilization by addressing issues surrounding land rights and cultural
distinctiveness.