What Is Colonialism? A History of Violence, Control and Exploitation  

(De)colonized is a series on the harms of colonialism, and the fierce resistance against it.

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Colonialism is defined as “control by one power over a dependent area or people.” In practice, colonialism is when one country violently invades and takes control of another country, claims the land as its own, and sends people — “settlers” — to live on that land. Although the terms colonialism and imperialism are often used interchangeably, they are not the same thing. Imperialism is defined as a set of policies or practices that extend the power and control of a nation over the political, economic, and cultural life of other areas. Imperialism can be understood as the ideology, or logic, that drives colonial projects.

Two waves of colonialism

There were two great waves of colonialism in recorded history. The first wave began in the 15th century, during Europe’s Age of Discovery. During this time, European countries such as Britain, Spain, France, and Portugal colonized lands across North and South America. The motivations for the first wave of colonial expansion can be summed up as God, Gold, and Glory: God, because missionaries felt it was their moral duty to spread Christianity, and they believed a higher power would reward them for saving the souls of colonial subjects; gold, because colonizers would exploit resources of other countries in order to bolster their own economies; and glory, since European nations would often compete with one another over the glory of attaining the greatest number of colonies.

Colonial logic asserted that a place did not exist unless white Europeans had seen it and testified to its existence, but colonists did not actually discover any land. The “New World,” as it was first called by Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian navigator and cartographer, was not new at all: People had been living and thriving in the Americas for centuries.

Yet, in many history books, Europe’s expansion is remembered as exploration, and the men who helmed ships that landed in foreign countries — and proceeded to commit violence and genocide against native peoples — are remembered as heroes. One of these men, an Italian explorer named Christopher Columbus, even has a federally recognized holiday to honor him. Columbus thought he was on his way to Asia, but found himself in the Caribbean instead. The first Indigenous people he came across were the Taíno, who accounted for the majority of people living on the island of Hispaniola (which is now divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic). They had a highly evolved and complex culture. But this did not stop Columbus from claiming the island and its inhabitants for Spain. By 1550, a mere 58 years after he first landed on the island, what was once a thriving culture and community was severely decimated by European diseases and the brutality of a newly instated slave economy.

The second wave of colonial expansion began during the 19th century, centering around the African continent. In what is called the Scramble for Africa, European nations such as Britain, France, Portugal, and Spain sliced up the continent like a pie, creating arbitrary borders and boundaries, and claiming large swaths of land for themselves. These artificial borders split cultural groups, resulting in fierce ethnic tensions that have had devastating ramifications throughout the continent. Indigenous political, economic, and social institutions were decimated, as were traditional ways of life, which were deemed inferior.

Among the most brutal of colonial regimes was that of Belgium under King Leopold II, known as "the Butcher of Congo." His well-documented acts of violence against the Congolese people resulted in an estimated 10 million deaths

The history of settler-colonialism

The treatment of the Indigenous people on the land now known as the United States is just as horrifying. The primarily British Europeans who settled here — just like the Europeans who settled in Africa and the rest of the Americas — overall did not care that there were people already living on the land. The majority did not want peace and harmony between cultures; they wanted the land for themselves. They did not want to share the abundant resources; they wanted to generate wealth to fill their own pockets. Most had no respect for Indigenous cultures or histories; they wanted to enforce their own instead. These colonizers did not care that land was considered sacred and communal. Most believed that everything, including the earth, was meant to be bought and sold.

Unlike the colonial occupation of much of the African continent, however, the Europeans who settled in the United States never left. This is called settler colonialism, a distinct form of colonialism that seeks to replace, often through genocide and forced assimilation, an Indigenous population with a new settler population. A settler is defined as any non-Indigenous person living in a settler-colonial state like the United States, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. Understanding settler colonialism allows us to see colonialism not as a singular event, but an ongoing process of violence against and erasure of Indigenous people.

The Europeans who first settled along the East Coast of the United States believed it was their Manifest Destiny, or God-granted right, to claim territory for themselves and their posterity. As they spread across the entirety of the continental U.S., they pushed the Indigenous populations — who had lived on and tended to the land for millennia — farther and farther west. Native Americans were moved to reservations — parcels of land that were barren and far from economic opportunities. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson, hailed by President Donald Trump and commemorated on the U.S. $20 bill, signed the Indian Removal Act, which led to the forced removal, relocation, and mass death of thousands of Indigenous people. In 1838, the Cherokee were forced west by the U.S. government, which seized control of their land. Forced to walk thousands of miles, an estimated 4,000 Cherokees died on what would later come to be called the “Trail of Tears.” 

How colonialism shaped the world

It may be easy to brush colonialism off as a relic of the past, but we are all living in a world shaped by these histories of brutal and violent conquest. The wealth and prosperity of what were once the most powerful colonial nations in the world can be attributed to the theft of land, resources, and people from former colonies.

Walter Rodney’s book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa asserts that systemic poverty on the continent can be directly linked to European exploitation and resource extraction. After Haiti’s liberation from France, the island nation was ordered to pay $21 billion in reparations to cover the cost of France’s losses during the Haitian Revolution in exchange for its independence. This calculation included the cost of lost slaves. Haiti, the poorest nation in the western hemisphere, made its final payment to France in 1947. Here in the United States, Native reservations have extraordinarily high poverty, alcoholism, unemployment, and suicide rates. These are the effects of what Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, a social worker and professor, describes as historical trauma: intergenerational emotional and psychological damage.

The violence of colonial thinking continues to shape the trajectories of countries that were once colonizers too. Colonizers believed the world was theirs for the taking, saw Black, Indigenous, and other people of color as disposable, and believed that nothing mattered more than the currency in their pockets. The world’s wealthiest countries continue to hoard the earth’s resources, and their unending quest for profit continues to trump the needs of the majority of people.

Indigenous resistance

Wherever colonialism has manifested in the world, from all over the Americas to every corner of the African continent, it has been met with a fierce struggle of resistance. Throughout history, Indigenous people have routinely risen up and successfully overthrown colonial powers, demonstrating that while colonizers may steal land and resources, they can never steal the dignity of a people determined to be free.

In the United States, ongoing protests in Minnesota are being waged against the proposed Line 3 oil pipeline, which the tribes who live along its planned route say would violate their sovereignty. Led by the Ojibwe people, the protestors, or water protectors, decry the pipeline’s potential impact on climate change, historic and sacred sites, and the water supply and food systems. Just a few states away, NDN Collective, an Indigenous organization based in South Dakota, launched a Land back campaign in 2020 calling for the return of all public lands to Indigenous people, beginning with Mount Rushmore. The Land back manifesto says the campaign’s goal is a “reclamation of everything stolen from the original Peoples: land, language, ceremony, medicine, kinship.” These are just a few examples of protests across the country being waged to remind us that decolonization, or the struggle to free oneself from the shackles of colonial rule and tyranny, is not a metaphor.

If colonialism is to be understood as an ongoing process, then so too is the fight for Indigenous self-determination.

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