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Colonization, or colonisation, constitutes large-scale population movements wherein migrants maintain strong links with their, or their ancestors', former country – by such links, gain advantage over other inhabitants of the territory. When colonization takes place under the protection of
colonial Colonial or The Colonial may refer to: * Colonial, of, relating to, or characteristic of a colony or colony (biology) Architecture * American colonial architecture * French Colonial * Spanish Colonial architecture Automobiles * Colonial (1920 a ...
structures, it may be termed settler colonialism. This often involves the settlers dispossessing
indigenous inhabitants Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...
, or instituting legal and other structures which disadvantage them. Colonization can be defined as a process of establishing foreign control over target
territories A territory is an area of land, sea, or space, particularly belonging or connected to a country, person, or animal. In international politics, a territory is usually either the total area from which a state may extract power resources or an ...
or peoples for the purpose of cultivation, often by establishing colonies and possibly by settling them. In colonies established by Western European countries in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand, settlers (supplemented by Central European, Eastern European, Asian, and African people) eventually formed a large majority of the population after assimilating, warring with, or driving away indigenous peoples. Elsewhere Western European settlers formed minority groups, often dominating the non-Western European majority. During the European colonization of Australia, New Zealand, and other places in Oceania, explorers, and colonists often regarded the landmasses as '' terra nullius'' ("empty land" in Latin). Owing to the absence of Western farming techniques, Europeans deemed the land unaltered by mankind and therefore treated it as uninhabited, despite the presence of indigenous populations. In the 19th century, laws and ideas such as Mexico's General Colonization Law and the United States'
manifest destiny Manifest destiny was a cultural belief in the 19th century in the United States, 19th-century United States that American settlers were destined to expand across North America. There were three basic tenets to the concept: * The special vir ...
doctrine encouraged further colonization of the Americas, already begun in the 15th century. Despite countless declarations and referendums from the United Nations on the independence of colonial countries and peoples, implemented since 1946, there are in the world still over 60 colonies – sometimes designated territories – including Puerto Rico, Guam, and Bermuda.


Lexicology

The term ''colonization'' is derived from the Latin words ''colere'' ("to cultivate, to till"), ''colonia'' ("a landed estate", "a farm") and ''colonus'' ("a tiller of the soil", "a farmer"), then by extension "to inhabit". Someone who engages in colonization, i.e. the agent noun, is referred to as a ''colonizer'', while the person who gets colonized, i.e. the object of the agent noun or absolutive, is referred to as a ''colonizee'', ''colonisee'' or the ''colonised''.


Pre-modern colonizations


Classical period

In ancient times, maritime nations such as the city-states of Greece and Phoenicia often established colonies to farm what they believed was uninhabited land. Land suitable for farming was often occupied by migratory '
barbarian A barbarian (or savage) is someone who is perceived to be either Civilization, uncivilized or primitive. The designation is usually applied as a generalization based on a popular stereotype; barbarians can be members of any nation judged by som ...
tribes' who lived by hunting and gathering. To ancient Greeks and Phoenicians, these lands were regarded as simply vacant. However, this did not mean that conflict did not exist between the colonizers and local/native peoples. Greeks and Phoenicians also established colonies with the intent of regulating and expanding trade throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East. Another period of colonization in ancient times was during the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire conquered large parts of Western Europe, North Africa, and West Asia. In North Africa and West Asia, the Romans often conquered what they regarded as 'civilized' peoples. As they moved north into Europe, they mostly encountered rural peoples/tribes with very little in the way of cities. In these areas, waves of Roman colonization often followed the conquest of the areas. Many of the current cities throughout Europe began as Roman colonies, such as Cologne, Germany, originally called '' Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium'' by the Romans, and the British capital city of London, which the Romans founded as ''
Londinium Londinium, also known as Roman London, was the capital of Roman Britain during most of the period of Roman rule. It was originally a settlement established on the current site of the City of London around AD 47–50. It sat at a key cross ...
''.


Middle Ages

The decline and collapse of the Roman Empire saw (and was partly caused by) the large-scale movement of people in Eastern Europe and Asia. This is largely seen as beginning with nomadic horsemen from Asia (specifically the Huns) moving into the richer pasture land to the west, thus forcing the local people there to move further west and so on until eventually the Goths were forced to cross into the Roman Empire, resulting in continuous war with Rome which played a major role in the fall of the Roman Empire. During this period there were large-scale movements of people establishing new colonies all over western Europe. The events of this time saw the development of many of the modern-day nations of Europe like the Franks in France and Germany and the Anglo-Saxons in England. In West Asia, during
Sassanid Empire The Sasanian () or Sassanid Empire, officially known as the Empire of Iranians (, ) and also referred to by historians as the Neo-Persian Empire, was the last Iranian empire before the early Muslim conquests of the 7th-8th centuries AD. Named ...
, some Persians established colonies in Yemen and Oman. The Arabs also established colonies in Northern Africa, Mesopotamia, and the Levant, and remain the dominant majority to this day. The Vikings of Scandinavia also carried out a large-scale colonization. The Vikings are best known as raiders, setting out from their original homelands in Denmark, southern Norway, and southern
Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...
, to pillage the coastlines of northern Europe. In time, the Vikings began trading and established colonies. The Vikings first came across Iceland and established colonies there before moving onto Greenland, where they briefly held some colonies. The Vikings launched an unsuccessful attempt at colonizing an area they called Vinland, which is probably at a site now known as L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, and Labrador, on the eastern coastline of Canada.


Modern colonialism

In the Colonial Era, colonialism in this context refers mostly to Western European countries' colonization of lands mainly in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania. The main European countries active in this form of colonization included Spain, Portugal, France, the Tsardom of Russia (later Russian Empire), the Kingdom of England (later Great Britain), the Netherlands, and the Kingdom of Prussia (now mostly Germany), and, beginning in the 18th century, the United States. Most of these countries had a period of almost complete power in world trade at some stage in the period from roughly 1500 to 1900. Beginning in the late 19th century, Imperial Japan also engaged in settler colonization, most notably in Hokkaido and Korea. While some European colonization focused on shorter-term exploitation of economic opportunities (
Newfoundland Newfoundland and Labrador (; french: Terre-Neuve-et-Labrador; frequently abbreviated as NL) is the easternmost province of Canada, in the country's Atlantic region. The province comprises the island of Newfoundland and the continental region ...
, for example, or Siberia) or addressed specific goals such as settlers seeking religious freedom ( Massachusetts), at other times long-term social and economic planning was involved for both parties, but more on the colonizing countries themselves, based on elaborate theory-building (note James Oglethorpe's Colony of Georgia in the 1730s and Edward Gibbon Wakefield's New Zealand Company in the 1840s). Colonization may be used as a method of absorbing and assimilating foreign people into the culture of the imperial country. One instrument to this end is linguistic imperialism, or the use of non-indigenous colonial languages to the exclusion of any indigenous languages from administrative (and often, any public) use.


Post-colonial variants


Soviet Union

In the 1920s, the Soviet regime implemented the so-called
korenization Korenizatsiia or korenization ( rus, коренизация, p=kərʲɪnʲɪˈzatsɨjə, , "indigenization") was an early policy of the Soviet Union for the integration of non-Russian nationalities into the governments of their specific Soviet ...
policy in an attempt to win the trust of non-Russians by promoting their ethnic cultures and establishing for them many of the characteristic institutional forms of the nation-state. The early Soviet regime was hostile to even voluntary assimilation, and tried to de-Russify assimilated non-Russians. Parents and students not interested in the promotion of their national languages were labeled as displaying "abnormal attitudes". The authorities concluded that minorities unaware of their ethnicities had to be subjected to
Belarusization Belarusization ( be, беларусізацыя) was a policy of protection and advancement of the Belarusian language and recruitment and promotion of ethnic Belarusians (a type of affirmative action program) within the government of the Belaru ...
, Yiddishization, Polonization, etc. By the early 1930s, this extreme multiculturalist policy proved unworkable and the Soviet regime introduced a limited Russification for practical reasons; voluntary assimilation, which was often a popular demand, was allowed. The list of nationalities was reduced from 172 in 1927 to 98 in 1939, by revoking support for small nations in order to merge them into bigger ones. For example,
Abkhazia Abkhazia, ka, აფხაზეთი, tr, , xmf, აბჟუა, abzhua, or ( or ), officially the Republic of Abkhazia, is a partially recognised state in the South Caucasus, recognised by most countries as part of Georgia, which vi ...
was merged into Georgia and thousands of ethnic Georgians were sent to Abkhazia. The Abkhaz alphabet was changed to a Georgian base, Abkhazian schools were closed and replaced with Georgian schools, the Abkhaz language was banned. The ruling elite was purged of ethnic Abkhaz and by 1952 over 80% of the 228 top party and government officials and enterprise managers in Abkhazia were ethnic Georgians (there remained 34 Abkhaz, 7 Russians and 3 Armenians in these positions). For Königsberg area of
East Prussia East Prussia ; german: Ostpreißen, label=Low Prussian; pl, Prusy Wschodnie; lt, Rytų Prūsija was a province of the Kingdom of Prussia from 1773 to 1829 and again from 1878 (with the Kingdom itself being part of the German Empire from 187 ...
(modern Kaliningrad Oblast) given to the Soviet Union at the 1945 Potsdam Conference Soviet control meant a forcible expulsion of the remaining German population and mostly involuntary resettlement of the area with Soviet civilians. Russians were now presented as the most advanced and least chauvinist people of the Soviet Union.


Baltic states

Large numbers of ethnic Russians and other
Russian speakers This article details the geographical distribution of Russian-speakers. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the status of the Russian language often became a matter of controversy. Some Post-Soviet states adopted policies of derussi ...
were settled in the three Baltic countries—Lithuania, Latvia, amd Estonia—after their reoccupation in 1944, while local languages, religion and customs were suppressed. David Chioni Moore classified it as a "reverse-cultural colonization", where the colonized perceived the colonizers as culturally inferior. Colonization of the three Baltic countries was closely tied to mass executions, deportations and repression of the native population. During both Soviet occupations ( 1940–1941; 1944–1991) a combined 605,000 inhabitants of the three countries were either killed or deported (135,000 Estonians, 170,000 Latvians and 320,000 Lithuanians), while their properties and personal belongings, along with ones who fled the country, were confiscated and given to the arriving colonists – Soviet military and NKVD personnel, as well as functionaries of the Communist Party and economic migrants from kolkhozs. The most dramatic case was Latvia, where the amount of ethnic Russians swelled from 168,300 (8.8%) in 1935 to 905,500 (34%) in 1989, whereas the proportion of ethnic Latvians fell from 77% in 1935 to 52% in 1989. Baltic states also faced intense economic exploitation, with
Latvian SSR The Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic (Latvian SSR), also known as Soviet Latvia or simply Latvia, was a federated republic within the Soviet Union, and formally one of its 16 (later 15) constituent republics. The Latvian Soviet Socialist Rep ...
, for example, transferring 15.961 billion rubles (or 18.8% percent of its total revenue of 85 billion rubles) more to the USSR budget from 1946 to 1990 than it received back. And of the money transferred back, a disproportionate amount was spent on the region's
militarization Militarization, or militarisation, is the process by which a society organizes itself for military conflict and violence. It is related to militarism, which is an ideology that reflects the level of militarization of a state. The process of milit ...
and funding of repressive institutions, especially in the early years of the occupation. It has been calculated by a Latvian state-funded commission that the Soviet occupation cost the economy of Latvia a total of 185 billion euros. Conversely, Marxian economist and world-systems analyst Samir Amin asserts that, in contrast to colonialism, capital transfer in the USSR was used to develop poorer regions in the South and East with the wealthiest regions like Western Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic Republics being the main source of capital. Estonian researcher
Epp Annus Epp Annus (born 30 August 1969 in Tallinn) is an Estonian writer and literary scholar. In 2002, she graduated from the University of Tartu The University of Tartu (UT; et, Tartu Ülikool; la, Universitas Tartuensis) is a university in the c ...
acknowledges that the Soviet rule in the Baltic states did not possess every single characteristic of traditional colonialism since the Baltic states were already modern industrial European nation states with an established sense of national identity and cultural self-confidence prior to their Soviet invasion in 1940 and proposed that the initial Soviet occupation developed into a colonial rule gradually, as the local resistance turned into a hybrid coexistence with the Soviet power. The Soviet colonial rule never managed to fully establish itself and began rapidly disintegrating during ''
perestroika ''Perestroika'' (; russian: links=no, перестройка, p=pʲɪrʲɪˈstrojkə, a=ru-perestroika.ogg) was a political movement for reform within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) during the late 1980s widely associated wit ...
'', but after the restoration of independence, the Baltic states similarly had to deal with problems of a characteristically colonial nature, such as pollution, economic collapse and demographic tensions.


Jewish oblast

In 1934, the Soviet government established the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the Soviet Far East to create a homeland for the Jewish people. Another motive was to strengthen Soviet presence along the vulnerable eastern border. The region was often infiltrated by the Chinese; in 1927,
Chiang Kai-shek Chiang Kai-shek (31 October 1887 – 5 April 1975), also known as Chiang Chung-cheng and Jiang Jieshi, was a Chinese Nationalist politician, revolutionary, and military leader who served as the leader of the Republic of China (ROC) from 1928 ...
had ended cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party, which further increased the threat. Fascist Japan also seemed willing and ready to detach the Far Eastern provinces from the USSR. To make settlement of the inhospitable and undeveloped region more enticing, the Soviet government allowed private ownership of land. This led to many non-Jews to settle in the oblast to get a free farm. By the 1930s, a massive propaganda campaign developed to induce more Jewish settlers to move there. In one instance, a government-produced Yiddish film called ''
Seekers of Happiness ''Seekers of Happiness'' (russian: Искатели счастья, Iskateli schastya) is a Soviet film from 1936 trying to attract Jews to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (JAO) in the far east of the USSR. It is also known by its alternative name, ...
'' told the story of a Jewish family that fled the
Great Depression The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...
in the United States to make a new life for itself in Birobidzhan. Some 1,200 non-Soviet Jews chose to settle in Birobidzhan.Arthur Rosen, ww./75mag/birobidzhan/birobidzhan.htm February 2004 The Jewish population peaked in 1948 at around 30,000, about one-quarter of the region's population. By 2010, according to data provided by the Russian Census Bureau, there were only 1,628 people of Jewish descent remaining in the JAO (1% of the total population), while ethnic Russians made up 92.7% of the JAO population. The JAO is Russia's only autonomous oblast and, aside of Israel, the world's only Jewish territory with an official status.


Israel

According to
Elia Zuriek Elia is a name which may be a variant of the names Elias, Elijah, Eli or Eliahu, and may refer to: People * Aelia (gens) or Elia, a ''gens'' of Ancient Rome Mononymic * Elia or Elijah, a biblical prophet * Elia, a pen-name of Charles Lamb First ...
, in his book "Israel's Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit", Israeli settlements in the West Bank is an additional form of colonization. This view is part of a key debate in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict Israelis ( he, יִשְׂרָאֵלִים‎, translit=Yīśrāʾēlīm; ar, الإسرائيليين, translit=al-ʾIsrāʾīliyyin) are the citizens and nationals of the State of Israel. The country's populace is composed primarily of Jew ...
. Law professors S­teven Lubet and Jo­nathan Zasloff descr­ibe the "Zionism as settler colonialism" theory as political­ly motivated, deroga­tory and highly controversial. According to them, there are important differences between Zionism and settler colonialism, for instance: (1) Early Zionists did not seek to transport European culture into Israel, they sought to revive the culture of a indige­nous people of the land, the culture of their ancestors (e.g. they left their European languages beh­ind and adopted a Middle Eastern\Semit­ic one: Hebrew); (2) No settler colonial movement ever claimed to be "returning home"; (3) Jews had already been living in the "colonized" region for thousands of years. Both professors also point out that the academic journal where Wolfe published his essay fails to ment­ion the Islamic military campaign that captured the region in the 7th and 8th centuries.


Indonesia

The transmigration program is an initiative of the Indonesian government to move landless people from densely populated areas of Java, but also to a lesser extent from
Bali Bali () is a province of Indonesia and the westernmost of the Lesser Sunda Islands. East of Java and west of Lombok, the province includes the island of Bali and a few smaller neighbouring islands, notably Nusa Penida, Nusa Lembongan, and Nu ...
and Madura, to less populous areas of the country including Papua,
Kalimantan Kalimantan () is the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo. It constitutes 73% of the island's area. The non-Indonesian parts of Borneo are Brunei and East Malaysia. In Indonesia, "Kalimantan" refers to the whole island of Borneo. In 2019, ...
,
Sumatra Sumatra is one of the Sunda Islands of western Indonesia. It is the largest island that is fully within Indonesian territory, as well as the sixth-largest island in the world at 473,481 km2 (182,812 mi.2), not including adjacent i ...
, and
Sulawesi Sulawesi (), also known as Celebes (), is an island in Indonesia. One of the four Greater Sunda Islands, and the world's eleventh-largest island, it is situated east of Borneo, west of the Maluku Islands, and south of Mindanao and the Sulu Ar ...
.


Papua New Guinea

In 1884 Britain declared a protective order over South East New Guinea, establishing an official colony in 1888. Germany however, annexed parts of the North. This annexation separated the entire region into the South, known as "The Territory of Papua" and North, known as "German New Guinea".


Philippines

Due to marginalisation produced by continuous Resettlement Policy, by 1969, political tensions and open hostilities developed between the Government of the Philippines and Moro
Muslim Muslims ( ar, المسلمون, , ) are people who adhere to Islam, a monotheistic religion belonging to the Abrahamic tradition. They consider the Quran, the foundational religious text of Islam, to be the verbatim word of the God of Abrah ...
rebel groups in Mindanao.


Myanmar


Subject peoples

Many colonists came to colonies for
slaves Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perf ...
to their colonizing countries, so the legal power to leave or remain may not be the issue so much as the actual presence of the people in the new country. This left the indigenous natives of their lands slaves in their own countries. The Canadian Indian residential school system was identified by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Canada) as colonization through depriving the youth of First Nations in Canada of their languages and cultures. During the mid 20th century, there was the most dramatic and devastating attempt at colonization, and that was pursued with Nazism. Hitler and Heinrich Himmler and their supporters schemed for a mass migration of Germans to Eastern Europe, where some of the Germans were to become colonists, having control over the native people. These indigenous people were planned to be reduced to slaves or wholly annihilated. Many advanced nations currently have large numbers of guest workers/ temporary work visa holders who are brought in to do seasonal work such as harvesting or to do low-paid manual labor. Guest workers or contractors have a lower status than workers with visas, because guest workers can be removed at any time for any reason.


Endo-colonization

Colonization may be a domestic strategy when there is a widespread security threat within a nation and weapons are turned inward, as noted by
Paul Virilio Paul Virilio (; 4 January 1932 – 10 September 2018) was a French cultural theorist, urbanist, architect and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with divers ...
: :Obsession with security results in the ''endo-colonization'' of society: endo-colonization is the use of increasingly powerful and ubiquitous technologies of security turned ''inward'', to attempt to secure the fast and messy circulations of our globalizing, networked society…it is the increasing domination of public life with stories of dangerous otherness and suspicion… Some instances of the burden of endo-colonization have been noted: :The acute difficulties of the Latin American and southern European military-bureaucratic dictatorships in the seventies and early eighties and the Soviet Union in the late eighties can in large part be attributed to the economic, political and social contradictions induced by endo-colonizing militarism.
Tim Luke Timothy W. Luke (born June 28, 1951) is university distinguished professor of political science in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences as well as program chair of the Government and International Affairs Program, School of Public and Int ...
&
Gearoid O Tuathail Gerard Toal ( ga, Gearóid Ó Tuathail; born 1962 in the Republic of IrelandHague, Euan (2004): Gearóid Ó Tuathail (Gerard Toal). In: Hubbard, Phil, Rob Kitchin and Gill Valentine (Eds.): Key thinkers on space and place. London: Sage Pubn Inc. ...
(2000) "Thinking Geopolitical Space: The spatiality of war, speed and vision in the work of Paul Virilio", in ''Thinking Space'', Mike Crang & Nigel Thrift editors, Routledge, quote page 368


Space colonization


See also

; Colonization * Colonialism * Coloniality of gender * Colonization of Antarctica * Cocacolonization * Ocean colonization * List of colonial empires ; Other related * Colonisation (biology) * Human settlement *
Imperialism Imperialism is the state policy, practice, or advocacy of extending power and dominion, especially by direct territorial acquisition or by gaining political and economic control of other areas, often through employing hard power (economic and ...
* Pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact


Notes and references


Bibliography

* Cooper, Frederick, ''Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge History’’, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005 * Jared Diamond, '' Guns, germs and steel. A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years'', 1997. * Ankerl Guy, ''Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations: Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese, and Western'', INUPress, Geneva, 2000. . * Cotterell, Arthur. ''Western Power in Asia: Its Slow Rise and Swift Fall, 1415 - 1999'' (2009) popular history
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