The Dictionary of Human Geography

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colonists and native populations plummeted

due to disease; and maritime enclaves (e.g.

Aden, Hong Kong, Jakarta and Malacca),

which served as commercial and military

nodes in encompassing imperial networks.

While these are ideal types – for instance,

French Algeria and Spanish Peru were both

extraction and settler colonies – a large litera-

ture identifies the distinct power relations per-

taining to these different colonial formations.

The close association of colonialism with

European/white minority rule has meant that

the term has been deemed inapplicable to

some situations – until recently, the colonial

period of US history, where colonists along the

Atlantic seaboard soon outnumbered native

people. And the ‘salt water’ association

between colonialism and distant overseas pos-

session explains why expressions such as ‘in-

ternal colonialism’ have been used to describe

situations in which colonialist relationships

exist within the borders of, or contiguous to,

an imperial state or kingdom (e.g. between

England and its ‘Celtic fringe’, especially

Ireland).

The history of colonialism has also been

divided into distinct periods: Spain and Por-

tugal’s initial sixteenth-century conquest of

the New World; the seventeenth-century cre-

ation of an ‘Atlantic world’ revolving around

the circulation of people and commodities,

and centred onslaveryand the racialized

plantationeconomies of the Caribbean; the

eighteenth-century extension of European (es-

pecially British and Dutch) trade and domin-

ion in Asia; the nineteenth-century building of

European land empires in Africa and Asia and

the emergence of the USA as a significant

empire-builder; the maturation of colonial ex-

port economies between 1900 and 1945; and a

postwar welfare-minded colonialism that be-

came entangled with independence struggles

anddecolonization.

Since the 1980s work on colonialism –

much of which is either aligned with, or sees

itself as a response to,post-colonialism–

stems from the recognition that the postwar

break-up of Europe’s colonial empires did not

quickly or necessarily put once colonized

regions on a par with the West – at any level.

In 1965, Kwame Nkrumah coined the term

neo-colonialismto describe how the West

(and especially the USA) was perpetuating

colonialism while upholding ideals of inde-

pendence and liberty, the contradiction being

as apparent indevelopmentmodels, which

were the vehicles of a new cultural imperialism,

as it was blatant in new international

investment and trade relations (Young, 2001,

pp. 44–56; cf. development geography;

third world;transnational corporation).

Some remarkable theoretical treatments of

colonialism from this era – for example, the

work of Fanon and Aime ́Ce ́saire – alight on

the enduring and nefarious psychological

influence of colonial categories of thought

and social pathologies on post-independence

politics andnationalism. And if, as this sug-

gests, the colonial past was not over, then

Derek Gregory (2004b, pp. 6, 117), adds what

now seems an obvious rider: that the colonial

past ‘is not even past’.empireis being revived

through the creation of new ‘colonizing geog-

raphies’ of division, partition and enmity (the

war-torn middle east currently bearing

the brunt of them) that displays many affinities

with past colonial ideas and practices. The

United Nations has declared the period

2001–10 the ‘Second International Decade

for the Eradication of Colonialism’.

Indeed, there is now arguably a greater range

of opinion about colonialism than there has

been for 50 years, including burly affirmations

of its supposed benefits that feed on imperial

nostalgia. On the other hand, there has been a

radical re-reading of the West’s conception of

its cultural evolution, and much academic soul

searching, not least within European and

North American geography, which has strong

ties with empire, blasting apart disciplinary

allegories ofobjectivity, progress and self-

contained development (cf.geography, his-

tory of). Many discourses and practices that

have been deemed central to geography’s

make-up and heritage –exploration, map-

ping, surveying, environmental determin-

ism, geopolitical model-building and latterly

GIS – have been pressed into (and are still

designed for) imperial service.

cartographyhas been a colonizing toolpar

excellence. Maps brought ‘undiscovered’ lands

intospatialexistence,emptying them of prior

(indigenous) meanings and refilling them with

Western place-namesand borders, priming

‘virgin’ (putatively empty land, ‘wilderness’)

for colonization (thus sexualizing colonial

landscapes as domains of male penetration),

reconfiguring alien space as absolute, quanti-

fiable and separable (as property), drawing

mapped space into the unifying framework of

Western knowledge and reason, and, along

with the clock and calendar, effecting a funda-

mental reorganization (standardization) of the

relations between time and space (Edney,

1997; cf.time__space distanciation). Little

wonder, then, that concepts andmetaphors

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_C Final Proof page 96 31.3.2009 9:45pm

COLONIALISM