8
Colonialism and Monumental Archaeology
in South and Southeast Asia
In the nineteenth century and theWrst half of the twentieth century, political
and economic power was concentrated in just a few countries. Having
eclipsed the most mighty early modern empires—those of Spain and Portu-
gal, the Ottoman Empire, The Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries—
Britain, France, the Russian, and the Austro-Hungarian Empires became the
major European powers. Later, these were joined by the newly formed
countries of Germany and Italy, together with the United States of America
and Japan. In these countries elites drew their might not only from the
industrial revolution but also from the economic exploitation of their ever-
increasing colonies. Colonialism, a policy by which a state claims sovereignty
over territory and people outside its own boundaries, often to facilitate
economic domination over their resources, labour, and markets, was not
new. In fact, colonialism was an old phenomenon, in existence for several
millennia (Gosden 2004). However, in the nineteenth century capitalism
changed the character of colonialism in its search for new markets and
cheap labour, and the imperial expansion of the European powers prompted
the control and subjugation of increasingly large areas of the world. From
1815 to 1914 the overseas territories held by the European powers expanded
from 35 per cent to about 85 per cent of the earth’s surface (Said 1978: 41;
1993: 6). To this enlarged region areas of informal imperialism (see Part II of
this book) could be added. However, colonialism and informal colonialism
were not only about economic exploitation. The appropriation of the ‘Other’
in the colonies went much further, and included the imposition of an
ideological and cultural hegemony throughout each of the empires.
The zenith of this process of colonization was reached between the 1860s
and the First World War, in the context of an increasingly exultant national-
ism. In a process referred to as ‘New Imperialism’, European colonies
were established in all the other four continents, mainly in areas not inhabited
by populations with political forms cognate to the Western powers. In the
case of Africa, its partition would be formally decided at an international