Colonisation
1.6% of the planet colonised the rest.
A tiny peninsula of the eurasian continent controlled the whole world. There were very few countries who were not colonised.
Non-colonised states:
Ethiopia. Afghanistan. Japan. Thailand. Liberia. Iran. Turkey. All the rest of the world was colonised.
Growing demand to decolonise society.
Breffu, St John Island revolt. Danish colony. Led the revolt of enslaved people against the danish plantation-owners.
Tacky, led a slave rebellion in Jamaica.
Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the Haitian revolution.
Eurocentric frames bad, stop ignoring parts of history in schooling.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haitian anthropologist from Chicago. Silencing the Past. History is a selection of facts and this is not neutral. Years and facts and important dates are not an objective story. If you only tell the story of some, you are not telling the story of others. And these stories that people care for are those of the victors. It is only recently that other stories of those less dominant become important.
Should include non-western perspectives in their course. Try to include some information about other countries that are not at the head of imperialism. Is usually done as a dessert. Should be main-course.
You don’t need to be of colour to bring in that kind of perspective.
Introduction 1750, The major metropoles, The seventy years war, Asia, Africa, Tools of empire, Twentieth century
”frames of knowledge”: Era of AI, Epistemology
Textbook facts (?): Chapters: 2, 3, 4, 5, 7.
Chapter 6 is on structures (?).
We still use a lot of the healthcare and stuff we receive from past violence. We should discuss this more.
Read a book on colonial Congo.
There are like 400 slides or so. Fun.
5 marks for the Congo.
Exam: Everything said in class, people with a portrait,
Lectures are recorded.
Introduction
Definitions of colonisation and so on.
None of them are clear-cut in this course, and are open for interpretation.
Colere, to cultivate; Colonia, agrarian settlement; Imperare, to dominate.
Colonisation were words that were used in the past, but have had different meanings over time. Colony as such, for the things we know understand as colonies, was not used before the end of the 19th century. In the 16th century with the start of portugese and spanish colonisation, they spoke of dominions or conquering territory. Or bringing civilisation, or fighting barbarism. Neither did one call it this in the 17th century. Before it was called plantation, private property, or commerce. In the late 19th century it was used for wide settler colonies like Australia and British North America. India was conquered, but was not called a colony by for example John Stuart Mill. He only alludes to the colonies as such.
It is a form of expansion. Expansion has different meanings as well. Expansion can go together without colonisation. In an exodus an entire population moves from one place to another, and this is not necessarily colonialist. There is no controlling center left behind. In colonisation you have a metropole and a colony. Emigration can also be a kind of expansion, but is not related to colonialism either. Many colonisers were emigrants, eg. the pilgrim father who broke with the metropole. There is a difference between colonisation and emigration.
Colonisation has different forms too. First and foremost there is border colonisation. This means that a country or an empire increasinly stretches its borders, or expands. An example is the US. The US celebrates its 250th anniversary in a few months, but most of the US was not part of it 200 years ago. Most was border colonised. But this is also a biassed view of border colonisation. The expansion into the native american borders was mainly settler-colonial. Everywhere in the US the native americans disappeared. Died off from disease of course, but indeed also a cultural genocide.
Overseas settlement is another kind of colonialisation. As a matter of fact this is the kind we’ll focus on. ”A colony is a new political organiation created by invasion (conquest and/or settlement colonisation) […] Its alien rulers are in sustained dependence on a geographically remote mother country or imperial center, which claims exclusive rights of possession of the colony.” Border colonisation is not exactly the same, given that the remote mother country are within the borders of the same continuous entity.
”Colonialism is a relationship of domination between indigenous mahority and a minority of foregin invaders”.
Colonisation is the process of establishing colonial control and so on. But you can have colonies without colonisation. Like the French Louisiana which were merely claimed, but which they did not really do a lot with. There can also be colonisation without colonies, like the USA. In the 2020s, four years ago war broke out between Ukraine and Russia. We can speak of border colonisation in terms of this war. It has so many similarities with what we will see with Western Europe overseas colonisation that it’s worth mentioning. Russia itself was also initially colonised. The Kievan-Rus empire expanded and was conquered by the tatars, and one dutchy of the former Kievan-Rus, ie. Moscowy, conquered the tatar remains and then we had the Russian empire and so on.
Russians will refer to the Cossacks conquering the land of Siberia. This is not entirely true, they were paid by merchants, the pioneer of the conquest of Siberia, was funded by the Stroganoff family. They didn’t penetrate the lands as such, but had to fight battles against the natives. They then imposed taxes on the natives of Siberia, it was a goldmine of fur. These cossacks didn’t hunt the fur themselves, but imposed the Yasak, the fur-tribute. Just like the Spanish and Portugese.
They traded with conditions imposed by the russians, and expropriated certain natural resources. Russia pillaged and extracted many natural resources from the newly conquered areas. Even today, we know of Russia as a provider of oil and gas, and none of this is found in European Russia, but in Volga and Siberia. Russia is the world’s largest producer and holder of natural diamonds. Yakutia is one of Russia’s richest regions, given its vast diamond-riches. All of the profits go to Moscow. Siberia is used for the exploitation of natural resources, and you can see that there is even no gas-supply system to the north of Siberia. The largest cities of Russia were almost all in European Russia. The richest cities are mainly in EU-Russia. This is very close to what we call colonisation in Western Europe. Regarding demography there are also similarities. The Russians did similar things to the natives of Siberia. Urkun is an event in Kyrgistan during the WW1 in which muslims were conscripted for the Army and upon which they did an uprising – leading to houndreds of thousand deaths against the Tsar. Total ignorance in Western Europe. I mentioned this as an example of how Tsarist Russia exterminated large population groups. Holodomor is a deliberate famine created in the 1930s by Stalin against the Ukrainian populations and Kulaks with millions of casualties. Famine-genocide. Just like the Brits did. 30 million indians died in famines in colonial india, these were not natural, but were the consequences of political decisions made to weaken the population. You find an abundance of maps of the indigenous people’s of Siberia. As if Siberia is populated by those people today. But just like with the US and the native americans, there was a great movement of settler colonisation of Russians in Siberia in the centuries following the conquest. All of this is completely neglected, because the bolsheviks began celebrating ethnic diversity. The bolsheviks were the advocates of blue-collar workers and peasants, but they also had a third point: give land to the non-russians. They reacted to the russian nationalism of the last tsars, and in the 1920s they promised land and autonomy to all of Russia’s ethnic minorities; korenizatsiya. Affirmative action for non-russian population groups. They even put these words in practice, and gave territories to these ethnic groups. They reorganised the adminsitrative structure of the Tsarist empire, and created a number of territories for these ethnic minorities. The soviet union was a union. And its internal borders changed over time. After WWII each nation had its own territory. Within each Soviet Republic other entities were alos created, like the republics and the oblasts. There are almost 20 of them, even today. The Soviet union fell apart in 1991, and a lot of the ethnic republics remain.
However, pseudo-federation. As a matter of fact the soviet union was very centralised, all power was in Moscow. And rather than celebrating this diversity, from the 30s onwards it was russification, like the holodomor. Many of the languages had to adapt their script to cyrillic, like the Uzbek. The Russians applied the strategy of divide and rule. They divided these ethnic groups in order to create tension, to avoid united resistance. This has consequences until today, like Ossetia. Ossetia was divided between two republic, south went to Georgia, and north went to Russia. There are the Kabbardenes and the Bulkarians. There is Transnistria. Used to be part of Moldova. This is another example of how Russia is obviously also a coloniser. These went together with orientalism, like how they would write about non-european people. The way they talk about the indigenous population is very racist.