Colonialism, Empire, and Sociology

Summary

The word colonialism (and cognates in other European languages) comes from the Latin verb colere, meaning to inhabit, till, or cultivate, and from the related noun colonus, meaning tiller of the soil. Both words point to Greek and Roman expansion in the ancient world, which involved not just the conquest and seizure of foreign lands but the settlement of Greeks and Romans in those lands. The word colony designated a territory occupied by emigrants from the conquering country. Due to these origins, colony and colonization sometimes signify land settlement without the additional political meanings of conquest and rule. In contrast to these older meanings, modern social science generally defines a colony as a geopolitical entity created by representatives of a foreign polity outside their own territory. Colonialism, a word that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century, designates a sequence of events involving the takeover of a territory by a foreign group, the elimination of indigenous political sovereignty, and the creation of relatively durable structures of rule over the territory and its inhabitants. These structures usually take the form of a colonial state. In the modern era since the late 18th century, European powers generally defended the seizure of foreign lands by claiming that the invaded territory was not under the sovereignty of any state—the terra nullius doctrine—or that its native population was inferior to their conquerors and incapable of self-governance. The supposed inferiority of the colonized was defined variably in terms of religion, civilization, or race.

Imperialism is a related term that was coined in the early 19th century. Imperialism is based on the earlier word empire, derived from the Latin imperium, which signified the power of princes and officials to command and punish their subjects. During the medieval era, empire referred to large territorial political organizations forged by conquest and noble alliance and consolidated under a single state or monarchy. Empires in the modern era can be defined as expansive, multi-ethnic political organizations that limit the sovereignty of subject populations to differing degrees and that govern different peoples in diverse ways. Some European empires in the Early Modern period encompassed far-flung territories in the eastern and western hemispheres, and it was their remoteness from the metropole that led to them being defined as colonies. Other empires in this period, including the Russian, Ottoman, and Chinese, pursued continental expansion outward from a center. These were land empires, or continental empires, not colonial empires.

During the 1880s, European powers created overseas colonial empires in Africa, Oceania, and Asia, and this was followed by the Japanese colonial empire in East Asia and Oceania starting in 1911. Most colonies regained their independence between 1945 and the 1970s. Modern forms of informal Empire came into existence, pioneered by the United States, involving the periodic exercise of direct control over foreign states and an empire of scattered U.S. military “bases” without permanent occupation.

Sociology emerged as a scholarly field in the 19th century, the era of modern colonialism and continental empires. Sociologists theorized and researched modern colonialism, land empires, and U.S. informal empire from the disciplinary beginnings to the present. This chapter surveys this sociological writing.