Collecti
ism: Cultural Concerns
riots, murder, delinquency, theft and fraud, drug and
alcohol abuse, suicide, brawling, wife beating, child
battering, and mental illness. The competition found
in individualist cultures often results in some segments
of the society remaining economically behind and
becoming especially susceptible to social pathologies.
By contrast, collectivism is associated with social
controls, including extreme punishment for crimes,
prompt punishment, and active gossip. Social control
is also achieved through emotional closeness, social
support, appeals to memorable myths, and a plausible
ideology that supports the ingroup’s norms. People
feel embedded in the social system, so they are less
likely to try to change it, to commit crimes or suicide,
to steal from the ingroup, or use drugs that isolate
them from it. One of the best predictors of drug abuse
is the combination of high pressure for achievement
with low social support, a combination often found in
individualist cultures.
On the negative side, collectivism is often found in
societies where groups assume that the individual is
relatively unimportant and must do what is best for
the group. This is especially significant when the group
is the state. People are expected to be ‘patriotic,’ i.e.
sacrifice themselves for the good of the state. However,
very often what is good for the state is in fact only
good for those in power, who frequently take ad-
vantage of the masses to further their personal goals.
As we have seen, leaders in all cultures are idiocentric,
and the history of the world offers too many examples
where they order their followers to do what is good for
the leader rather than what is good for the followers.
Also, collectivism makes it easier to convince the
ingroup to fight outgroups, and wars are more
frequent between collectivist countries than be-
tween individualist cultures. In a world with nuclear
weapons, there may be much to be said in favor of re-
duced collectivism.
Note also that while the social pathology associated
with individualism is formidable, it does not affect
most individuals in a society. Pathology by definition
is found among a small minority in any society. Thus,
the majority can enjoy the benefits of affluence without
the negative consequences of individualism.
In short, an evaluation of the desirability of col-
lectivism or individualism depends on what criteria we
wish to maximize. If we wish to emphasize the
creativity that individualism allows, which often re-
sults in more affluence, the freedom and self-actuali-
zation of individuals, democratic processes, and the
independence of individuals from the social pressures
of groups, we may wish to see globalization leading to
more individualism. But if we wish to emphasize the
values of the ingroup, we may resist the weakening of
collectivism associated with affluence. These values
include religious beliefs, the social support that one
can get from the ingroup in moments of crisis, and the
security, both material and emotional, that the in-
group can provide.
2232
In addition to the above considerations, there are
issues of individual differences. For those who are
intelligent, educated, easily changed, adaptable, an
individualistic society can offer a great deal. Creativity
requires freedom to pursue different courses of action,
and in a society where one is supposed to consult
others, and act according to well-established customs,
creativity is not likely to flourish. On the other hand,
for those who value especially family life, harmony,
security, and a life of little stress, a collectivist society
may be optimal.
See also: Action, Collective; Collective Behavior,
Sociology of; Collective Memory, Psychology of;
Individualism versus Collectivism: Philosophical
Aspects
Bibliography
Diener E, Diener M, Diener C 1995 Factors predicting the
subjective well-being of nations. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology 69: 851–64
Hofstede G 1980 Culture’s Consequences. Sage, Beverly Hills,
CA
Kagitcibasi C 1997 Individualism and collectivism. In: Berry
J W, Segall M H, Kagitcibasi C (eds.) Handbook of Cross-
cultural Psychology, 2nd edn. Allyn & Bacon, Boston, pp.
1–50
Markus H, Kitayama S 1991 Culture and self: implications for
cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Re
iew 98:
224–53
Naroll R 1983 The Moral Order. Sage, Beverly Hills, CA
Triandis H C 1995 Indi
idualism and Collecti
ism. Westview
Press, Boulder, CO
Triandis H C in press Individualism and collectivism. In:
Matsumoto D (ed.) Handbook of Cultural Psychology. Oxford
University Press, New York
H. C. Triandis
Colonialism, Anthropology of
The story of the relationship between colonialism and
anthropology (or more specifically, of the anthro-
pology of colonialism) is not the story of a neatly
unfolding self-consciousness. It is, rather, the story of
successive contexts of questions that have shaped the
intellectual space in which the problem of colonialism
for anthropology has been formulated and engaged.
Anthropological self-consciousness of colonialism,
that is, of colonialism as a distincti
e problem for an-
thropological knowledge and anthropological practice,
begins roughly in the 1970s. In the early years of that
decade two edited volumes appeared dealing with
anthropology’s relation to the social and political
world of which it was a part. One came out of the
tradition of US cultural anthropology, Rein
enting

Anthropology edited by Hymes (1972); and the other
out of the tradition of British social anthropology,
Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter edited by
Asad (1973). Both collections perceived the discipline
to be in serious crisis; and both were radical in the
sense that they were explicitly concerned to subject
that crisis to a fundamental self-scrutiny.
Hymes’s volume urged that the social and political
conditions in which anthropology had emerged as a
professional academic discipline in the US at the turn
of the twentieth century had, by the late 1960s,
significantly altered. First, there was the overwhelming
fact that with political decolonization there was a
fundamental change in the conditions in which field-
work could be conceived and undertaken. At the same
time, the relation between the US government and the
Third World (as the colonized or recently decolonized
part of humanity came to be called from the 1950s)
had given rise to troubling moral-political questions
about the state of the anthropological enterprise. In
particular, US involvement in attempted counter-
insurgency in Latin America, and the role of anthro-
pologists as cultural experts in the war in Indochina,
served to pose the question of the relationship between
‘objectivity’ of ethnographic data and political interest
in a very acute way (see Stocking 1991). What place
would anthropology have in raising fundamental
questions about injustice and inequality in the world it
inhabited, and what was its role in trying to transform
that world? Was anthropology to be employed as an
instrument of Western domination or as a means of
liberation? Moreover, the publication of Malinowski’s
field diaries in 1967 and the revelation of his barely
veiled racism further focussed attention on the ethics
of the relation between ethnographer and informant.
In this context, the challenge Rein
enting Anthro-
pology sought to pose was whether the discipline
would be able to transform—to rein
ent—itself in a
way that reflected the demands for political account-
ability, ethical concern, and critical social commitment
on the part of anthropologists. Two strains in US
anthropology inspired the volume’s contributions:
one—reflected especially in the articles by Hymes and
Stanley Diamond—was the radical Boasian tradition
in the work of people like Edward Sapir, Ruth
Benedict, and Paul Radin, who thought of anthro-
pology as a reflexive critique of civilization. The other
strain—reflected in Eric Wolf’s contribution—was a
post World War II Marxism (much influenced
by the cultural-evolutionary materialism of Julian
Steward) which was concerned to highlight the
plight of peasant societies caught in the juggernaut of
capitalist imperialism.
The intellectual tradition of British social anthro-
pology has of course a very different historical context
than US cultural anthropology, one far more in-
timately interconnected with the subordination, man-
agement and rule of colonial subjects. Not surpris-
ingly, then, the concerns of Asad’s Anthropology and
Colonialism, Anthropology of
the Colonial Encounter were somewhat differently
inflected than those of Hymes’s volume. To be sure,
they shared a concern that since World War II
fundamental changes had occurred in the world
inhabited by social anthropology. The emergence of
new nations, especially in Africa where much British
social anthropological fieldwork was carried out—
Sudan (1956), Ghana (1957), Nigeria (1960)—made
it increasingly difficult to avoid the pertinence of
a more historical approach that brought the larger
political and economic system of colonialism into
view. And in consequence it was increasingly difficult
not to be critical (as indeed Edmund Leach was in
a limited way) of the ahistorical functionalism and
empiricism that characterized British anthropological
theorizing.
In the middle 1960s, New Left critics had in fact
launched an attack on British social anthropology.
And part of the project of Asad’s volume was to
respond to these and other radical claims, not simply
to affirm or deny them, but to more adequately specify
and formulate them. There was a sense that perhaps,
while undeniable, the relation between colonialism
and social anthropology was more complicated than
was allowed by the polemical tone of accusation and
disavowal. In her contribution, for example, Wendy
James argued that the very existence of social anthro-
pology in the colonial period constituted a source of
potential radical criticism of the colonial order, and
she sought to provide a more nuanced account of
Malinowski’s own active social reformism during the
interwar years. Stephan Feuchtwang, in his contri-
bution, discussed the relation between the social and
institutional conditions of British anthropology and
the knowledges it produced. In an allied way, Asad
examined ‘objectifications’ of colonial power pro-
duced in two authoritative domains of systematic
knowledge—the functionalist anthropology of Africa
and Islamic orientalism. Asad was concerned to
understand the connections between these different
images of rule (one largely of ‘consent,’ the other
largely of ‘repression’), their ideological roots, and
conceptual consequences.
In subsequent decades, the anthropological pre-
occupation with colonialism has tended to be largely
(if not solely) a phenomenon of the US academy. At
any rate, in the 1980s there was a gradual shift away
from the concern with the role of the discipline in the
colonial\imperial enterprise and the politics of its
practitioners, toward a concern with colonial forms of
knowledge about non-European worlds. The register
in which the problem of colonialism for anthropology
was conceived was now less a political than an
epistemological one. Or rather, linking power and
knowledge, colonialism was now conceived as a
problem of (in the language of the day) the politics of
representation. This shift has many interconnected
sources. I shall only be able to touch on a few of the
more salient ones.
2233
Colonialism, Anthropology of
At one level, of course, the shift is connected to the
decline of anti-imperialism and anticolonialism as
going politico-ideological concerns. On the one hand,
beginning with the end of the Vietnam War and
accelerating through the years of Ronald Reagan’s US
Presidency there is a marked decline in the First World
intelligentsia’s interest in revolutionary change in the
Third World. On the other hand, in the Third World
itself there is a decline (indeed a rapid unraveling) of
the experiments with radical social transformation in
many of the independent countries of South Asia,
Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. At another
level this shift was connected to a number of in-
tellectual transformations in the understanding and
practice of the human sciences. Very broadly speaking,
these may be characterized in terms of a general drift
away from the determinism (Leslie White, Julian
Steward) and functionalism (Radcliffe-Brown) of post-
war anthropology and toward a social\cultural con-
structionism. Principal among these transformations
was the so-called ‘turn to meaning’ in social and
cultural analysis. In many ways, of course, the work of
Geertz (1973) embodied—indeed, helped to con-
stitute—this constructionist moment. In his work,
culture came to be understood as a web of semiotic
processes or relations, and cultural analysis as a
practice less of uncovering determinate causes, or of
explaining functions, as of deciphering meanings. Two
features of this anthropology are of special importance
here: one is that its criticism of objectivism brought
about a renewed sensitivity to ‘the native’s point of
view’ and ‘local knowledges’; and the other is that the
critique of positivist social science led to a greater
openness to interdisciplinarity, to literature and his-
tory in particular (Geertz’s famous ‘blurring of
genres’).
This work, in turn, set the stage for the emergence in
the 1980s of an interest in the textuality of eth-
nographic description and analysis, in the senses in
which these are artifacts of language—hence, in their
way, literary—and therefore open to an investigation
of their rhetorical and poetic structures (Clifford and
Marcus 1986). How is ethnographic authority con-
structed? What are the linguistic devices that enable
anthropological representations to produce their dis-
tinctive ‘realistic’ effects? Some of this work sought
explicitly to reconceive the task of a critical anthro-
pology (Marcus and Fischer 1986).
This preoccupation with modes of representation in
social and cultural analysis was, in part at least, the
context for the rise of what would come to be called
colonial studies. An interdisciplinary field (drawing
largely on literary critics, anthropologists, and hist-
orians), colonial studies would help to institutionalize
the renewed scholarly focus on colonialism. The
central inspiring text here was Said’s Orientalism
(1978). Borrowing in some measure from the middle
work of Foucault (1979), this book thematized the idea
of colonialism as a discursi
e formation. Said set out to
2234
demonstrate the ways in which, in the (especially
French and British) colonial discourse of orientalism,
the Orient was invented. The Orient, therefore, was
less a geo-political location than a figure in the
cultural-political imagination of the West. Orientalism
opened up a rich vein of research and a critical demand
to interrogate the West’s authoritative discourses on
the non-West—anthropology chief among them—and
to unmask the ways in which they produced and
reproduced their hegemonic knowledges. Interestingly
Said himself (1988) would later express doubts about
the value and future of a discipline so deeply implicated
in the making of such hegemonic knowledge.
One anthropological work that drew together some
of these themes—though in a way less pessimistic
about the possibility of a revised anthropological
enterprise—was Fabian’s Time and the Other (1983).
The subtitle of the work was significant: How Anthro-
pology Makes its Object. It focussed attention pre-
cisely on the ‘constructedness’ of anthropological
discourse, specifically on the uses of Time in anthro-
pology’s constitution of its object (the savage, the
primitive, the native, the Other). Fabian sought to
show how the existential copresence of the Other in the
dialogical interaction of ethnographic fieldwork gets
transformed into a temporal distancing—what he
called a denial of coevalness or cotemporality—in the
theoretical construction of authoritative anthropo-
logical knowledge. This ‘conjuring trick’ served per-
petually to consign the native to a temporal zone
outside of the Time of anthropology, which is to say
the privileged Time of the West. It is easy to see that
the lessons of Fabian’s book are wider than the issue
of temporality alone. What it demonstrated was that
unless anthropology subjects its own discourse to
critical scrutiny, unless it pays attention to the con-
ceptual assumptions that go into the making of its
objects, it is liable to reproduce colonial knowledge.
Other work would later seek to extend and develop
this inquiry into the formation of anthropological
objects (see Scott 1994).
Another set of anthropological concerns with
colonialism in the 1980s was more closely connected to
the antinomies of Marxism. The defeat of the com-
munist project in Western Europe after 1920 had given
rise to a strain of Marxism (soon to be called Western
Marxism) focussed on what had hitherto been dis-
missed as superstructural issues. Marginalized until
the rise of the New Left in the 1960s, this strain became
more prominent in the 1970s, especially in the North
Atlantic academy. Antonio Gramsci’s theorization of
hegemony, Louis Althusser’s reconceptualization of
ideology as representation, and Raymond Williams’s
displacement of the base\superstructure model for the
analysis of literature (and cultural production more
generally) offered less reductionistic critical languages
in which to situate social and cultural life in relation to
capitalism. An interest in rethinking the problem of
the articulation of modes of production, and of

precapitalist (and precolonial) formations was one
direction of Marxist work that had actually begun
earlier. But in another direction, folded into the
anthropological concern with local knowledges and
finite histories, this cultural Marxism offered the
prospect of an antiuniversalistic account of hitherto
invisible idioms of resistance to dominant power
(including, of course, globalizing capital), and of
hitherto unacknowledged forms of (often informal)
agency in the quotidian making of histories. In their
very titles, James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak (1985),
and Jean Comaroff’s Body of Power, Spirit of Resist-
ance (1985), offer exemplification of this interest in the
anthropology of anticolonial resistance.
Throughout the 1980s history was becoming a site
of profound scholarly preoccupation. Indeed within
the discipline of history itself there was already a
growing interest in the intersection of modes of
cultural and historical representation. Work in fem-
inist history, in particular, helped to reformulate
relations between power, difference, and represen-
tation. But perhaps the most significant contribution
to the argument for more than a nodding relationship
between anthropology and history—and this too on
the terrain of colonialism—has been the pioneering
work of Cohn (1987). Cohn’s essays were only brought
together in 1987, under the title, An Anthropologist
among the Historians and Other Essays, but from the
early 1960s he had been urging the theorization of
the intersection of history and anthropology. In a
number of wide-ranging essays on British India—from
concerns with the formation of historical, legal, and
statistical modes of colonial knowledge, to an interest
in ritualized representations of political authority—
Cohn demonstrated that historical analysis of colonial
rule was indispensable for anthropological under-
standing. This work inspired a number of innovative
studies in the historical anthropology of colonial India
(among them Dirks 1987). Significantly too, India was
the conceptual and intellectual-political site of another
important contribution to the debate about history for
an anthropology of colonialism—the Subaltern
Studies Collective’s re-interrogation of liberal and
nationalist accounts of colonial rule in India and the
anti-colonial struggle against it (Guha 1984). Trans-
disciplinary in perspective, the work of the Collective
resonated with the anthropological discontent with
universalism and Eurocentrism and its interest in the
agency of non-dominant idioms, knowledges, and
practices.
In the 1990s one can discern another shift in the
questions driving the anthropology of colonialism.
These new questions turn less on the textuality of
colonial representation or the agency of resistance
than on the problematization of the relationship
between colonialism and modernity, and the impli-
cations of this relationship for understanding the
postcolonial present (Asad 1991, 1992, Scott 1997).
The profoundly epochal sense attending the fin de
Colonialism, Anthropology of
siecle, the sense of a crisis of modernity (and for some,
an emerging postmodernity), has made for a growing
preoccupation with a re-examination of the formation
of the modern world and its moral, epistemic and
political modes of legitimization. Much of this re-
historicizing work has sought to criticize the pro-
gressivist story of modernization.
There are several dimensions to this anthropological
preoccupation with colonialism and modernity. One
of the earliest has been the concern with the problem
of nation and nationalism. There had of course been
an older multidisciplinary interest in nations and
nationalisms, namely, the ‘new nations’ projects of the
early 1960s. These studies were primarily concerned
with inquiring into the modernizing and democratizing
challenges facing the newly independent nation-states.
However, two books more than any others reopened
and significantly reshaped the debate about the nation:
Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (1983), and Ander-
son’s Imagined Communities (1983). Each was focus-
sed differently, but they were both inspired by the
problem of the relation between nation\nationalism
and modernity. If the ‘new nations’ work tended
teleologically to take nationhood as a normal de-
velopmental threshold, what Gellner and Anderson
foregrounded was the idea that nations were not
natural entities nor nationalisms primordial senti-
ments or ideologies. Both, they argued, were pro-
foundly historical, and that historical character,
moreover, owed most to the making of the modern
world.
Gellner and Anderson would both be criticized for
their emphasis on the modernity of nations and
nationalisms, but it was precisely this connection that
those interested in colonialism were concerned to
explore. Anticolonial nationalisms and the making of
postcolonial sovereignties clearly had a very com-
plex—and as yet, perhaps, unresolved—relation to the
modernizing project of late colonialism. In this regard
the decisive work was Chatterjee’s seminal book,
Nationalism and the Colonial World, originally pub-
lished in 1986 but becoming influential in debates from
the early 1990s. A noticeable feature of this work was
its interdisciplinarity, and especially the place of
anthropology (as the authoritative discourse on
Europe’s Others) within it. While indebted to Said’s
Orientalism for its opening deconstructive move,
Chatterjee undertook a sustained examination of
anthropological assumptions (e.g., about rationality)
undergirding the distinction between Western and
non-Western nationalisms.
Connected to this focus on rethinking the relations
between modernity and nation, has been the renewed
attention given to the problem of modern colonial
power generally, and the colonial state in particular.
Especially important here has been the later work of
Foucault on governmentality (1991) that raised the
question of the place of the state in a larger and much
transformed understanding of power. Questioning a
2235
Colonialism, Anthropology of
deeply influential tradition of social and political
analysis owing much to both Marx and Weber,
Foucault’s concept of governmentality sought to think
(conceptually) about a field of power in which the state
was not the central analytical domain; and (histori-
cally) about a concrete moment in European history
when political power becomes more dispersed, less
dependent upon the institutions of coercion. This
concept opened up the possibility of reconceiving the
questions through which the problem of colonial
power was formulated. Where modernization nar-
ratives (liberal or Marxist) had plotted a story of the
progressive rationalization of the state (the more or
less of power; the counter-positioning of power and
freedom), what now emerged was the possibility of a
story of colonial power told in terms of the political
rationalities by which it was organized. The point here
was to urge an historicization in which the emergence
of a colonial rationality of government (i.e., a form of
colonial power directed at transforming conditions so
as to produce effects on colonial conduct) could come
more sharply into view. And the significance of this
is that this rationality is central to the making of our
postcolonial worlds (see Scott 1999).
There have been critics, of course, who are skeptical
about this thematization of governmentality in the
anthropology of colonialism. The more sympathetic
of them argue that neither the old master-narrative of
progress and modernization nor the new Foucauldian
revisionism are adequate because neither appreciates
the inherent doubleness of colonial rule. The essential
paradox of the colonial state, it is argued, is that it was
always caught between two principal imperatives—
ruling subjects and making citizens—and, therefore,
always moved simultaneously in two directions: co-
ercion and civilization. The crucial hinge on which this
doubleness hung was the colonial language of law and
legality (Comaroff 1998). In a related direction some
critics have been concerned that the whole relation
between metropole and colony has been ill-conceived
(Cooper and Stoler 1997). The worry here is the
assumption among many students of empire of a
Manichaeism that sees the problem of colonialism as a
binary—colonizer\colonized—one. These critics ar-
gue that, to the contrary, the conception of an
encounter between an empty colony simply remade by
Europe and a Europe that remains ever unmarked by
its empire is untenable. They urge a view that places
metropole and colony in a single (if internally dif-
ferentiated) analytical field, and focuses precisely on
the multiple tensions—inclusions\exclusions, hier-
archies, reversals, etc.—through which Europe and
its empire were (unevenly and asymmetrically) co-
constructed.
Since its emergence as a distinctive theme in anthro-
pology in the 1970s, the problematization of colon-
ialism has been thought of as part of an orientation
towards the present at least as much as, if not more
than, the past. In this sense there has always been
2236
about it an animating ethos of criticism—whether
criticism of our worlds or criticism of our disciplines.
The anthropological problem about the colonial past,
in other words, has been connected to raising critical
questions about the postcolonial present: it is part of
the making of a distinctively postcolonial anthro-
pology. However this connection and its implications
have been more often assumed than systematically
thought out. Consequently, anthropology has been
less concerned than it might, not merely about the
ways in which understandings of the colonial past are
conditioned by contemporary ‘scenes of inquiry,’ but
more importantly about the ways in which a self-
consciousness about alterations in the latter ought
strategically to alter the kinds of questions we pursue
about the nature of the former. The point, then, is that
for anthropological criticism to have purchase on the
present it is not enough to insist that the purview of
colonial studies be enlarged (to encompass Europe, for
instance, or gender, or the state), it is necessary to
specify the domain of contemporary questions that are
being addressed in so doing. This is the only way to
gauge the extent to which our critical exercises are
meeting a contemporary demand as opposed to simply
expanding an already established cognitive field.
This is the challenge. It is an important challenge
because the crisis upon which the formerly colonized
world entered in the 1980s and 1990s (unlike those of
the 1960s and 1970s) is a crisis not merely of policy
orientations or development options or even ideo-
logical alternatives. It is a crisis of the legitimacy of
the modern\modernizing assumptions that have
undergirded the very making of these colonial and
postcolonial societies and polities (assumptions, for
example, about the relation between culture and
politics; between nation and sovereignty; between
individual rights and historical traditions, and so on).
Our conjuncture, in short, is shifting. And therefore, if
it is to more adequately theorize the relation between
the problem–space in which it produces knowledge
and the questions through which it does so, the
anthropology of colonialism has to attend more
systematically to the changing contours and character
of this postcolonial present and its crisis.
See also: Colonialism: Political Aspects; Colonization
and Colonialism, History of; Racism, History of
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Colonialism: Political Aspects
Colonialism in the English language originally indi-
cated a practice or idiom associated with British
colonies (e.g., the phrase ‘the place was going ahead’
was described in 1887 as a ‘colonialism’) and was only
recently applied to the relationships between metro-
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
Colonialism: Political Aspects
politan states and their colonial possessions. Its
modern usage dates from the 1950s, although the
relationships it embraces have a very long history
indeed.
The word is derived from the Latin
: colonia, which
was a synonym for the Greek αποικι!α, meaning a
settlement of people from home, and it should,
therefore, properly apply to the process of establishing
and governing such settlements. It is now closely
linked, and often interchangeable, with imperialism
(e.g., see Imperialism: Political Aspects), but it is a
particular form of the latter. The ideas that the term
embraces have shifted in line with the shift in the idea
of a colony.
1. The Classic Colony
The classical Greek colony was a new community,
originating from an existing πο! λιc: , and, apart from the
Corinthian colonies, was independent, although tied
to the mother country by sentimental and religious
affinities. The high era of Greek colonization lasted
from the middle of the eighth century BC until the early
sixth century BC, by when Greeks had ‘colonized’
much of southern Italy, Sicily, and the Black Sea
littoral. The motives were a mixture of land shortage
and traded expansion (Boardman 1980).
Roman colonies generally had greater strategic
purposes. They were settlements of Roman citizens,
normally veterans, who garrisoned a new town in a
hostile country and thus extended Rome’s imperium or
rule. Similar expansionist activities occurred in many
other parts of the world, as with the Mogul and
Ottoman Empires or the Vijayanagara Empire in
southern India.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century, European
powers extended their physical occupation of land to
settle in the Americas, later in Australasia and parts of
Africa. Colonialism involved settlement in areas non-
contiguous to the motherland and should be carefully
distinguished from conquest per se which involves
physical incorporation into the parent state. Settlers
left their homes for many reasons. Some fled religious
and other forms of persecution; some were risk-takers,
seeking opportunities to better themselves; some were
sent abroad by families to resolve domestic difficulties
or by the state to penal colonies.
Governing such distant possessions has always been
problematic. Initially, the local, or native, populations
were subdued forcibly or persuaded to sign agree-
ments, and administrative authority passed to the new
immigrants and their successors. Financial and mili-
tary strength ensured metropolitan dominance at first.
Over time, as the colonies grew in population and
economic strength, their immigrant inhabitants sought
a much greater degree of self-governance. Initially, the
European powers opposed such aspirations and anti-
colonial wars took place that ultimately wrested much
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