Beginning postcolonialism: Second edition

Beginning postcolonialism

Beginnings

Series editors: Peter Barry and Helen Carr

‘Beginnings’ is a series of books designed to give practical help to students beginning to tackle recent developments in English, Literary Studies and Cultural Studies. The books in the series

• demonstrate and encourage a questioning engagement with the new;

• give essential information about the context and history of each topic covered;

• show how to develop a practice which is up-to-date and informed by theory.

Each book focuses uncompromisingly upon the needs of its readers, who have the right to expect lucidity and clarity to be the distinctive feature of a book which includes the word ‘beginning’ in its title.

Each aims to lay a firm foundation of well understood initial principles as a basis for further study and is committed to explaining new aspects of the discipline without over-simplification, but in a manner appropriate to the needs of beginners.

Each book, finally, aims to be both an introduction and a contribution to the topic area it discusses.

Also in the series

Beginning theory (2nd edition)

Peter Barry

Beginning film studies

Andrew Dix

Beginning realism

Steven Earnshaw

Beginning ethnic American literatures

Helena Grice, Candida Hepworth,

Maria Lauret and Martin Padget

Beginning Shakespeare

Lisa Hopkins

Beginning postmodernism

Tim Woods

Beginning postcolonialism

Second edition

John McLeod

Copyright © John McLeod 2000, 2010

The right of John McLeod to be identified as the author of this work has been

asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First edition published 2000 by Manchester University Press

This edition published 2010 by Manchester University Press

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This edition first published 2010

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by Action Publishing Technology Ltd, Gloucester

Printed in Great Britain

by Bell & Bain Ltd, Glasgow

For my parents,

Veronica and James McLeod

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface to the second edition

Introduction

Beginning

Postcolonialism?

A note on terminology: or, on not using the hyphen

1 From ‘Commonwealth’ to ‘postcolonial’

Introduction

Colonialism and decolonisation

The emergence of ‘Commonwealth literature’

Theories of colonial discourses: Frantz Fanon and Edward Said

The turn to ‘theory’ in the 1980s

The Empire ‘writes back’

Into the twenty-first century

‘Postcolonialism’: definitions and dangers

Selected reading

2 Reading colonial discourses

Ideology, interpellation, discourse

Reading Orientalism

The shape of Orientalism

1. Orientalism constructs binary oppositions

2. Orientalism is a Western fantasy

3. Orientalism is institutional

4. Orientalism is literary and creative

5. Orientalism is legitimating and self-perpetuating

6. There is a distinction between ‘latent’ and ‘manifest’ Orientalism

Stereotypes of the Orient and Orientals

1. The Orient is timeless

2. The Orient is strange

3. Orientalism makes assumptions about people

4. Orientalism makes assumptions about gender

5. The Orient is feminine

6. The Oriental is degenerate

Criticisms of Orientalism

1. Orientalism is ahistorical

2. Said ignores resistance by the colonised

3. Said ignores resistance within the West

4. Said neglects the significance of gender

‘Ambivalence’ and ‘mimicry’ in colonial discourses

Stop and think

Colonial discourses and Rudyard Kipling: reading ‘The Overland Mail’

Selected reading

3 Nationalist representations

Introduction

Imagining the nation: forging tradition and history

Stop and think

Language, space, time

National liberation vs. imperialist domination

Negritude

Stop and think

Frantz Fanon, national culture and national consciousness

Nationalist discourses, national culture

Constructing national consciousness: Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat

Selected reading

4 The nation in question

The disenchantment with nationalism

Nationalism: a derivative discourse?

Stop and think

Nationalism, representation and the elite

Nationalism, ‘race’ and ethnicity

Stop and think

Nationalism, gender and sexuality

The nation and its margins

Stop and think

English in the colonies: a national language?

English in the settler nations

‘Third World’ Englishes: elite discourses or nation language?

Stop and think

The nation in question: Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah

Stop and think

Selected reading

5 Re-reading and re-writing English literature

Interrogating the text

Colonialism and the teaching of English literature

Colonial contexts

Stop and think

Reading literature ‘contrapuntally’

Stop and think

Re-reading Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

Stop and think

Jane Eyre: a postcolonial text?

Stop and think

Postcolonial re-writings: Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

‘Re-writing’: possibilities and problems

Stop and think

Selected reading

6 Postcolonialism and feminism

Some definitions

The ‘double colonisation’ of women

Stop and think

Postcolonial critiques of ‘First World’ feminism

Feminism and ‘race’

Learning the limits of ‘First World’ feminism

‘Third World’ women

Stop and think

Can the subaltern speak?

‘Going a piece of the way’: creative dialogues in postcolonial feminism

Representing women in Sally Morgan’s My Place

Selected reading

7 Diaspora identities

Migration, colonialism and decolonisation

What is a ‘diaspora’?

‘Of, and not of, this place’: home and displacement

Living ‘in-between’: from roots to routes

Hybrid identities at the ‘in-between’

Stop and think

New ethnicities

Stop and think

Cultural diversity, cultural difference and the ‘Black Atlantic’

Moving pictures: Beryl Gilroy’s Boy-Sandwich

Selected reading

8 The limits of postcolonialism?

The habit of self-critique

Postcolonial times? The limits of temporality

New maps (f)or old? The limits of geography

The problem of ‘Western’ theory

The new ‘ghetto’ of postcolonialism

Postcolonialism, or the logic of capitalist modernity?

Postcolonialism or tricontinentalism? The limits of materialist critique

Globalisation and ‘postcoloniality’: the new imperium?

Where do we go from here?

Appendix: ‘The Overland Mail (foot-service to the hills)’ (Rudyard Kipling)

Further reading

Index

Acknowledgements

Since the first edition of Beginning Postcolonialism appeared in 2000 I have been fortunate to meet many students and scholars who have kindly offered me their views on its strengths and weaknesses. I have endeavoured to use their advice in preparing this second edition, and I am very grateful to them for their generosity and candour. My own thinking as regards postcolonialism remains indebted to the friendship and conviviality of many postcolonial scholars and writers whom I’d like to thank for sharing with me their expertise and wisdom: Elleke Boehmer, Sarah Brouillette, Maurizio Calbi, Isabel Carrera Suárez, Claire Chambers, Shirley Chew, Laura Chrisman, Stef Craps, Sandra Courtman, Pilar Cuder, Nic Dunlop, Sam Durrant, Bernardine Evaristo, Luz Mar González Arias, David Farrier, Francesca Giommi, Dave Gunning, Caroline Herbert, Graham Huggan, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Tsunehiko Kato, Michelle Keown, Joel Kourtti, Bénédicte Ledent, Gail Low, Belén Martín-Lucas, Judith Misrahi-Barak, Anshuman Mondal, Bart Moore-Gilbert, Peter Morey, Stephen Morton, David Murphy, Stuart Murray, Susheila Nasta, Brendon Nicholls, Jopi Nyman, Melanie Otto, Caryl Phillips, Sandra Ponzanesi, James Procter, Ato Quayson, Alan Rice, David Richards, Gemma Robinson, Mark Shackleton, Neelam Srivastava, Mark Stein, John Thieme, Sara Upstone, Rashmi Varma, Abigail Ward, Andrew Warnes, Janet Wilson and Bruce Woodcock. A special thank you is due to Peter Barry for involving me in the Beginnings series, and also to Manchester University Press’s Matthew Frost for entrusting me with the responsibility of writing this book and for his unique support over many years (especially on Friday 25 August, 2000, Helsinki, Finland).

Friends, colleagues and my family have endured my life-long passion for postcolonialism with patience and good cheer. Thanks in particular to Richard Brown, Lucy Evans, Alberto Fernández Carbajal, Tracy Hargreaves, Rick Jones, Katy Mullin, Alex Nield, Francis O’Gorman, Matthew Pateman, Martin Rushworth, Alistair Stead, Mark Taylor-Batty, Ceri Thomas and Agnes Woolley. I am especially grateful to Colin and Margaret Adams for their enthusiasm, encouragement, and the gift of Burnham Market, while the aptly named Joys are a constant source of support: Linda, Brian, Caitlin, Lydia and Madeleine. My parents, Veronica and James McLeod, remain the people whom I admire the most. This book is for them, with love.

Finally, I must thank Julie Adams for playing a major role in the preparation of this second edition.

John McLeod

University of Leeds

Preface to the second edition

It is a rare privilege to publish any book, but especially one which is intended to welcome new readers to a field of study that has fascinated and inspired me over many years. It is rarer still to be given the opportunity to revise a book for a second edition, and I have both enjoyed and been daunted by the exciting challenge of revisiting and refreshing Beginning Postcolonialism. In the ten years that have passed since I finished the first edition, postcolonialism has cemented its place within a wide range of academic disciplines, while the creative endeavours of postcolonial writers, artists and thinkers have become increasingly familiar beyond a strictly academic context and today sit firmly in the vanguard of contemporary literature, music, film and many other spheres besides. But this has not necessarily meant an increase in the acceptance, or the understanding, of postcolonial cultures and their critique, and there remains more than a degree of resistance to the insights and vocabularies of the postcolonial. When a critic as astute as Bruce King writes that ‘postcolonialism became fashionable in the academy as part of the culture wars that followed the battle over Vietnam’ and has subsequently ‘lost touch with the basis of the great migration of the world’s people’ (The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 13, 1948–2000: The Internationalization of English Literature, Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 5), one is made mindful perhaps of the continued need for books which open up postcolonialism for newcomers responsibly, and with accuracy and patience. Beginning postcolonialism today is both easier and harder than it was a decade ago – easier because of its relative visibility and due to the greater number of useful books available which engage with it, but harder because of the misunderstandings and hostility regarding its significance which circulate and which are partly due to the ways in which postcolonialism continues to take issue with several central ideas beloved of certain critics.

In preparing this second edition I have tried to give a sense of the continuing debates about postcolonialism while seeking to anchor some of its key themes and vocabularies securely for its readers. But I have also tried not to change too much, partly because most readers of the first edition I have met have tended to speak positively of the book’s organisation, content and approach, but also because the impact of much of the late-twentieth-century discussions of postcolonialism are no less important today and still require our cognisance as we make our beginnings in the field. That said, in each chapter I have incorporated new materials where appropriate, mostly in the spirit of updating, finessing and extending the ways in which key ideas might be articulated. I have also taken the chance to correct some errors of fact and spelling which appeared in the first edition (I don’t think I shall ever live down spelling Tasmania with a ‘z’), and I have also attempted to engage with some central postcolonial ideas with greater sharpness, fluency and accuracy – I was never very happy with the account of the ideas of mimicry and ambivalence in colonial discourses that I gave the first time around, and also I wanted to capture better Fanon’s sense of national culture and national consciousness this time around. These and certain other passages in the book have, I hope, been tightened up, to the benefit of the book as a whole. Readers familiar with the first edition of Beginning Postcolonialism will notice in particular a new subsection in Chapter 1 called ‘Into the twenty-first century’, while Chapter 8 – which was previously titled ‘Postcolonialism and the Critics’ – has been substantially rewritten as ‘The Limits of Postcolonialism?’ in order to give an expanded sense of some of the key critiques of the field as well as engage with emergent matters that have appeared on the horizon, such as the issue of globalisation and the advocacy of ‘tricontinentalism’.

It was never my intention to aim for coverage in the first edition of Beginning Postcolonialism; rather, my strategy was to ground selected key themes and ideas for new readers very much in the spirit of opening doorways into a wider and more complex field. I always wanted this book to be a first port of call for those dealing with postcolonialism rather than be thought of as the last word or as a potted account of the field in its neat totality. I’ve stuck to my guns in this second edition and continued to prioritise certain issues and texts, rather than (to speak proverbially for a moment) trying to touch every pebble on the beach. No single book can encompass everything, especially not in a field of such range and in a book of this nature. But I hope that in opening this rewritten and refreshed second edition of Beginning Postcolonialism, you have in your hands a more useful and productive text than before, one that will help shape your initial studies and encourage your enthusiasm for all things postcolonial.

Introduction

Beginning

Any new beginning poses several important questions. Exactly what am I beginning, and what am I about to encounter? How shall I best proceed? Where might be the most appropriate position to start from? What do I need to know first? Beginnings are exciting things, inviting us to explore that which we may not have previously visited; but they also expose us to the unfamiliarity and inevitable disorientation of doing something new.

Beginning Postcolonialism is my attempt to help you make your own beginnings in one of the most exciting and challenging fields of study that has established itself in recent years. It takes as its primary focus the various reading practices which distinguish and characterise much of the field – practices which for the purpose of this book attend chiefly to literary texts, but which can be applied beyond a strictly literary context to other cultural phenomena. In the following chapters this book will introduce you to the various ways we can approach, perhaps for the first time, the creative endeavours of those who either come from, or have an ancestral purchase upon, countries with a history of colonialism. In addition, we will reconsider our approaches to older, more familiar or canonical works that seem to have little to do with the fortunes of Empire. By the end of this book you will have encountered many new concepts which will help you build and develop your readings of the range of texts which preoccupy postcolonialism. Along the way, you will be continually invited to think critically about the key concepts in the field, and measure your own satisfaction with the different strands of thought which inhabit and shape postcolonial studies. If Beginning Postcolonialism is designed to help you explore postcolonial ways of reading and thinking, it is also intended to encourage you from the beginning to think for yourself about many of the key issues pursued in the field.

That said, we should also be clear about what this book is not. It will not be attempting to offer a full history of the various literatures often considered as postcolonial. There already exists some excellent work which narrates the emergence and fortunes of postcolonial literatures throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. Neither should we presume that the texts we consider in this book are typical of, or adequately represent, the wide-ranging field of postcolonial cultural production. The choice of texts in the chapters that follow is informed on the whole by my experience of teaching many of them to undergraduate students, and they inevitably reflect some of my own areas of interest. They have served well in seminars to stimulate successfully a discussion of the reading practices, issues and concepts with which this book is concerned. But they are not the only texts we might choose, and we should not treat them as paradigmatic of postcolonialism.

I hope that this book will assist in kindling your excitement and enthusiasm for the texts and the approaches we cover, and will stabilise to an extent some of the disorientation that is inevitable with any new departure. Yet, disorientation is also very much a productive and valuable sensation, and it is fair to say that many of the reading and writing practices often considered postcolonial achieve much of their effectiveness in derailing accustomed trains of thought. For many of us, perhaps, postcolonialism challenges us to think again and question some of the assumptions that underpin both what we read and how we read. So it is important, throughout this book, that some of this valuable disorientation will be maintained.

Postcolonialism?

It is fair to say that beginning postcolonialism is an especially challenging procedure because it is particularly difficult to answer those questions with which we started. Such is the variety of practices often called postcolonial that it is not very easy to find an appropriate point of departure. For example, the literatures of nations such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Kenya, India, Sri Lanka, Jamaica and Ireland have been declared postcolonial at one time or another. Are they all postcolonial in the same way? What is the best way to begin reading them? Could such a ‘best way’ ever exist, one that is appropriate to all these literatures (and should we be looking for it)? In addition, readings of postcolonial texts sometimes are resourced by concepts discovered across a range of intellectual disciplines and practices, such as anthropology, philosophy, feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, politics, poststructuralism, modern languages and linguistics. Such variety creates both discord and conflict within the field, to the extent that there seems no single critical procedure that we might identify as definitively postcolonial.

Due to the variety and wide range of our field, it is worth considering if we can ever really talk of a ‘postcolonialism’, with all the coherency that this term implies. Rather than using an umbrella term that lets in so much, might it be better for us to begin by questioning postcolonialism as a meaningful concept – maybe even dispense with it altogether – and seek better ways to account for its prevailing, manifold subject matter and myriad critical approaches?

These have long been persisting questions for postcolonial thinkers, many of whom have struggled with the legitimacy of the term since it first emerged, and we shall be returning to such questions throughout this book. But it is important that we do not become transfixed by them as we try to make our beginnings, to the extent that we cannot proceed at all. For better or for worse, the term ‘postcolonialism’ does have a history. It has entered common parlance and is frequently used by critics, scholars, teachers and writers. It is important that we grasp the variety of what the term signifies if we want to begin to use it self-consciously and productively. The range of issues covered by the term is indeed large, and sometimes contradictory, as too is the array of critical engagements performed in its name. By using the term ‘postcolonialism’ in this book when describing such various activities, I by no means want to suggest that diverse and culturally specific writings, as well as critical theories of postcolonialism, can be readily homogenised. There is no one singular postcolonialism. But one of the fundamental arguments of this book is that postcolonialism can be productively articulated in different ways as an enabling and critical concept, despite the difficulties we have to live with when we try to describe it. As we are about to see, ‘postcolonialism’ is not a word we can render precisely. But out of its very variety comes possibility, vitality, challenge. Postcolonialism, then, is a term we will use in this book to help us with our beginnings, a term we can begin with; but I hope that by the end of reading this book you will be using it with a healthy degree of self-consciousness and productive suspicion.

In order to bear witness to the enabling possibilities of postcolonialism, each chapter of this book concerns a specific issue – such as ‘colonial discourses’, ‘the nation in question’, ‘diaspora identities’. They are designed to introduce some major areas of enquiry within postcolonialism, as well as offer concrete examples of various kinds of relevant reading and writing practices. But it is also the intention that we read across the chapters too. Many of the issues which are raised in each chapter can be relevant in other related areas, and I will endeavour to signal some useful points of connection and contrast as we proceed. It is always vital that we take into account the cultural and historical specificity of writers and thinkers when we consider their work, and understand the dynamic relationship between a writer and the culture(s) about which he or she writes. But it is also true that similar issues can and do preoccupy readers, writers and critics in different positions and at different moments, and the skills we collect from each chapter will offer productive ways of approaching many texts and contexts, not just the small selection we encounter in this book.

In order to enable us to think critically about the ideas and concepts raised in Beginning Postcolonialism, and in keeping with the format of the Beginnings series as a whole, I have at times inserted small sections called ‘STOP and THINK’. In these sections we review the ideas which we have been exploring so far in the chapter and pose a series of questions about them. The responses to these questions will be, of course, your own. The ‘STOP and THINK’ sections are designed to assist you in making your particular judgements about the ideas raised within postcolonialism – and, ultimately, your overall sense of postcolonialism itself. In introducing several debates within the field throughout this book, my intention is to enable you to enter actively into these debates. I will not be providing definitive conclusions or answers to the questions we raise (although I cannot, and will not, pretend to remain neutral either). So, in order to help you begin your active participation in the field, the ‘STOP and THINK’ sections will identify focal points of debate for you to pursue critically; either with others with whom you may be studying postcolonialism, or in your own further reading. As regards this latter activity, each chapter concludes with a selected reading list which points you in the direction of some key and useful texts that concern that chapter’s issues, as well as other texts in which the particular ideas we have been exploring have received more prolonged, sophisticated attention.

A note on terminology: or, on not using the hyphen

In Chapter 1 we will describe the terms ‘colonialism’ and ‘postcolonialism’ in some detail. But before we begin, we need to make some decisions about the form of the words ‘postcolonial’ and ‘postcolonialism’. As we shall see, these terms have attracted much debate among scholars who often use them in contrary and confusing ways. Indeed, critics often cannot agree on how to spell postcolonialism: with the hyphen (as in ‘postcolonialism’) or without?

Let us be clear from the start: throughout Beginning postcolonialism we will not use the hyphen but spell the term as a single word: ‘postcolonialism’. There is a particular reason for this choice of spelling and it concerns the different meanings we might assign to ‘post-colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’. The hyphenated term ‘post-colonial’ seems better suited to denote a particular historical period or epoch, like those suggested by phrases such as ‘after colonialism’, ‘after independence’ or ‘after the end of Empire’. In its hyphenated form, ‘post-colonial’ functions rather like a noun: it names something which exists in the world. But for much of this book we will be thinking about postcolonialism not in terms of strict historical or empirical periodisation, but as referring to disparate forms of representations, reading practices, attitudes and values. These principally aesthetic phenomena can circulate across the historical border between colonial rule and national independence. To put this another way, we might say that postcolonialism does not refer to something which tangibly is, but rather it denotes something which one does: it can describe a way of thinking, a mode of perception, a line of enquiry, an aesthetic practice, a method of investigation. Therefore, ‘postcolonialism’ without the hyphen is best thought of as akin to an adjective, a word which describes the particular qualities of a thing or an action. Of course, it is not easy to keep apart these two realms, and in many ways the term ‘postcolonialism’ always exists somewhere in-between noun and adjective, between reality and its perception. So, in thinking about postcolonialism in this book primarily as signifying forms of representation, particular values, or modes of thought, we need to remember that the term is not simply contained by the tidy categories of historical periodisation – although it always remains firmly hinged to historical experiences.

To keep confusion to a minimum as we begin, let us use the phrases ‘once-colonised countries’ or ‘countries with a history of colonialism’ (rather than ‘post-colonial countries’) when dealing in strictly historical terms with those locations which were previously part of the European empires. When quoting from other critics we must, of course, preserve their own habits of spelling ‘post-colonial’. But for the duration of Beginning Postcolonialism, ‘postcolonial’ and ‘postcolonialism’ will be used when talking about historically situated representations, reading practices, attitudes and values which range across past and present. How and why this is the case will be the subject of the first chapter.

1

From ‘Commonwealth’ to ‘postcolonial’

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to approach a flexible but solid definition of the word ‘postcolonialism’. In order to think about the range and variety of the term, we need to place it in two primary contexts. The first regards the historical experiences of decolonisation that have occurred chiefly in the twentieth century. The second concerns relevant intellectual developments in the latter part of the twentieth century, especially the shift from the study of ‘Commonwealth literature’ to ‘postcolonialism’. After looking at each, we will be in a position at the end of this chapter to make some statements about how we might define ‘postcolonialism’.

Colonialism and decolonisation

At the turn of the twentieth century, the British Empire covered a vast area of the earth that included parts of Africa, Asia, Australasia, Canada, the Caribbean and Ireland. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, although there remains a small handful of British Overseas Territories (see www.ukota.org), the vast bulk of the Empire has not survived. All over the world, the twentieth century witnessed the decolonisation of millions of people who were once subject to the authority of the British crown. For many, the phrase ‘the British Empire’ is most commonly used these days in the past tense, signifying a historical period and set of relationships which appear no longer current.

But if the political realities of Empire have been transformed with the coming of independent government to many once-colonised locations, the material and imaginative legacies of both colonialism and decolonisation remain fundamentally important constitutive elements in the contemporary world. These legacies continue to inflect contemporary geo-political realities and conflicts around the world and impact upon how different people (are forced to) live today. And they also remain in the arts, cultures, languages and intellectual disciplines to which we often turn to make sense of the world, in the past and the present: such as anthropology, economics, painting, politics, music, philosophy, the media and – as we shall be highlighting in this book – literature.

Colonialism has taken many different forms and has engendered diverse effects around the world, but we must be as precise as we can when defining its meaning. This can be gauged by thinking first about its relationship with two other terms: ‘capitalism’ and ‘imperialism’. As Denis Judd argues in his book Empire: The British Imperial Experience from 1765 to the Present (HarperCollins, 1996), ‘[n]o one can doubt that the desire for profitable trade, plunder and enrichment was the primary force that led to the establishment of the imperial structure’ (p. 3). Judd argues that colonialism was first and foremost a fundamental part of the commercial venture of Western nations such as Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Portugal that developed from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Some date its origins to the European ‘voyages of discovery’ in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, epitomised by those of Christopher Columbus who ‘discovered’ the Americas in trying to find a western sea route to the Indies. The seizing of ‘foreign’ lands for government and settlement was in part motivated by the desire to create and control opportunities to generate wealth and control international markets, frequently by securing the natural resources and labour power of different lands and peoples at the lowest possible cost to Europeans. As many colonial governments and entrepreneurs would come to realise, colonialism was big business and the profits to be made were hitherto unimaginable. The construction of the sugar industry in the Caribbean is one such example: the harvesting of sugar in the favourable environmental conditions by African slaves and, later, Indian indentured labourers meant that British businesses could produce a range of products at minimal cost which, when shipped to Europe, could be sold for extremely high profits. Colonialism was first and foremost a lucrative commercial operation, bringing wealth and riches to Western nations through the economic exploitation of others. It was pursued for economic profit, reward and riches. Hence, colonialism and capitalism share a mutually supportive relationship with each other. Indeed, the birth of European modernity was in many ways parented by this partnership of capitalism and colonialism, a fact which should remind us that colonialism is absolutely at the heart of Europe’s modern history.

‘Colonialism’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘imperialism’, but in truth the terms mean different things. As Peter Childs and Patrick Williams argue, imperialism is an ideological project which upholds the legitimacy of the economic and military control of one nation by another. They define imperialism as ‘the extension and expansion of trade and commerce under the protection of political, legal, and military controls’ (An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1997, p. 227). Colonialism, however, is only one form of practice, one modality of control which results from the ideology of imperialism, and it specifically concerns the settlement of people in a new location. Imperialism is not strictly concerned with the issue of settlement, and it does not demand the settlement of different places in order to function. In these terms, colonialism is one historically specific mechanism of imperialism which prioritises the act of settlement, and its manifestations can be varied; as Robert J. C. Young has written, ‘colonialism involved an extraordinary range of different forms and practices carried out with respect to radically different cultures, over many different centuries’ (Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Blackwell, 2001, p. 17). It follows, then, that colonialism is not the only way of pursuing imperialist ideals. This is why some critics argue that while colonialism is virtually over today as a practice, imperialism continues apace as Western nations are still engaged in imperial acts, securing wealth and power through the continuing economic exploitation of other nations (we consider this in terms of globalisation in Chapter 8). Benita Parry spells things out helpfully for us when she describes colonialism as ‘a specific, and the most spectacular, mode of the imperial project’s many and mutable states, one which preceded the rule of international finance capitalism and in mutated forms has survived its formal ending’ (Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique, Routledge, 2004, p. 18.)

To recap: colonialism is a particular historical manifestation of imperialism, specific to certain places and times. Similarly, we can regard the British Empire as one form of an imperial economic and political structure among several which emerged in Europe. So we can endorse Elleke Boehmer’s judicious definition of colonialism in her important book Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (second edition, Oxford University Press, 2005) as the ‘settlement of territory, the exploitation or development of resources, and the attempt to govern the indigenous inhabitants of occupied lands, often by force’ (p. 2). Note in this definition (a) the important emphasis on the settlement of land, (b) the economic aims at the heart of colonialism, and (c) the unequal relations of power which colonialism constructs between colonising and native peoples.

Boehmer’s phrase ‘the attempt to govern’ points to the ways in which colonialism was never fully successful in securing its aims, despite its lucrative gains, and met with perpetual acts of resistance from the outset by indigenous inhabitants of colonised lands. In some cases too, members of the European communities who had settled overseas – in Canada and Australia, for example – in large numbers and who no longer wished to defer power and authority to the imperial ‘motherland’ came to agitate for forms of self-government. As regards the imperial venture of the British Empire, there are three distinct periods of decolonisation when the colonised nations won the right to govern their own affairs. The first was the loss of the American colonies and declaration of American independence in the late eighteenth century. The second period spans the end of the nineteenth century to the first decade of the twentieth century, and concerns the creation of the ‘dominions’. This was the term used to describe the nations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. These nations (today referred to as ‘settler’ nations) consisted of large European populations that had settled overseas, often violently displacing or in some cases destroying the indigenous peoples of these lands – ‘First Nations’ peoples in Canada, Aboriginal communities in Australia, New Zealand’s Maori and the many different tribes in southern Africa. The ‘settler’ peoples of these nations campaigned for forms of self-government which they achieved as dominions of the British Empire. Yet, as a ‘dominion’ each still recognised and pledged allegiance to the ultimate authority of Britain as the ‘mother country’. Canada was the first to achieve a form of political autonomy in 1867, Australia followed suit in 1901, New Zealand similarly in 1907, and South Africa in 1910. Slightly after this period, Ireland won self-rule in 1922, although the country was partitioned and six counties in the north east remained under British control as Northern Ireland. In 1931 the Statute of Westminster removed the obligation for the dominions to defer ultimate authority to the British crown and gave them full governmental control.

The third period of decolonisation occurred in the decades immediately following the end of the Second World War. Unlike the self-governing settler dominions, most colonised lands in South Asia, Africa and the Caribbean did not become sites of mass European migration, and tended to feature larger dispossessed indigenous populations settled and governed by small British colonial elites. The achievement of independence particularly in South Asia and Africa occurred often as a consequence of indigenous anti-colonial nationalism and military struggle. India and Pakistan gained independence in 1947, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1948. In 1957 Ghana became the first ‘majority-rule’ independent African country, followed by Nigeria in 1960. In 1962, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean followed suit. The decades of the 1960s and 1970s saw busy decolonisation throughout the declining Empire. So, with the passing of Hong Kong from Britain to China on 1 July 1997, the numbers of those living under British rule fell below one million for the first time in centuries – a far cry from the days when British colonialism subjected millions around the globe.

There are, of course, as many reasons for decolonisation as there were once-colonised nations. One fundamental reason concerned the growth of many nationalist movements which mounted various challenges across