Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-s22k5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-11T08:03:45.778Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Colony and Empire, Colonialism and Imperialism: A Meaningful Distinction?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2021

Krishan Kumar
Krishan Kumar*
Affiliation:
University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA
*
kk2d@virginia.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Colony and empire, colonialism and imperialism, are often treated as synonyms. This can be acceptable for many purposes. But there may be also good reasons to distinguish between them. This article considers in detail one important attempt in that direction by the classicist Moses Finley. It argues that there is considerable strength in that approach, putting the stress as it does on the distinctiveness of the settler community. It is also valuable in suggesting that early-modern Western colonialism marked a new departure in an older history of imperialism, thus once again suggesting the need for a conceptual separation of the two. But the article concludes that ultimately more may be lost than gained by insisting on the distinction. In particular, it inhibits wide-ranging comparisons between ancient and modern, and Western and non-Western, empires, which can often suggest illuminating connections and parallels. The field of empire studies gains by drawing on the rich store of examples provided by the whole history of empire, from the earliest times to now. Western colonialism is part of that story; to separate it out is to impoverish the field.

Keywords

empireimperialismcolonycolonialismsettlerssettler communitiesWestern and non-Western empiresancient and modern empires
Type
Empire and Ethnicity
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 63 , Issue 2 , April 2021 , pp. 280 - 309
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adas, Michael. 1998. Imperialism and Colonialism in Comparative Perspective. International History Review 20, 2: 371–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New ed. London: Verso.Google Scholar
August, Thomas. 1986. Locating the Age of Imperialism. Itinerario 10, 2: 85–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bartlett, Robert. 1994. The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350. London: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Bayly, C. A. 1998. The First Age of Global Imperialism, c. 1760–1830. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 26, 2: 28–47.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Belich, James. 2009. Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bell, Duncan. 2007. The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bickers, Robert, ed. 2014. Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bridge, Carl and Fedorowich, Kent, eds. 2003. The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity. London: Frank Cass.Google Scholar
Brook, Timothy. 2010. The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buckner, Phillip and Francis, R. Douglas, eds. 2005. Rediscovering the British World. Calgary: University of Calgary Press.Google Scholar
Buettner, Elizabeth. 2004. Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Buettner, Elizabeth. 2016. Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burbank, Jane and Cooper, Frederick. 2010. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Camus, Albert. 1996. The First Man. Hapgood, David, trans. New York: Vintage.Google Scholar
Cavanagh, Edward and Veracini, Lorenzo, eds. 2016. The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Champion, Craig B., ed. 2004. Roman Imperialism: Readings and Sources. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Cipolla, Carlo M. 1974. The Economic History of World Population. 6th ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Colás, Alejandro. 2007. Empire. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Conrad, Sebastian. 2012. German Colonialism: A Short History. O'Hagan, Sorcha, trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cooper, Frederick. 2005. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cooper, Frederick and Stoler, Ann Laura, eds. 1997. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Crosby, Alfred W. 1986. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Darwin, John. 2010. Empire and Ethnicity. Nations and Nationalism 16, 3: 383–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davies, R. R. 2000. The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles 1093–1343. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Devji, Faisal. 2020. The Turn to Empire in Asia. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 21, 1: 111–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Di Cosmo, Nicola. 1998. Qing Colonial Administration in Inner China. International History Review 20, 2: 287–309.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doyle, Michael W. 1986. Empires. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Elkins, Caroline and Pedersen, Susan. 2005a. Settler Colonialism: A Concept and Its Uses. In Elkins, C. and Pedersen, S., eds., Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies. New York: Routledge, 1–20.Google Scholar
Elkins, Caroline and Pedersen, Susan, eds. 2005b. Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Elliott, J. H. 1989. Spain and Its Empire in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. In Spain and Its World, 1500–1700. New Haven: Yale University Press, 7–26.Google Scholar
Emerson, Rupert. 1969. Colonialism. Journal of Contemporary History 4, 1: 3–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Etherington, Norman. 1982. Reconsidering Theories of Imperialism. History and Theory 2, 1: 1–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Etkind, Alexander. 2011. Internal Colonization: Russia's Imperial Experience. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Evans, Raymond. 2010. “Crime without a Name”: Colonialism and the Case for “Indigenocide.” In Dirk Moses, A., ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History. New York: Berghahn Books, 133–47.Google Scholar
Faber, Richard. 1966. The Vision and the Need: Late Victorian Imperialist Aims. London: Faber and Faber.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Niall. 2005. Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. New York: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Ferro, Marc. 1997. Colonization: A Global History. Prithipaul, K. D., trans. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fieldhouse, D. K. 1982. The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Survey from the Eighteenth Century. 2d ed. Houndmills: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Finley, M. I. 1976. Colonies—An Attempt at a Typology. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26: 167–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Finley, M. I. 1978. The Fifth-Century Athenian Empire: A Balance Sheet. In Garnsey, P.D.A. and Whittaker, C. R., eds., Imperialism in the Ancient World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 103–26.Google Scholar
Finzsch, Norbert. 2010. “The Aborigines … Were Never Annihilated, and Still They Are Becoming Extinct”: Settler Imperialism and Genocide in Nineteenth-Century America and Australia. In Moses, A. Dirk, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History. New York: Berghahn Books, 253–70.Google Scholar
Fitzmaurice, Andrew. 2010. Anticolonialism in Western Political Thought. In Moses, A. Dirk, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History. New York: Berghahn Books, 55–80.Google Scholar
Fradera, Josep M. 2018. The Imperial Nation: Citizens and Subjects in the British, French, Spanish, and American Empires. Mackay, Ruth, trans. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Gann, Louis H. and Duignan, Peter, eds. 1969. Colonialism in Africa, 1870–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hechter, Michael. 1999[1975]. Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development. New ed. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.Google Scholar
Hobson, J. A. 1988[1902]. Imperialism: A Study. 3d ed. London: Unwin Hyman.Google Scholar
Horvath, Ronald J. 1972. A Definition of Colonialism. Current Anthropology 13, 1: 45–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Howe, Stephen. 2002. Empire: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
International History Review. 1998. Special issue, “Manchu Colonialism,” 20, 2: 253–504.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Dane. 1987. Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1930. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Dane. 2016. Decolonization: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Khodarkovsky, Michael. 2002. Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500–1800. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Kiernan, V. G. 2005. America: The New Imperialism. From White Settlement to World Hegemony. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Koebner, Richard. 1961. Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Koebner, Richard and Schmidt, Helmut Dan. 1965. Imperialism: The Story and Significance of a Political World, 1840–1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kohn, Hans. 1958. Reflections on Colonialism. In Strausz-Hupé, Robert and Hazard, Harry W., eds., The Idea of Colonialism. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 2–16.Google Scholar
Krautwurst, Udo. 2003. What Is Settler Colonialism: An Anthropological Meditation on Frantz Fanon's “Concerning Violence.” History and Anthropology 14, 1: 55–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kumar, Krishan. 2010. Nation-States as Empires, Empires as Nation-States: Two Principles, One Practice? Theory and Society 39, 2: 119–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kumar, Krishan. 2017a. Visions of Empire: How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Kumar, Krishan. 2017b. The Time of Empire: Temporality and Genealogy in the Development of European Empires. Thesis Eleven 139, 1: 113–28.Google Scholar
Kumar, Krishan. 2020. Empire: A Historical and Political Sociology. Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Livi-Bacci, Massimo. 1992. A Concise History of World Population. Ipsen, Carl, trans. Cambridge: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lonsdale, John. 2014. Kenya: Home County and African Frontier. In Bickers, Robert, ed., Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 74–111.Google Scholar
Lorcin, Patricia M. E. 2002. Rome and France in Africa: Recovering Colonial Algeria's Latin Past. French Historical Studies 25, 2: 295–329.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lorcin, Patricia M. E. 2013. Imperial Nostalgia; Colonial Nostalgia: Differences of Theory, Similarities of Practice? Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 39, 3: 97–111.Google Scholar
Lowry, Donal. 2014. Rhodesia 1890–1980: The Lost Dominion. In Bickers, Robert, ed., Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 112–49.Google Scholar
Mann, Michael. 2005. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mazower, Mark. 2009. No Enchanted Place: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations. Princeton: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mead, Walter Russell. 2007. God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World. London: Atlantic Books.Google Scholar
Messud, Claire. 2013. Camus and Algeria: The Moral Question. New York Review of Books, 7 Nov.: 56–58.Google Scholar
Morris, Ian. 2010. The Greater Athenian State. In Morris, Ian and Scheidel, Walter, eds., The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 99–177.Google Scholar
Moses, A. Dirk. 2010a. Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History. In Moses, A. Dirk, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History. New York: Berghahn Books, 3–54.Google Scholar
Moses, A. Dirk, ed. 2010b. Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History. New York: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Muthu, Sankar, ed. 2014. Empire and Modern Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Osterhammel, Jürgen. 2005. Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Frisch, Shelley, trans. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers.Google Scholar
Osterhammel, Jürgen. 2014. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Camiller, Patrick, trans. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Oxford English Dictionary. 1989. 2d ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Pateman, Carole. 2007. The Settler Contract. In Pateman, Carole and Mills, Charles W., eds., Contract and Domination. Cambridge: Polity, 35–78.Google Scholar
Perdue, Peter C. 2005. China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Robinson, Ronald. 1986. The Eccentric Idea of Imperialism, with or without Empire. In Mommsen, Wolfgang J. and Osterhammel, Jürgen, eds., Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities. London: Allen and Unwin, 267–89.Google Scholar
Rochfort, Demond. 1993. Mexican Muralists: Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.Google Scholar
Said, Edward W. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. London: Vintage.Google Scholar
Seeley, J. R. 1971[1883]. The Expansion of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Sommer, Michael. 2011. Colonies—Colonisation—Colonialism: A Typological Reappraisal. Ancient West and East 10: 183–93.Google Scholar
Spruyt, Hendrik. 2001. Empires and Imperialism. In Motyl, Alexander J., ed., Encyclopedia of Nationalism. 2 vols. San Diego: Academic Press, vol. 1: 237–49.Google Scholar
Tocqueville, Alexis de. 2001[1841]. Essay on Algeria. In Writings on Empire and Slavery. Pitts, Jennifer, ed. and trans. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 59–116.Google Scholar
Veracini, Lorenzo. 2010. Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Veracini, Lorenzo. 2018. Where Does Colonialism Come From? Rethinking History 22, 2: 184–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Washbrook, David. 2014. Avatars of Identity: The British Community in India. In Bickers, Robert, ed., Settlers and Expatriates: Britons over the Seas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 178–204.Google Scholar
Wesseling, H. L. 2004. The European Colonial Empires 1815–1919. Webb, Diane, trans. Harlow: Pearson Education.Google Scholar
Wilson, P. H. 2016. Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolfe, Patrick. 1997. History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory, from Marx to Postcolonialism. American Historical Review 102, 2: 388–420.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native. Journal of Genocide Research 8, 4: 387–409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wolfe, Patrick 2010. Structure and Event: Settler Colonialism, Time, and the Question of Genocide. In Moses, A. Dirk, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History. New York: Berghahn Books, 102–32.Google Scholar
Zaretsky, Robert. 2013. The Tragic Nostalgia of Albert Camus. Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques 39, 3: 55–69.Google Scholar