Cultural imperialism

Cultural imperialism

1-Cultural imperialism is the effort by powerful states to force their culture and societal systems upon subjugated, or less powerful, people.

2-These formal and informal efforts are often based on ethnocentrism and were exemplified by the social Darwinist movement of the late nineteenth century.

3-Cultural imperialism is responsible for the spread of some positive values, including democracy and equal rights, but it also brought about the demise of many indigenous cultures and languages and provided a justification for colonialism.

4-During the early period of Western colonialism, cultural imperialism was marked by efforts to forcibly spread Christianity and European economic values to indigenous societies. The onset of the new imperialism of the nineteenth century saw the maturation of this trend as imperial states sought to replicate their legal, political, and educational systems within their colonies.

5-With the rise of the United States as a global power in the twentieth century, American culture came to dominate the world through an informal and tacit form of cultural imperialism.

THE GOALS OF CULTURAL IMPERIALISM

Usually two divergent cultures that come into contact tend to influence each other. There is a give-and-take that often results in a new, hybrid culture. Societies have historically adopted and integrated different languages, political or legal systems, religions, and traditions into their own cultural identity. Only rarely are such cultural interactions mainly unidirectional. However, cultural imperialism distorts normal societal exchanges. Instead, the dominant power seeks to suppress and, in some cases, eradicate other cultures. Although a dominant culture may incorporate specific products into its mainstream, as the Europeans did with corn, sugar, and potatoes, through cultural imperialism, there is a range of actions taken to destroy indigenous ways of life. The suppression of native religions and their replacement by outside faiths is one example of this trend. In addition, societal attributes, including language, legal traditions, and family patterns, also are often forcibly changed through new legal codes and colonial policies.

During the initial period of European colonization, the imperial powers sought two things from their overseas territories, and both of these imperatives often led to efforts to completely eradicate native cultures. First, under the prevailing mercantile system of the period, the European states tried to maximize the economic potential of their colonies. They wanted colonies that would be economically profitable and provide resources that were unavailable, or in limited quantities, in Europe. In much of North America, the Caribbean, and Africa, this often meant replacing the existing agrarian and hunting cultures with European economic systems based on resource extraction and large-scale agriculture. Second, the colonial powers endeavored to minimize the costs of their empires. One way to ensure that colonies did not become profitably expensive was to ensure that those territories remained politically subservient to the mother country. Replicating European political culture provided one method of maintaining submissive colonies. This was especially important to the European colonizers in those areas, such as the Aztec Empire in Mexico, in which there was an existent, strong, and stable political system that could provide leadership for anti-colonial insurgencies. In such cases, one immediate goal for the colonial powers was to exterminate, or co-opt in some cases, the indigenous political leadership.

During the late imperial era of the nineteenth century, colonization also increasingly came to be based on strategic considerations. Imperial states no longer only sought colonies simply for profit, they also wanted territory for political and military reasons, including naval bases for refueling and refitting; buffer areas to protect wealthy colonies; and to deny rival empires territory. In addition, public sentiment in many imperial powers, especially Great Britain and France, opposed the wholesale eradication of indigenous cultures and people. This combination of factors resulted in less overtly brutal methods of suppressing native cultures. This imperial period was marked by efforts among several of the leading colonial powers to integrate their possessions into their broader culture and traditions. A common theme was that it was the duty of the imperial power to uplift the people who came under its suzerainty. This idea would later be modified and embraced by the United States and its allies in the twentieth century as America sought to promote its ideals and values in the post-World War II era, but often dismissed local culture and tradition, even if it was compatible with the goals of U.S. policy.

Not all of the negative impacts of cultural imperialism are deliberate. In some cases, actions taken by colonial governments and settlers had disastrous impacts on indigenous lifestyles. Colonialism disrupted societies by elevating some groups, while disenfranchising others from positions of power or status. Colonial powers often removed or eradicated those groups that held political or economic power within a new acquired territory. The colonists then elevated other groups within societies to elite status as a means to bind those groups to the colonial power, and then exploited them to maintain control. Such actions exacerbated existing ethnic rivalries or initiated long-lasting intra-societal conflicts. In addition, the artificial borders created during the colonial period disrupted societies and broke apart ethnic and religious groups, further contributing to the demise of many cultures.

The economic consequences of colonialism also eroded cultures. The introduction of new agricultural systems by imperial powers led to the demise of hunter-gathering cultures. For instance, the spread of ranching and farming in the American Midwest resulted in the decline of indigenous cultures such as those of the Native Americans of the Plains region. In the later imperial era, the introduction of European manufactured products destroyed local economic systems. In the twentieth century, the spread of American culture through the globalization of the entertainment industry undermined regional literature and arts.

EARLY CULTURAL IMPERIALISM AND WESTERN COLONIALISM

Cultural imperialism did not begin with the period of modern European colonization. Ancient empires such as the Greeks and the Romans spread their ideals, values, and language to conquered areas. During the Middle Ages, successive English monarchs attempted to subjugate the Welsh and Scottish cultures, whereas the 1453 fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks resulted in the demise of the Byzantine culture and society, and the policies of imperial Russia resulted in the suppression of non-Russian cultures on the periphery of the empire.

What initially differentiated colonization after 1400 from earlier periods was the effort to justify the acquisition of new territory. Europeans initially asserted that the new areas were unoccupied and claimed possession based on the principle of first discovery. However, as it became clear that the areas had resident populations, European states struggled to develop a legal justification for conquest. Most governments asserted that they had the right to exercise dominion over native people to spread the gospel, uplift them, and improve their barbaric way of life. In an argument advanced initially by Spanish Dominicans, and adopted thereafter by most of the colonial powers, indigenous people were declared barbarians based on a range of criteria that included religion, family and marriage customs, language (especially the lack of a written language), legal systems, and political arrangements. The colonists also would contend that native cultures did not encourage people to make maximum use of land and other resources. The colonial powers argued that they should have dominion over these new areas to make them more productive. These arguments would be utilized by colonial powers in such diverse settings as the Spanish in America and the British in Ireland. Hence, the theoretical underpinnings of colonialism came to be based on the assumption that the cultures of native people were inferior to those of the Europeans and that the colonial states had a duty to transmit their customs and norms to these populations.

The first Portuguese colonies in Africa were established to extract resources and establish trading posts. As a result there was only minor cultural penetration, mainly in the form of economic interaction. Even as the Spanish and Portuguese conquered the Canary Islands and Sao Tome, there was little effort made to integrate the inhabitants into the European culture. Native people did increasingly learn European languages to facilitate commerce and the slave trade. As long as the trading posts remained on the periphery of Africa and other areas, European culture initially made little impact on indigenous societies.

This changed as the Spanish established colonies in the Americas. To gain ascendancy over the area, the Spanish had to destroy two major indigenous empires (the Aztec and Inca) and replace their cultural influence. This marked the first major step in the spread of cultural imperialism in the Western Hemisphere. The destruction of major native political bodies also would occur in North America with the destruction or subjugation of groups such as the Powhattan Confederacy.

A second major step toward the goal of eradicating native cultures and imposing European norms and values outside of Europe came as efforts to evangelize and spread Christianity became increasingly intertwined with colonialism itself. Following Pope Alexander Vl’s (14311503) 1493 papal bull, which divided the new world between Spain and Portugal, and the subsequent Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which reaffirmed the bull, both states pursued colonies to accumulate wealth, but did so under the justification of the need to spread Christianity. The Protestant Reformation would further accelerate these efforts, as Catholic and Protestant missionaries competed to replace native religions with their denominations of Christianity. For instance, even though the Dutch empire was based almost exclusively on trade, missionaries were dispatched to Dutch colonies to ensure that native peoples were converted to Protestantism as opposed to Catholicism.

Those areas with long-recognized cultures, or with the military might to prevent European incursions, received very different treatment from the colonial states. For instance, in India, the various colonial powers often sought to gain trade and other concessions through treaty instead of conquest. One result was the survival of many cultural traditions on the Indian subcontinent. It would only be in the later imperial period that the British began to seriously erode Indian culture. In contrast, when efforts to spread Christianity, or otherwise suppress native cultures, met with failure, the colonial states often resorted to strategies of displacing native people, or exterminating whole groups of them. For instance, after the 1622 native rebellion in Virginia, the colonists engaged in widespread reprisals and a broad effort to force the native tribes from their land.

THE NEW AGE OF IMPERIALISM                  

While the initial period of European colonialism after 1400 was characterized by efforts to completely eradicate or suppress native cultures, the new imperial era of the late nineteenth century was usually marked by less brutal efforts to spread dominant, colonial cultures. This period marked the height of European imperialism and the maturation of colonial systems. This era also marked the formalization of the self-perceived civilizing mission by colonial powers in areas of Africa and Asia and the prevalence of institutionalized racism.

The development of new technologies during the nineteenth century not only accelerated the drive for imperialism, it also further undermined indigenous cultures. The imperial powers actively embraced new technologies, including military weapons, the telegraph, steamboats, and the railroad. These technological advances reinforced the attractiveness of European culture among native people. This included perceptions of superiority among both the colonizers and the people colonized. Many native rulers who were not under the dominance of imperial powers often hired European military and economic advisers to tacitly, or overtly, spread colonial cultures.

In addition, many native leaders sent their children to European schools, a custom that the British in India, and the French in North Africa, particularly encouraged. The imperial powers also developed a series of colonial schools, including universities in some cases, to educate the native population and the colonial elites. At colonial schools, native students were taught the history, culture, and traditions of the imperial state, while their own culture was denigrated.

As new colonies were added to empires for strategic reasons, there was increasing pressure on colonial governments to lessen the costs of empire. One method to accomplish this goal was to integrate local groups into the colonial hierarchy. In British colonies, such as Canada, Australia, and the Caribbean islands, this was accomplished through colonial settlers who brought with them the main elements of British culture. In other areas, the British and other colonial powers endeavored to use local populations as soldiers, government officials, and bureaucrats to lessen the costs of empire. One result of these methods was the consolidation of areas populated by small, decentralized groups or tribes under colonial powers.

In binding groups to the colonial establishment, there was a range of efforts undertaken to supplant indigenous cultures with colonial or European ones. These efforts included ongoing drives to spread Christianity, European-style education and training, and inter-colonial policies that pitted favored groups against others. One result of these efforts was the emergence of native-colonial elites who adopted the main aspects of the imperial cultures, including the hierarchical class system of the dominant imperial powers. These elites increasingly formed the core of the colonial civil service and military.

Even as new economic imperatives for imperialism emerged, including the discovery of diamonds in South Africa in 1867 or the rise of the ivory trade in the Belgian Congo, colonial tactics remained constant. In pursuing their economic interests, colonial powers often specifically targeted cultures to undermine existing political entities. For instance, the British promoted the use of opium to undermine Chinese culture and gain economic concessions in the 1840s.

The contemporary popular notion of social Darwinism, which argued that different ethnic groups were at different stages of intellectual and physical development, was often used as a justification for imperialism. Pro-imperial politicians and officials would even use social Darwinism to contend that the imperial states had a duty to civilize the less-developed regions of the world by spreading European culture. Such sentiments were presented in contemporary newspapers and literature that reinforced public support for imperialism. Social Darwinism was also used to justify the elevation of some groups and the suppression of others. For example, many British and French colonial officials believed that people from the India subcontinent or Asia were superior to Africans and, therefore, transported people from these regions to Africa where they often became part of the colonial elite.

POSTCOLONIALISM AND CULTURAL IMPERIALISM

During the independence movements, the colonial powers sought to bind their possessions through economic, political, military, and cultural ties. Great Britain formed the Commonwealth of Nations and France formed the Francophone Association to perpetuate their influence in the former colonies. However, many colonial powers found that the Western-educated elites formed the core of independence movements. In colonies such as India, Burma, or Indonesia, these native elites endeavored to combine positive aspects of Western culture with their own indigenous traditions. This helped revive native culture in many areas, even as Western-style governments and economic systems remained prevalent.

European culture continued to exert an enormous influence in terms of language, educational systems, and religion; nonetheless, it would be the United States, not the former colonial powers, that would ultimately have the greatest cultural impact in the post-World War II era. The economic preponderance of the United States at the end of World War II (1939-1945) allowed the nation to export a range of products and to gain access to emerging markets as states became independent. Products such as Coca-Cola, Levi’s jeans, and General Motors vehicles came to be regarded as synonymous with the United States. This American economic expansion would evolve into cultural imperialism as the world embraced U.S. products. In addition, the rise of the American entertainment industry helped expand the cultural influence of the United States. During the Cold War, the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union limited the global reach of American culture. With the end of the Cold War, these constraints were lifted. The result was a dramatic period of American cultural dominance.

The opening of a McDonald’s restaurant in Moscow in 1990 was followed by a round of global expansion that resulted in 24,500 restaurants in 115 nations. In addition, American films, media, and music came to dominant the global entertainment industry. The Cable News Network (CNN) is broadcast in 120 countries while the world’s top-selling author is America’s Stephen King. In 1992 Disney even opened a theme park near Paris. American cultural expansion has been aided by the revolution in telecommunications and the widespread use of English. For instance, approximately 90 percent of the content on the Internet is in English.

As American products continue to find new markets and cultural icons such as Spiderman or Superman replace local heroes, many local customs will give way to a global cultural uniformity dominated by the United States. The prominence of U.S. culture has even led foreign companies to utilize American symbols in advertising. A range of foreign corporations use cowboys or American icons to advertise a variety of products such as cigarettes, alcohol, and clothing. Critics of these trends have decried what they perceive to be a second century of American cultural homogeneity.

While many aspects of American culture have positive connotations, including the ideals of gender and racial equality, and political and economic freedom, the violence and materialism that many perceive is inherent in the United States has produced a backlash. States such as France have imposed limitations on American media products, including films and music (the French government briefly tried to prevent the American film Jurassic Park from being released in France). On a broader level, opponents of globalization have increasingly targeted American firms such as Starbucks as symbols of what is wrong with the contemporary world market. Finally, radical anti-Western extremist groups have defined themselves by their opposition to the main features of American culture.

JUSTIFICATION FOR EMPIRE, EUROPEAN CONCEPTS (Western Colonialism)

The term empire, derived from the Latin word imperium, contains at least three overlapping senses: a limited and independent rule, a territory embracing more than one political community, and the absolute sovereignty of a single individual. All three of these components were in play when the European overseas expansion gathered speed in the late fifteenth century. And all three senses of the term would figure prominently in European justifications for empire.

Although it opened a Pandora’s box of philosophical disputes, the original justification for Spanish colonialism was found in the bulls issued by Pope Alexander VI (1431-1503). These conceded to the Spanish monarchy the right to occupy the newly discovered Americas and to undertake the conversion of the indigenous population, thus making the Spanish monarchy the vicar of God in the New World. If the initial encounters with the inhabitants of the New World corroborated with the Christian hope of evangelizing to the entire world, it also lent new force to a more secular aspiration that focused on the increasing civilization of all humankind. Evangelization and this mission of civilization were the two complementary ideals that underpinned most justifications for European empire for nearly 500 years. This essay traces the many manifestations of these ideas and convictions in the imperial trajectories of the Western powers.

For conquest to serve as adequate proof of the righteousness of the Spanish cause, the conquest itself had to be justified. The wide-ranging debates that preoccupied generations of jurists who debated the legality of the conquest may be condensed into a single question: Had the wars with the indigenous population of the Americas resulting in European conquest, been just ones? In On the American Indians, Francisco de Vitoria (1486-1546) argued that war with native populations could not be justified on the basis of the jurisdiction given by a papal bull, or even a purported right to compel natives to obey natural law. Conflict could be justified in defending the innocent, however, especially in cases where cannibalism and human sacrifice were practiced.

War resulting in conquest also could be justified, according to Vitoria’s logic, if indigenous rulers refused to allow missionaries to preach, or discouraged conversion by killing converts. The defense of the latter might instigate war in which the Spaniards could legally occupy the native territories and depose their governments. While critics of the Spanish wrangled over the legitimacy of the conquest of America and the dispossession of its inhabitants, other European powers were embarking on their empire-building missions and would devise different justifications to support their rule.

Like the Spanish, the English justified the conquest of Ireland by claiming that their aim was to convert its inhabitants to Christianity. They contended that this goal was impossible to realize so long as the Irish persisted in their barbarous ways. In the view of Sir Thomas Smith (1513-1577), the English were the new Romans who had come to civilize the Irish, just as the ancient Romans had once civilized the Britons. This historical vision bolstered the conviction that the Irish were culturally inferior to, and far behind, the English in developmental terms. Through subjection, the English colonizers reasoned, the Irish could be made free. This was not regarded as a small task. In his book Tragicall Tales (1587), George Tuberville echoed England’s dim view of Ireland, saying, ”Wild Irish are as civil as the Russies in their kind;/ hard choice which is best of both, each bloody, rude, and blind” (Berry 1968, p. 28).

A similar rationale, the alleged responsibility to convert heathen Americans to Christian faith, extended to Britain’s North American colonies. The true principal and main end of the colonial enterprise, according to one early seventeenth-century Virginian planter, Richard Hakluyt (1552-1616), was to preach and baptize into the Christian religion. Hakluyt exhorted Sir Walter Raleigh (1554-1618) in a similar vein, but added the civilizing mission that would become so important to imperialists in future centuries: ”for to prosperity no greater glory can be handed down than to conquer the barbarian, to recall the savage and the pagan to civility, to draw the ignorant within the orbit of reason” (Pagden 1998, p. 35).

This is not to say that religious justification disappeared entirely and was superseded by a secular civilizing mission after the first age of European imperialism had drawn to a close. In late nineteenth-century Britain, many Christians viewed imperial expansion as being designed to support worldwide conversion. Some observers felt that the purported benefits of conversion justified the use of force. One missionary went as far as to remark in 1895 that the British army and navy were under God’s Evangelical mission fused with, and complemented, other justifications for European expansion.

Unlike their Spanish counterparts, however, English and Dutch ideologues of empire rejected the notion that conquest itself justified rule. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) distinguished the original acquisition of property through appropriation, which existed before the establishment of civil society and existed as a natural right, from the notion of ownership existing within civil society, and regulated by the laws made by the appropriate public authority. There were twofold implications of appropriation that served as the basis for a notion of divisible sovereignty: the public rights of sovereignty and the private rights of ownership.

Unlike the Spanish, but like Grotius, British theorists of empire were most concerned not with a king’s jurisdiction over native populations, but with justifying the title to property they appropriated (or, more often, expropriated). In his Two Treatises on Government (1690), John Locke (1632-1704) asserted that ownership was acquired when a person had ”mixed his labor with (it); and joined to something that is his own” (Pagden 1998, p. 45). This was part of a larger argument that drew on the Roman law of res nullius, which held that all empty things, including unoccupied land, remained the common property of all humankind until they were put to some use.

The arguments of Locke and Grotius formed the basis of most English attempts to legitimate their presence in America, both against the claims of the Iberian powers who appealed to the terms of the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which divided the New World among itself, and those complaints of the dispossessed native populations. Locke was most influential in the justification of the latter. America was in the same condition as that of the entire world before the founding of human societies when, he argued, ”the inhabitants were too few for the country, and want of people and money gave men no temptation to enlarge their possessions of land, or contest for wider extent of ground” (Pagden 1998, p. 44). The major conclusion of Locke’s meditations was that Europeans could disregard all aboriginal forms of government, and, consequently, deny their status as nations.

The English, by settling and cultivating the land, had acquired rights to possession that the native people had never enjoyed and certainly could not contest. In this way, Locke’s version of the res nullius argument was the most frequent legitimation of British presence in America and would later be employed to justify colonization in Australia and Africa. It also would be used during the American Revolution (1776-1783) by those seeking to justify the continuation of British rule. ”Because no nation ever planted colonies with so liberal or noble a hand as England has done,” Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) argued in 1776, ”(the Americans) should repay us for all the blood and treasure that we have extended in the common cause” (Paquette 2003, pp. 428-429). British statesman also appealed to res nullius in their disputes with Spain in the late eighteenth century, claiming that their occupation of the Mosquito Coast and Darien in Central America and the Nootka Sound in the Pacific Northwest was valid because Spain had neither cultivated nor populated those places.

The discourse of improvement then became a justification for the expansion of imperialistic governmental power in the nineteenth century. As historian Richard Drayton commented, ”the rational use of Nature replaced piety as the foundation of imperial Providence, government became the Demiurge, and universal progress, measured by material abundance, its promised land” (Drayton 2000, p. 81).

Even where no formal empire existed, as in South America, British proponents of unhindered free trade with the newly independent states invoked the mission of improvement as a way to justify the incursion of their capital. In the 1820s and 1830s, a widespread conviction arose that British industry and technological ingenuity could generate wealth from the fertile resources that Spain’s primitive methods and indolence had squandered. Free trade would open markets that Britain could exploit with its superiority and excellence in machinery, skill of the artisan, and extent of capital it enjoyed. The rapid growth of British mining companies in Chile, for example, was premised on the conviction that the mines, if worked with moderate industry and knowledge of metallurgy, might yield considerably more than the quantity necessary for the supply of the whole world.

A Bible Lesson in Colonial Massachusetts. Christian hopes of evangelizing the entire world underpinned most justifications for European empire, and the alleged responsibility to convert heathens to the Christian faith extended to Britain s North American colonies. In this illustration, a European missionary preaches to Indians in the Massachusetts area.

Such grandiose visions permeated parliamentary debates as well. In a speech urging diplomatic recognition of Spanish America as independent in 1824, Lord Ellenborough (1790-1871) remarked, ”even the power of steam seemed to be discovered at the most favorable moment for giving faculties to the navigation of (South American) rivers and the working of precious mines” (Paquette 2004, p. 87). The political language of improvement fused with the interests of British financiers to help bring about a series of free trade agreements that would stifle the development of independent Latin America’s industry for much of the nineteenth century.

However much the mission of improvement and legal arguments were the predominant justifications of empire, the differences, real and imagined, between European and non-European cultures would emerge with increasing force and frequency to legitimize imperial rule. Long before Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) set sail, a vigorous, progressive Europe was juxtaposed with a more apathetic Asia and Africa. Although Pope Paul Ill’s (1468-1549) early sixteenth-century bull (Sublimis Deus) left little doubt that ”the [American] Indians are true men,” assertions of their inferiority to Europeans remained pervasive and this theory was employed to justify the conquest, subjugation, and enslavement of indigenous populations.

Nonetheless, very few writers before the nineteenth century would justify empire on the basis of racial difference. They did not assume that those living east of the Ural Mountains or south of Crete implied subhuman status, if only because no reference existed in the Bible to separate acts of creation. In the absence of scriptural evidence, environmental explanations, the impact of terrain and climate specifically, gained in popularity. The most popular of these climatic theories was the one contained in Corneille de Pauw’s (1739-1799) Recherches philosophiques sur les Americains (1768), who declared that the difference between Europe and America was best defined as the difference between strength and weakness, between civilization and savagery.

These explanations gradually led to the stage-based theory of history popularized by the leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. All societies, its proponents claimed, advanced through four stages evolving from a hunter-gathering society to a commercial society. An emphasis on cultural evolution linked physical environment and economic progress and could also be turned into a justification for empire. Although critical of Spanish conquest in the Americas, Scottish historian William Robertson (1721-1793) juxtaposed the science, courage, and discipline of the Spaniards to the ignorance, timidity, and disorder of the indigenous population to justify the vicious conduct of conquistadores in relation to the Aztec and Incan societies.

In the introduction to his Historia del Nuevo Mundo (1793), Juan Bautista Munoz (1745-1799) argued that Spain had encountered in the New World ”a field of glory worthy for its elevated thoughts”; and that, in spite of obstacles, ”the genius along with the ardor of religious belief ensured the happy attainment of its most arduous enterprises” (Mufioz 1990, p. 25). Spain, in his view, far from destroying the New World’s wealth, persevered heroically in the worst of conditions, until America’s steadily increasing wealth sparked the emulation, competition, industry, commerce, and interest of all of Europe.

This notion of a hierarchy of civilization, the possibility of advancement toward the perfection achieved by Europe, and Europe’s responsibility to accelerate the progress of the non-European world also inspired certain progressive, if paternalistic, late eighteenth-century political writers. Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) claimed in 1791 that the inhabitants of Africa, Asia, and America almost seemed to be waiting for Europe to civilize them.

In the early nineteenth century, racial attitudes emerged increasingly as part of the rhetoric that justified colonial rule. Catholics, half-castes, and Hindus were deemed irremediably degenerate, as their religions were thought to corrupt both their moral judgment and political institutions. Arguments of cultural superiority and civilizing mission were plentiful in nineteenth-century Britain. Empire came to express the protection and glorification of the British Crown, church, law, and trade. As Lord Palmerston (1784-1865) bluntly noted, Britain stood at the head of moral, social, and political civilization. ”Our task,” he said, ”is to lead the way and direct the march of other nations.”

Such national and cultural chauvinism increased and was given new impetus in the mid-nineteenth century with the emergence of social Darwinism. Coining the term ”survival of the fittest” several years before Charles Darwin (1809-1882) set forth his theory, Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) developed an all-encompassing conception of human society and relations based on evolutionary principles. The centerpiece of Darwinism is the theory of natural selection, according to which only the fittest species in organic nature survive, whereas the unfit become extinct. Europeans employed this biologis-tic framework to justify their imperial rule over people whose races were considered inferior or less fit.

French political leader Jules Ferry (1832-1893) explicitly argued that ”the superior races have rights over the inferior races.” In his Greater Britain (1868), Charles Dilke (1789-1864) rejoiced over the ”grandeur of our race, already girdling the earth.” Josiah Strong (18471916), an American clergyman, wanted this Anglo-Saxon mantle shared with the United States and, in his Our Country (1885), praised the Anglo-Saxon instinct for colonizing, saying, ”his unequalled energy, his indomitable perseverance, and his personal independence made him a pioneer” (Snyder 1962, p. 122).

Empire was justified because it served domestic goals as well. While an empire might have been built around notions of an exported social hierarchy, as historian David Cannadine has shown, it also served to reinforce the hierarchy at home. Possessing an empire bolstered the British perception that they still belonged—amid the upheaval wrought by mass democracy, industrialization, and urban growth to a traditional, agricultural, layered society.

If the legal and religious rationale for conquest, as well as the racial justifications for empire, have been discussed, other European concepts require further treatment. A pervasive justification for empire, existing from the Spanish Conquest until their dismantlement in the late twentieth century, involved the notion of empire as a trust. Finding indigenous societies to be lacking in human and political standards, Vitoria argued: ”For their own benefit the king of Spain might take over the government of the country, nominating prefects and governors for their cities, and even giving them new rulers, if it were clearly necessary for their well-being.” There was also a materialistic dimension to this trust in Vitoria’s thought. The king, he argued, ”is obliged to do for the pagans over whom he rules whatever he would be obliged to do for the good of his own people” (Hamilton 1963, pp. 133-134).

Such notions of trust persisted until the late eighteenth century. Speaking on the East India Bill in 1783, British statesman Edmund Burke (1729-1797) remarked that obligations stemmed from empire: ”Such rights or privileges … are all in the strictest sense a trust; and it is the very essence of every trust to be rendered accountable; and even totally to cease when it substantially varies from the purpose for which alone it could have a lawful existence.” This notion gathered force at the end of the eighteenth century. Imperialism’s apologists pointed to their association with humanitarian policies, such as the abolition of slavery, in justifying the maintenance and expansion of territory. Writing of the acquisition of India in The Expansion of England (1883), J. R. Seeley (18341895) says, ”aggrandisement might present itself in the light of a simple duty, when it seemed that by extending our empire the reign of robbery and murder might be brought to an end” (Snyder 1962, p. 120)—thus presaging Rudyard Kipling’s (1865-1936) famous exhortation to Anglo-Saxons across the globe to ”take up the white man’s burden” (Snyder 1962, p. 87).

The question remained, however, about how this trusteeship could best be fulfilled. One of the main responses was that the expansion of commerce would benefit both the colonized and colonizer. Free trade was considered a vehicle for bettering the world, as well as a way to expand economic interests overseas. Capitalism was conceived as a moral force, helping to civilize the world through the spread of enterprise and a strong work ethic.

Palmerston believed commerce to be the best pioneer of civilization, saying that it improved humankind’s sense of well-being. Others regarded this type of rhetoric with skepticism. Historian C. A. Bayly, for instance, said, ”free trade was no more than a nostrum of a nation which had achieved superiority by the use of military force to break into other protected markets; the British could now afford to be free traders” (Bayly 1989, p. 237).

Free trade also would emerge as one of the main justifications for setting up the Belgian King Leopold Il’s (1835-1909) colony of the Congo in 1884. In exchange for recognizing the validity of his claims to sovereignty by other European powers, the King promised not to impose import duties on the goods of those nations in the newly established free state. Civilization, free trade, and fulfillment of European responsibility toward non-European people combined to justify such colonial ventures.

Different sentiments and justifications for imperialism as a trust also may be found in the history of Dutch imperialism. As a Christian nation, they believed that the Netherlands had a moral duty in Indonesia to uphold a policy that was manifested in the improvement of education, public health, agriculture, and the appointment of Indonesians to local administrative bodies. Similar notions would grow in strength after the Great War (1914-1918). Trusteeship dominated early twentieth-century debates, for example. It was the keystone of the mandate system proposed by the League of Nations in 1919, justifying the repartition of the collapsed German and Ottoman empires. Although the explicit purpose of making Britain and France trustees was to stifle slavery and forced labor, the demoralizing traffic in arms and spirits and other abuses were considered barbaric to European sensibilities. The mandatory power also was entrusted to promote the material, moral well-being, and social progress of the inhabitants.

The ethic of trusteeship served to justify empire at its most vulnerable point. In The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1922) F. D. Lugard (1858-1945) purveyed an alternate vision for the newly acquired tropical dependencies, thought to be unsuited for white settlement, based on his experiences as governor of Nigeria before the war. Lugard called for the development by the agency of natives through European guidance, a formula that demanded the government’s intervention. It was a dual mandate because it called for the advancement of the inhabitants and the development of its material resources for the benefit of humankind. In this way, Lugard deflected criticism that tropical dependencies were maintained solely for British self-interest. He insisted that Africans, too, were benefiting from, as he put it, ”the influx of manufactured goods and the substitution of law and order for the methods of barbarism” (Lugard 1922, pp. 616-618), while a simultaneous reciprocal and mutual benefit accrued to Europe.

Arguments for trusteeship persisted until the bitter end of European empires. In Portuguese-controlled Angola, one apologist contended in the early 1950s that colonial rule had been characteristically paternal, slowly but surely improving the native’s quality of living and bringing them toward the more refined European way of life. The rhetoric of trusteeship also permeated the creation of the colonial development schemes, the forerunners of contemporary development agencies. Britain’s 1929 Colonial Development Act, though intended to help colonies to service borrowing for public works, was not altruistic in practice. It was primarily designed to give a boost to a decaying British heavy industry. Similarly, trade preference policies in the 1930s counteracted the slim benefits that development monies produced. In essence, they helped the dominions and harmed the colonial consumers who were likewise exploited by the 1939 policy of bulk-buying commodities, which led to the British economy being subsidized by colonial producers.

The Colonial Development Act had little practical effect. Between 1930 and 1939, only £18 million was spent on development, compared to the £145 million borrowed on the open market by the colonies. Furthermore, the government did nothing to remove the obstacles to investment in the colonies, nor did anything to make industrial production more profitable. In spite of the shortcomings in practice, the notion of empire as a trust was a common feature of the justifications for colonialism in all of the European empires at one time or another.

Some justifications for empire did not address the indigenous inhabitants who would be impacted and focused purely on the needs of European society and its economy. Proponents of such views often resorted to a political language that described colonization as a natural process arising from burgeoning wealth or population in a European country. Colonies were justified as a potential solution to the problems wrought by population expansion. Sir James Steuart (1713-1788), a Scottish political economist whose influence extended across Europe in the mid-eighteenth century, alleged that population must be reduced either by encouragements given to leaving the country, or by establishing colonies. To stay economically strong, he believed that the colony should check its population growth and facilitate the ”preservation of wealth that they have already acquired.”

Thomas Malthus’s (1766-1834) early nineteenth-century demographic analysis, which stressed competition for increasingly scarce resources, justified the search for open territory where a surplus population could live. Observing the social unrest triggered by massive urbanization in the early nineteenth century, G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) also argued in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821) that colonization could help to solve the problem generated by poverty by providing an outlet for the indigent population competing for scarce resources. European nations, he suggested, were driven to colonize by the pressures of burgeoning population, overproduction, and underconsumption. For Hegel, colonies represented an escape from the burdens and restrictions of European society and envisaged European peasants populating verdant and empty lands, making no mention of the people they might encounter there.

Demographic arguments persisted, especially among the nations without empires. One Italian politician in 1897 claimed that overpopulation forced large-scale immigration of Italians to rival European states and that the absence of space was a cause of poverty. Colonies would provide a much-desired outlet for this surplus population. Some believed that it was less safe and more expensive to bring under control 3 million hectares of land in Italy than to insure the prosperity of a large agricultural colony in Eritrea. Population, of course, was not the only surplus that flowed naturally to ultramarine possessions. Capital, too, searched for new markets. In 1898 American financial analyst Charles Conant (1861-1915) spoke of the irresistible tendency of great states to expand and advocated new outlets for American capital. He argued, ”The great industrial countries should turn to countries which have not yet felt the pulse of modern progress.”

It must not be forgotten that one of the main justifications for imperialism was that of gaining advantage in the competition among the European powers. The European empires watched each other constantly. They measured their behavior against each other and borrowed from each other’s practices. As Portugal’s Marques de Pombal (1699-1782) observed in the mid-1740s: ”All European nations have augmented themselves and are augmenting even today through reciprocal imitation, each one carefully keeps watch over the actions taken by the others (and), through their ministers, they take advantage of the utility of foreign inventions” (Carvalho e Melo 1986, p. 158).

Under the mercantilist system, each state aimed to secure the advantages of colonial trade by depriving competitor nations of access. To achieve this goal, the creation of monopolies was necessary. The conquest and maintenance of colonies was justified not only by bringing commodities to the European colonizing power and opening new markets for domestic manufacturers, but also by depriving rival nations of the benefits of that territory. All of the European empires endeavored to create a closed, monopolistic trading system so that all benefits of colonization would accrue to itself alone, rendering the empire self-sufficient and economically independent of the rest of the world.

Seventeenth-century English commercial writer Charles Davenant (1656-1714) claimed that, in matters of empire, ”whoever is the cause of another’s advancement is the cause of his own diminuition” (Davenant 1704, pt. 1, p. 205). A nation could not remain, in his view, unarmed and inactive, while other nations enlarged their dominions. In the late eighteenth century, Scottish economist Adam Smith (1723-1790) would show that the mercantile system had rendered less secure the long-term prosperity of the colonial power because its commerce, instead of running in a great number of small channels, had been taught to run principally in one great channel. But even though mercantilist assumptions about the profitability of a colonial monopoly gradually dissipated in the early nineteenth century, the justification of empire based on international rivalry persisted.

Allusions and analogies to the natural processes reached their peak in the biologistic justifications for empire offered by adherents to social Darwinism. This set of ideas played a key role in both imperial rivalry among European states and in the justification of empire over non-European people. In the effort to be fittest among their peers, social Darwinists justified rising military expenditure and increased national efficiency. Walter Bagehot (1826-1877), harnessing biology to defend liberal democracy in the 1870s, emphasized cultural rather than individual selection. He sought to prove that the institutions and practice of liberal democracy were the guarantors of evolutionary progress. ”In every particular state in the world,” Bagehot wrote in Physics and Politics (1872), ”those nations which are the strongest tend to prevail over the others; and in certain marked peculiarities the strongest tend to be the best.”

In 1886 the Russian sociologist Jacques Novikov defined the foreign policy of a state as the art of pursuing the struggle for existence among social organisms. Competition with other European states urged the securing of colonies to guarantee the raw material, land, and potential markets against their rivals. Theodore Roosevelt’s (1858-1919) The Strenuous Life (1900) warned against the possibility of elimination in an international struggle for existence. America, he said, could not shrink from hard contests for empire or else the bolder and stronger would pass them by and gain domination of the world. Successful imperial ventures thus were perceived to indicate the vitality, and hence fitness, of a nation.

Roosevelt’s ideas echoed the sentiment of the so-called Doctrine of World Empires, which maintained that great nations possessed empires. Not possessing an empire, or losing an existing one, would be a sign of being a third-rate, or declining, power. In 1877 French publicist Pierre Raboisson declared, ”The grandeur of empires always reaches its apogee when colonial expansion has reached its maximum, and their decadence always coincides with their loss of colonies”(Baumgart 1982, p. 70).

Similarly, Britain’s Herbert Asquith (1852-1928) interpreted European expansion as normal, necessary, and a sign of vitality in a growing nation. As they had been for mercantile nations until the eighteenth century, possessing colonies was a sign of national strength and an asset in the constant state of conflict among European nations. Yet even within a biologistic framework, the growth and consolidation of empires did not always tend toward war, but also could be the harbinger of peace. In 1898, dividing the world between living and dying nations, Lord Salisbury (1830-1903) argued, ”The living nations will eventually encroach on the territory of the dying, and the seeds and causes of conflict amongst civilized nations will speedily disappear” (Baumgart 1982, p. 72). In this way, biologistic conceptions of international relations made the acquisition of colonies imperative.

This essay has discussed European justifications for empire that persisted during its more than 500 years of world domination. The main justifications were evangelization, pursuit of the civilizing mission, racial superiority, trusteeship and development, and internal demographic and economic pressures. Yet while legions of the West’s leading political thinkers collaborated in legitimizing empire, many others lent their intellectual prowess to debunking such justifications. Sometimes unfavorable attitudes toward empire arose from their lack of profitability rather than moral censure. The utility of colonies, or plantations, was among the most contentious and least resolved issues debated by seventeenth-century English economic writers.

Roger Coke derogated their value, asserting: ”Ireland and our plantations rob us of all the growing youth and industry of the nation, whereby it becomes weak and feeble, and the strength as well as trade becomes decayed and diminished” (Paquette 2004, p. 77). William Petty (1623-1687) lamented on the treasury-draining impact of providing imperial defense for small, divided, and remote governments that are seldom able to defend themselves. He argued that defending these nations was too much of a financial burden and ultimately diminished national strength.

By the mid-eighteenth century, however, Denis Diderot (1713-1784), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), and J. G. Herder (1744-1803) all opposed imperial rule over non-European people on ethical rather than economic grounds. The views of these Enlightenment, anti-imperialist thinkers on issues of human nature, cultural diversity, and cross-cultural moral judgments served to undermine justifications for European overseas expansion. They rejected imperialism outright as unworkable, dangerous, or even immoral.

Diderot and his collaborator Abbe Raynal (17131796), for example, rejected imperialism not only because of its unhappy consequences for subjugated non-Europeans, but for its adverse impact on Europeans as well, whose prospects for peace, economic stability, and freedom were diminished by the quest for, and maintenance of, empire. Furthermore, Herder, Kant, and Diderot, as scholar Sankar Muthu has recently shown, shared a commitment to human dignity, rooted in the humanity of each individual. These authors presaged the attacks on empire that intellectuals, most notably Marxists, pursued in the twentieth.

Orientalism

Orientalism refers principally to the academic study during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries of the peoples, languages, and cultures of North Africa, the Middle East, and, to a lesser degree, South Asia. In art history, the term refers to a school of European painters of the nineteenth century who took the peoples of these regions as their primary subjects. Since the publication of Edward Said’s (1935-2003) widely influential study titled simply Orientalism (1978), the term has become pejorative, suggesting a critical orientation or mode of representation that privileges the Western over the Eastern or idealizes the East in a manner that reflects European desires and political and economic interests.

What is called, after Said, orientalist discourse, developed during the era of most active European colonialism, from the early 1800s to World War I (1914-1918). Among the first important works accurately called orientalist were those produced by figures associated with colonialist endeavors in North Africa and the Middle East, including the massive, twenty-four-volume Description de I’Egypte, produced by approximately 160 scholars who accompanied Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) on his ultimately failed expedition to conquer Egypt in 1798. The Description, completed in 1829, is typically orientalist in, on the one hand, the idealization of Egyptian people and places in its many beautifully rendered images, and, on the other, its overall concern with defining and classifying all the cultural and physical aspects of Egypt toward the ultimate objective of controlling its people and natural resources.

The nineteenth century can rightly be called the orientalist era in the arts, as works across the spectrum of literature and painting drew on the myth of the Orient that was being produced by the functionaries of colonialism and the scholars of philology. While French painters such as Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) and Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904) are widely regarded as the preeminent orientalists in the visual arts, the movement was widespread and included Frederick Arthur Bridgman (American, 1847-1928), Frederick Goodall (British, 1822-1904), Louis-Joseph Anthonissen (Belgian, 1849-1913), Ludwig Deutsch (German, 1855-1935), and Leopold Carl Muller (Austrian, 1834-1892). Orientalist literary artists include Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), and Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), to list only a very few.

Muslim women were a particular focus of orientalist artists. The "slave market," "harem," and "bath" received seemingly endless treatments. Gerome’s images characteristically give the impression of the voyeur who has lifted or pulled back the "veil" to reveal the hidden mystery of the Orient. Women’s bodies are erotically on display, often, in fact, under examination by some Arab buyer or slave trader. The precise response of a European audience to such images is difficult to ascertain, but generally the erotic construction of an Arab "other" appealed to a patriarchal sense of superiority and interest in control.

The matters of the European sense of superiority and interest in control can also be seen in orientalist scholarship. Non-Western societies were described as backward and barbaric, fundamentally incapable of social, political, or technological modernization. An important point is that the works of orientalist scholars were often not intentionally or explicitly motivated toward the interests of Western power. The assumptions of superiority and control were embedded in the scholarship, often despite the fact that an individual scholar might regard his or her subject very sympathetically. However, it is certainly true that whatever the disposition of the orientalist scholar, his or her work was a critical part of the general body of knowledge that facilitated and justified the control and exploitation of colonized peoples.

The publication in 1978 of Said’s study unleashed a fierce and continuing debate. The debate is wide ranging and contains multiple positions, though it can be roughly divided between two groups. Some believe Said’s work has overly politicized the academic study of non-Western peoples and unfairly characterized the work of devoted scholars. Others, particularly the generation of scholars who pursued their graduate work in the later 1980s and 1990s, hold that Said’s work is a particularly valuable contribution to the broad examination of the ideological assumptions and effects of intellectual works that purport to be disinterested.

Whatever the multiple positions in this rich debate, the influence of Said’s volume has been tremendous. Orientalism has been translated into at least thirty-six languages, including Hebrew and Vietnamese, gone through multiple editions, and is certainly one of the most cited works in the humanities and social sciences since 1978. The critique of orientalist work is at the center of entire new disciplines, such as postcolonial studies, which is concerned with the struggle of non-Western peoples to meaningfully represent themselves and their social, political, and cultural concerns to both Western and non-Western audiences and institutions.

British Empire

The term British Empire refers to political and geographical territories formerly under the control of the British Crown—either as colonies, dependencies, protectorates, mandates, or dominions. The coining of the term British Empire is mostly attributed to the Welsh astronomer, mathematician, and alchemist John Dee (1527-1608), who in a 1570 publication invoked ”this Incomparable Brytish Empire.” Although Great Britain came into official existence only with the Act of Union in 1707 unifying

England and Scotland, the term is generally applied to the English colonial realm before that date as well. In this entry, British Empire will be used in this sense, referring to all English, Scottish, and British colonial territories acquired since the early seventeenth century. Until 1707, the respective protagonists are referred to as England or Scotland, from then on only as Britain or Great Britain.

It is sometimes argued that the British Empire began with King Henry II (1133-1189) declaring himself lord of Ireland in 1171, but usually the origins of empire are associated with England’s expansion to overseas territories in North America in the early seventeenth century. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Britain’s empire advanced to global hegemony and reached its greatest expansion shortly after World War I (1914-1918), encompassing about a quarter of the world’s land area.

Decolonization after World War II (1939-1945) brought independence for most of Britain’s overseas territories during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 has often been described as the end of the British Empire—but even today there are a number of overseas territories remaining under British control, such as Anguilla, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, or the Falkland Islands. British colonial engagement is often described in two phases differing in their regional focus and the underlying concept of colonialism—the First British Empire from around 1600 to American independence, and the Second British Empire from then to decolonization.

THE FIRST BRITISH EMPIRE

England—and even more so Scotland—was a latecomer in European overseas activities. During the fifteenth century it completely lacked both the economic and strategic potential to participate in early colonialist endeavors. When England finally started to develop a taste for overseas trade and settlement in the mid-sixteenth century, Portugal and Spain had both firmly established themselves as transatlantic empires and extracted substantial profits from their American holdings. Hence, early English overseas activities, such as John Hawkins’s (1532-1595) three slaving expeditions to western Africa (1562-1586) or English buccaneering in the Caribbean, intruded into hitherto exclusively Portuguese and Spanish domains.

The resistance of the established colonial powers further delayed English overseas expansion. However, Sir Francis Drake’s (ca. 1543-1596) circumnavigation of the globe (1577-1580) and the victory over the Spanish Armada at Gravelines (1588) established England as a major naval power and facilitated private overseas engagement on any significant scale. At the same time, economic incentives for overseas trade emerged. North America offered rich fishing grounds and other resources (e.g., fur). Potential overseas markets became increasingly attractive to English producers and merchants when they lost access to Antwerp as the major cloth market during the Revolt of the Netherlands (1568-1609).

Humphrey Gilbert (ca. 1539-1583) established a settlement in Newfoundland in 1583, and Sir Walter Raleigh (ca. 1554-1618) founded a colony on Roanoke Island, Virginia, in 1585. Although both ventures had to be abandoned shortly after their founding, a first step toward English overseas expansion had been made. After peace with Spain in the Treaty of London (1604), English colonialism gained momentum. Jamestown in Virginia was founded in 1607 and became England’s first permanent settlement in North America. The colony was saved from severe economic distress by the introduction in 1612 of the tobacco plant, whose cultivation immediately proved to be a highly profitable venture.

Such bright economic prospects attracted other settlers from the motherland, and numerous new settlements were founded. When the Puritan Pilgrims established Plymouth Colony in 1620, they became the first religious separatists to seek refuge in North America and thus gave an example that was later followed by many other religious groups. Salem was founded furtherto the north in 1626. From the Salem settlement sprang in 1629 the Massachusetts Bay Company. The company secured itself a royal charter and was granted the administration of the colony. This practice proved successful and attracted large numbers of immigrants. By 1640, the colony boasted a total population of 11,500.

The English government saw North American colonization as a means to relieve rising population pressure in the home country, and the British encouraged emigration. Connecticut was founded in 1633, Maryland in 1634, and New Haven in 1638. The administration of the colonies rested with royally chartered joint-stock companies. In 1664 England seized New Amsterdam from the Dutch and renamed it New York. The influential Quaker William Penn (1644-1718) secured a royal charter in 1681 and established Pennsylvania as a refuge for his coreligionists. The settlement prospered and attracted a steady influx of European immigrants.

Further north, the Hudson Bay Company successfully tried to participate in the hitherto French-dominated fur trade from 1670 onwards. Territorial tensions between France and England increased and—in the course of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714)—culminated in the British takeover of Acadia (a region in eastern Canada) and Newfoundland in the Treaty of Utrecht in

BRITISH EMPIRE, KEY DATES

1570: Welsh astronomer, mathematician, and alchemist John Dee coins the term British Empire

1583: English explorer and nobleman Humphrey Gilbert establishes a settlement in Newfoundland

1585: English explorer and statesman Sir Walter Raleigh, Humphrey Gilbert’s step-brother, founds a colony on Roanoke Island, Virginia

1607: Jamestown, England’s first permanent North American settlement, is founded in Virginia

1620: The Puritan Pilgrims establish Plymouth Colony in present day Massachusetts

1620s: English colonization of the Caribbean commences with the settlement of Saint Kitts and Barbados

1626: Salem, Massachusetts, is established

1629: The Massachusetts Bay Company—a British enterprise that establishes the Massachusetts Bay Colony at present day Boston—is formed

1655: Britain takes Jamaica from Spain

1664: England seizes New Amsterdam from the Dutchand renames it New York

1681: William Penn secures a royal charter and establishes Pennsylvania

1713: The Treaty of Utrecht results in British takeover of Acadia (a region in eastern Canada) and Newfoundland

1765: The Stamp Act prompts colonial demonstrations and an import embargo of British goods

1773: The Tea Act culminates in the so-called Boston Tea Party

1776: Thirteen American colonies declare their independence

1783: The Treaty of Paris results in Britain’s acknowledgement of American independence and the end of the so-called First British Empire

1788: British colonization of Australia begins with the establishment of Sydney in New South Wales

1791: The separate provinces of Upper Canada and Lower Canada are established

1796: Britain takes Ceylon (Sri Lanka) from the Dutch

1806: British forces overtake the Dutch Cape Colony in South Africa

1840: New Zealand comes under British authority with the Treaty of Waitangi

1840: The two Canadas are reunited in the Act of Union

1842: Hong Kong falls to Britain with the Treaty of Nanjing

1858: The British Crown assumes direct control over India

1867: The British North America Act creates the Canadian Confederation

1870s: The era of “new imperialism” begins, leading to formal British control over wide parts of Africa, as well as imperial expansion in Asia and the Pacific

1876: Queen Victoria is proclaimed empress of India

1885: Britain occupies Burma

1918: Following World War I the British Empire reaches its greatest extent, but struggles to maintain control over its vast territories

1931: The Statute of Westminster and the Commonwealth of Nations give Britain’s white settler dominions full sovereignty or authority over their own affairs

1945: Post-World War II decolonization begins and continues through the 1960s, bringing gradual independence for most of Britain’s overseas territories

1947: India achieves independence, eventually leading to the partition of British India into Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India

1948: Ceylon and Burma achieve independence

1950s: African decolonization commences late in the decade

1961-1983: British colonies in the West Indies achieve independence

1997: Some consider the return of Hong Kong to China as the end of the British Empire

2006: A number of overseas territories remain under British control, including Anguilla, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, and the Falkland Islands

1713. The Transportation Act of 1718 made provisions for the transportation of convicted criminals from Britain to North America. Thus emigration to the colonies further increased.

Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, tensions between New France and New England and their European motherlands mounted again and finally led to the global Seven Years’ War (1754-1763 in the North American colonies, where it was called the French and Indian War; 1756-1763 in Europe). After winning the war, Britain took over the remaining French possessions in America. Only Louisiana went to Spain as compensation for the British occupation of Florida. By 1760, the British colonies in North America housed 1.6 million inhabitants—rising to 2.7 million only twenty years later. This population explosion was mainly due to the large-scale immigration of Europeans and African slaves, as well as to high natural population growth resulting from the comparatively favorable living conditions in the American colonies.

The Caribbean had been a stage for English activity since the middle of the sixteenth century. Tolerated—at times even encouraged—by the British Crown, privateers like Sir Francis Drake harassed the Spanish in the region. English colonization commenced only in the 1620s with the settlement of Saint Kitts and Barbados. Jamaica was taken from Spain in 1655. These new holdings immediately attracted European planters as the land proved well suited for the cultivation of tobacco and sugarcane.

The early tobacco plantations were mostly run as smallholdings and employed mainly convicts or ”indentured” labor from Europe. Falling world-market prices for tobacco and competition from Virginia soon rendered small-scale tobacco farming unprofitable. Sugar, on the other hand, enjoyed favorable market conditions and promised quick and large profits. Although intensive in capital and labor, sugar cultivation attracted many planters and investors. The abundance of suitable land and the availability of imported slave labor led to the ”sugar revolution” of 1630 to 1670, when large parts of the Caribbean were completely transformed into tropical export economies based on huge, slave-run, European-owned production units. The early years swelled the planters’ coffers with immense profits and—although the profit margin had narrowed to about 5 percent by then—Caribbean sugar cultivation remained a profitable venture well into the 1820s.

Trade with Africa attracted English merchants from the early sixteenth century onwards. However, English engagement on the West African coast remained marginal at first. Mostly short-lived factories were established during the first half of the seventeenth century. These concentrated mainly on trade in redwood and gold. Only when the ”sugar revolution” in the Caribbean led to rising labor demands that could not be satisfied with European convict or indentured labor anymore did the slave trade arise as a profitable business.

The English entered the slave trade—originally dominated by Portuguese and later Dutch merchants— from the 1640s onwards and established slaving stations on the West African coast. Founded in 1672, the Royal African Company was granted the English monopoly on the slave trade and provided the North American and Caribbean plantations with African slave labor. The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 eventually granted to the British the exclusive right to supply slaves to Spanish America—the so-called asiento. Hence, the British emerged as the dominant protagonists in what became known as triangular trade. British ships loaded slaves in Africa and sold these slaves in the Caribbean, loading sugar in exchange. They brought the sugar back to Europe, exchanging it for rum and other processed goods, which they finally sold in Africa, thus completing the triangle. Following reasonable estimates, the (triangular) slave trade brought between 9.5 and 11.5 million African slaves to American plantations from the sixteenth century until the abolition of the slave trade (1802-1833).

Since the beginning of colonization, the economic relations between the motherland and the American colonies were based on mercantilist trade doctrines. Mercantilism rested on the belief that the wealth of a country depended exclusively on the amount of gold and silver that it possessed (bullionism). Mercantilism, therefore, required a favorable balance of trade, with the home country’s exports to the colonies being larger than its imports. To achieve such a favorable balance of trade, mercantilist countries restricted and protected overseas trade. The English Parliament did so by passing the first Navigation Act in 1651, reserving imports from the colonies for English merchants. Five more Navigation Acts between 1660 and 1773 extended the reach of the acts. Mercantilist trade protectionism and the seemingly arbitrary imposition of various duties and taxes during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries continually annoyed the colonies and led to their gradual alienation from Britain.

Although Britain took over French possessions in America after the Seven Years’ War, the war had been a costly enterprise. Convinced that the French and Indian War had been mostly a colonial affair benefiting the American holdings, London tried to recover its war expenses by increasing the financial burden of the colonies. In 1764 Britain halved import taxes on West Indian products and simultaneously cracked down on smuggling. A year later, the infamous Stamp Act imposed a levy on the issuing of all legal documents in the American colonies.

The colonists regarded the stamp duty as extremely unjust and staged an import embargo of British goods and demonstrations throughout the colonies. The duty soon proved to be uncollectible and the Stamp Act had to be repealed in 1766. To compensate for this defeat, the British Parliament issued a Declaratory Act that emphasized its full legal authority in North America. However, this act remained mostly a dead letter. Duties on tea and manufactured imports introduced in 1767 had to be abolished after only two years due to the noncooperation of the colonists. Britain responded with the threat of force and stationed a garrison at Boston in 1770. Several local outbreaks of violence in the following years further alienated Britain and America.

The implementation of the detested Tea Act in 1773, cementing the English East India Company’s qua-simonopoly of the American tea trade, intensified the conflict and culminated in the so-called Boston Tea Party of 1773. American activists—symbolically masked as Indians—seized a shipload of tea and threw it into the sea. The conflict escalated and led to violent clashes between the “Patriots” on the American side and the “Loyalists.”

However fierce, American resistance against British authority had never aimed at full independence from Great Britain until then. Only when Britain refused to enter into negotiations did thirteen American colonies declare their independence in 1776. With the help of French forces, the colonies finally managed to defeat a substantial British force sent to suppress the rebellion. The Treaty of Paris ended hostilities in 1783, and Britain had to acknowledge American independence.

Attempts of the United States to conquer the remaining British colonies in former French Canada were fended off. Although lacking representation in London and at times badly neglected, the Canadian colonies remained loyal to Britain. As stout Catholics, the Canadians feared religious discrimination at the hands of the new Americans.

By 1783, the first white decolonization of modern times had been successful, and a new state—or rather a federation of states—had arisen. As such, American independence not only inspired the French Revolution and Latin American independence movements, but it also marked the end of the so-called First British Empire. In this first phase, British colonialism focused mainly on the white settlement colonies in North America whose economic relations with the motherland were built around strict mercantilist beliefs. Although the loss of its most populous and economically important American colonies did not ultimately ruin Great Britain—as had often been predicted by contemporaries—the focus of the British

Empire had to be drastically readjusted. And readjusted it was by shifting it to the East and by heeding the louder and louder pleas for free trade.

THE SECOND BRITISH EMPIRE

When the Spanish Crown decided to fund Christopher Columbus’s (1451-1506) ill-planned and little promising voyage—eventually leading to the “discovery” of the New World in 1492—it did so out of the desire to find a westward passage to Asia. Portugal’s Bartholomeu Dias (ca. 1450-1500) had just recently circumnavigated the Cape of Good Hope and reached the Indian Ocean. Spain saw itself at a serious disadvantage, and funding Columbus’s voyage was an act of desperation.

The colonial potential of the New World was tremendously underestimated. Hence, when Vasco da Gama (ca. 1469-1524) finally reached India in 1498, Portugal’s access to the rich Indian Ocean trade seemed far more valuable than Spain’s newly acquired hegemony over the New World. Although this notion proved to be wrong, and Europe’s colonial focus rested on the Americas for the next 250 years, the Indian Ocean trade emerged as an extremely profitable affair for the European sea powers as well.

The Dutch entered the Indian Ocean trade, originally dominated by the Portuguese, in the late sixteenth century. When its holdings in the region began to run at a loss in the seventeenth century, Portugal refocused its attention on Brazil and left the East to the Dutch newcomers. The latter established the Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, or Dutch East India Company) in 1602, granting to it a monopoly on Dutch-Asian trade. During the seventeenth century, the VOC clearly dominated European trade in the Indian Ocean.

The VOC’s English counterpart, the East India Company (EIC)—although founded two years earlier in 1600—could not compete with the VOC initially. It commanded less capital and lacked the long-term perspectives and planning of the VOC. In its first years, the EIC managed to establish a small network of bases and factories on the Indian coast, including Malaya, Java, Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Japan, but it was soon expelled from the spice regions and the East Asian trade by the Dutch. The EIC had to content itself with a small number of factories on the Indian Subcontinent.

With the consent of the Mughal emperor, who controlled about 70 percent of the Indian Subcontinent, the EIC founded a factory at the port of Surat in 1613. Fort Saint George in Madras (Chennai) was built in 1641. Ten years later, the EIC established a foothold in Bengal. In 1668 it acquired Bombay (Mumbai).

With the turn of the century, market conditions started to favor the EIC. Demand for cotton increased in Europe and America, where the slave laborers needed cheap clothing. While the VOC concentrated almost exclusively on the spice trade, the EIC had access to the Indian cotton and textile market. Countering the VOC’s imports of Javanese coffee, the EIC became the prime importer of Chinese tea to Europe. Thus, by the middle of the eighteenth century, the Dutch company had lost its trade supremacy in Asia. The English East Indian Company had become the single most important merchant company trading with Asia.

Although the VOC had never aimed at the creation of a Dutch overseas empire, it was the first European power in the Indian Ocean to bring larger territories under its direct domination. This practice soon proved to be economically beneficial to the VOC by giving the company direct and cheap access to local markets and a certain security of investment—albeit combined with skyrocketing administration costs.

The EIC soon followed the VOC’s example. When the local ruler (nawab) of Bengal occupied Fort William at Calcutta in 1756 to end the EIC’s trade monopoly in Bengal, the company sent an army from Madras and eventually defeated the nawab’s forces in the Battle of Plassey (1757). The EIC succeeded the nawab as direct ruler of Bengal. The Mughal emperor granted the company full rights of jurisdiction and taxation and made the EIC the legal sovereign of a vast territory on the Indian subcontinent. The company’s new role was financially extremely profitable. Much of the ongoing struggle with the French Compagnie des Indes (Company of the Indies) over trade supremacy in India was funded with the new gains. The EIC conquered the French stronghold Pondicherry in 1761 and thereby marginalized the French position in India (although Pondicherry was eventually returned to France in the Treaty of Paris in 1763).

Being, after all, a private and profit-oriented enterprise, the EIC ruthlessly exploited its Indian territories. Hence, it initially extracted large profits from its holdings. Nevertheless, the company steered into financial trouble in the 1770s. Administration costs and shareholder dividends were steadily rising. In the end, the EIC had to ask the British government for help. A loan was granted on the condition of immediate administrative reforms in India. The Regulating Act was passed in 1773 and aimed at stabilizing and regulating company rule in India. The India Act of 1784 tried to intensify government control over the EIC and established the Board of Control. The act also prohibited any further expansion of the company’s territory in India.

Despite such regulations, the EIC soon waged war against the French-backed sultan of Mysore and eventually conquered Mysore in 1799. War against the Maratha Empire followed and ended with an EIC victory in 1818. Like Mysore, the Maratha territory came under direct company rule. Other princely states on the subcontinent were able to retain formal independence, but were closely bound to the company. Thus, by 1818, practically the whole Indian Subcontinent had come under formal or informal EIC control. In 1824 parts of Burma (Myanmar) were annexed. After a series of clashes with the Sikh state of the Punjab, the company defeated the Sikhs and annexed the Punjab in 1849.

Although the British military forces proved to be very effective, EIC administration in India was less so. The company’s pronounced focus on economic exploitation and its total lack of intercultural competence finally led to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Triggered by rumors that the cartridges of the new Enfield rifle were greased with pork and beef fat—an alleged practice offensive to Muslim and Hindu soldiers alike—parts of the Indian sepoy troops revolted against British domination. The rebellion took the EIC by complete surprise and proved to be a formidable challenge to British rule. Lacking unifying leadership and an overall purpose, the uprising was eventually suppressed by British forces in 1858. However, the rebellion had made obvious that the EIC could not handle the administration of India in a just and effective manner. Thus, the British Crown took over the company’s possessions in 1858 and assumed direct control over India. It reorganized the administrative structure and established a conservative administration resting largely on collaboration with traditional local elites. In 1876 Queen Victoria (1819-1901) was proclaimed empress of India.

During his famous explorations in the 1770s, Captain James Cook (1728-1779) discovered a promising replacement for the thirteen American colonies—Australia. The continent proved to be of prime strategic importance. Australia emerged as an important settlement colony— and the new destination for convict transports. Sydney in New South Wales was founded in 1788 and soon prospered. By 1810, New South Wales boasted five major settlements. The land was perfectly suited for sheep husbandry, and Australia alone satisfied 50 percent of Britain’s exploding demand for raw wool by 1850. In that year, New South Wales already had 265,000 inhabitants, Tasmania had 70,000, and South Australia had 64,000. Only Western Australia lagged behind with a population of merely 4,600. Immigration to Australia was further stimulated by the discovery of rich gold deposits in 1851.

In 1855 the crown colonies New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania were granted self-government within the British Empire. More sparsely populated Queensland and Western Australia followed this example in 1859 and 1890 respectively. New Zealand had come under British authority in 1840 with the Treaty of Waitangi between the British Crown and the Maori chiefs. It achieved self-government in 1852.

The remaining North American colonies were reorganized in 1791. About 50,000 loyalist refugees had swelled Quebec’s population after 1783 and introduced a substantial English-speaking element in the former French colony. Acknowledging this, the separate provinces of Upper Canada (today Ontario) and Lower Canada (Quebec) were established in 1791. Only in 1840 were the Canadas reunited in the Act of Union. The British North America Act of 1867 widened the union and created the Canadian Confederation.

The British Empire further expanded in Africa and Asia during the Napoleonic Wars. Ceylon (Sri Lanka) was taken from the Dutch in 1796. At the Battle of the Nile in 1798, Britain repelled the French invasion of Egypt, and firmly established its influence in the Mediterranean. After a short-lived occupation in 1795, British forces took over the Dutch Cape Colony in South Africa in 1806. Java was occupied as well, but was eventually handed back to the Netherlands after the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

Both the South African colonies and Ceylon became strategically and economically important to the British Empire. British colonists started to arrive at Cape Colony in significant numbers from 1820 onwards. The original Boer settlers left British territory and founded the Boer colonies of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. From 1815 onwards, Ceylon’s interior was systematically opened up and transformed into a plantation economy producing coffee and later tea. Elsewhere in Asia, Britain expanded its holdings as well. The Straits Settlement on the Malay Peninsula was established as a crown colony in 1826. Hong Kong fell to Britain with the Treaty of Nanjing that ended the First Opium War in 1842.

The old mercantilist practices of trade protectionism were gradually abandoned after the American Revolution and replaced by ideas of free trade. The Scottish economist Adam Smith (1723-1790) published his influential An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776 and contributed to the popularization of the laissez-faire approach. Both the character of Britain as well as that of its empire started to change in the mid-eighteenth century. On the one hand, industrialization had gripped Britain and made its economy highly flexible and dynamic. On the other hand, the nature of the British Empire had changed as a whole. Having lost the most populous of its settlement colonies, the empire rested more and more on the mainly Asian colonies of domination. These territories often boasted dense indigenous populations and were closely integrated in centuries-old trade systems. Mercantilism soon proved to be too inflexible and restrictive to fully exploit the economic potential of the new empire. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, ideas of free trade became more and more accepted and quickened the pace of empire building.

After 1858, India manifested its position as the nucleus of Britain’s second empire—the ”Jewel in the Crown.” Ideas of ”white superiority,” ”benevolent despotism,” and the ”white man’s burden” began to shape relations between the ”colonizers” and the ”colonized.” Unlike European engagement in the Americas, South Africa, or Australia, British colonialism in India, Burma, Malaya, and Ceylon lacked the significant participation of European settlers. Instead, these regions experienced an influx of European business agents and planters.

Following the Caribbean example, large-scale cash crop cultivation was introduced to wide parts of the region in the early nineteenth century. Yielding to the influence of the planting community and the European absentee investors, the colonial administration more often than not focused its attention on the welfare of the export economy and neglected the indigenous sector. British industrialization cheapened textile production and European-manufactured clothing flooded the Indian market, thereby swiftly ruining the important Indian cotton sector. This process of ”deindustrializa-tion,” along with increasing population pressure, led to the emergence of widespread landlessness and the creation of an agricultural wage-labor force in (South) India. Following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the 1830s, South India’s excess labor was exported to the plantation regions of the empire under the indenture system.

Between the late eighteenth century and the era of ”new imperialism” starting in the 1870s, Britain did not experience serious competition from other European powers in its empire-building efforts. However, France started to recover from its internal problems in the middle of the nineteenth century. And the German unification of 1871 created another global player longing for colonial expansion. Italy developed similar ambitions. Internal rivalries between these powers made them over-ambitious colonizers and heralded the period of ”new imperialism.”

But the more accessible and economically attractive parts of the world had already been colonized (or even decolonized)—only most of Africa and large parts of the Pacific had been spared as yet. Thus began what has been aptly described as the ”Scramble for Africa.” The major European powers started to occupy territories in Africa. Britain secured control over the Suez Canal by occupying Egypt in 1882. Most of southern Africa, modern Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Nigeria, and the Gold Coast in western Africa followed.

During the partition of Africa, European rivalry manifested itself in numerous crises. French and British interests, for instance, clashed in the Fashoda Incident of 1898 when both countries strove to establish themselves in Sudan and complete their north-to-south (British) or west-to-east (French) territorial connections. Outside Africa, Britain’s adoption of new imperialism led to the complete occupation of Burma in 1885 and its annexation to British India in 1886.

While the era of new imperialism saw the establishment of formal British control over wide parts of Africa and imperial expansion in Asia and the Pacific, a first devolution of power took place in the white settler colonies of North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Self-government had already been granted to most of these colonies when the British North America Act raised Canada to dominion status in 1867. The federations of Australia and South Africa (including the self-governing territories of the Orange Free State and Transvaal) acquired dominion status in 1901 and 1910, respectively. New Zealand had chosen not to join the Australian federation and was made a dominion in 1907. However, the motherland retained legislative authority over the dominions (consolidated by the Colonial Laws Validity Act of 1865) until the creation of the Commonwealth of Nations in 1931. The dominions’ foreign relations were also centrally administered through the Foreign Office in London, and the British monarch remained the head of state in the dominions.

Britain had not seriously resisted the settlement colonies’ pursuit of home rule. On the contrary, in an empire of free trade it feared little economic loss and anticipated financial relief due to lower administration costs. However, in its colonies of domination the empire fiercely clung to direct control and was little willing to devolve power.

Aggressive colonial policy, combined with mounting intra-European tensions, eventually led to the outbreak of World War I in 1914. After four years of global warfare, the victors (particularly France and Britain) took over most of the colonies of the defeated. Britain inherited most of the German colonies in Africa and acquired League of Nations mandates over Palestine and Iraq, both former territories of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. The British Empire had reached its greatest extent, but found it increasingly hard to maintain control over its vast territories. Britain’s economy lay in ruins and local nationalist movements demanded concessions recognizing the colonies’ exhaustive financial and military support of the British war effort.

On that background, Egypt was granted quasi-independence in 1922 with British soldiers remaining solely at the Suez Canal. The Indian nationalist movement gained momentum after World War I and could not be satisfied with the half-hearted reforms of 1919 and 1935. However, as in other colonies, the Indian nationalist movement was mainly carried by local elites and thus did not initially aim at total independence but at increased political and economic autonomy within the empire. Accordingly, excluding the case of Ireland, Egypt remained the only decolonized colony of domination until the end of World War II, while the white settler dominions had achieved full sovereignty over their affairs with the Statute of Westminster and the creation of the Commonwealth of Nations in 1931.

But after World War II, the pace of decolonization quickened immediately. Facing a serious economic crisis, the government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee (1883-1967) saw no gains in keeping up colonial control over South Asia. India achieved independence in 1947; Ceylon and Burma followed a year later. Britain’s sudden loss of interest in South Asia, combined with the diverse notions of local nationalist movements, rendered decolonization a thoroughly unorganized and hurried affair. Indian decolonization eventually led to the partition of British India into Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India, a development that was accompanied by a mass exodus on both sides and the death of over one million people in the resulting atrocities.

African decolonization commenced only in the late 1950s. Britain’s territories in Africa had been important for the motherland’s economic recovery after the war. But now Britain yielded to rising national consciousness in the colonies and released Sudan (1956), Nigeria (1960), Sierra Leone (1961), Tanganyika (1961), Uganda (1962), Kenya (1963), Zambia (1964), Malawi (1964), Gambia (1965), Botswana (1966), and Swaziland (1968). In most of these cases, the devolution of power worked comparatively smoothly. In Rhodesia, however, the presence of a substantial and influential white settler community complicated matters and eventually led to terrorism and guerrilla warfare. Rhodesia became modern Zimbabwe only in 1980.

In the West Indies, the creation of the West Indies Federation in 1958 was meant to satisfy local desire for increased autonomy. However, the largest members— Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago—left the federation in 1961 and 1962 to become fully independent. The federation was dissolved and the remaining members became British colonies again. They achieved full independence in 1966 (Barbados), 1974 (Grenada), 1978 (Dominica), 1979 (Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines), 1981 (Antigua and Barbuda), and 1983 (Saint Kitts and Nevis). British Guyana and British Honduras on the American mainland became independent in 1966 and 1981, respectively

”Highways of Empire.” This poster, showing Britain at the center of the world and its colonies and former colonies in red, was issued in 1927 by the British Empire Marketing Board to promote the purchase of goods produced in the British Empire.

With the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997, Britain handed back its last remaining crown colony. However, Great Britain today still controls strategically or financially important territories outside the British Isles, including Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, the Falkland Islands, Montserrat, Saint Helena, the Turks and Caicos islands, Gibraltar, and Pitcairn.

While British decolonization has been practically completed with the return of Hong Kong, the legacy of the British Empire still reverberates in the political, economic, social, and cultural makeup of the world today. The emergence of the English language as the international lingua franca and the spread of the English legal system are parts of this heritage. The dissemination of European religious and cultural ideas throughout the world needed the vehicle of European expansion in general. The British Empire, in particular, made possible the worldwide spread of the Church of England and Puritanism.

British culture and lifestyle also influenced the emergence of national identities after decolonization. British sports, most prominently cricket, remain a favorite pastime in many former colonies. On the other hand, the hurried decolonization in large parts of Asia and Africa often left behind a geopolitical landscape full of unresolved ethnical, political, or economic issues leading to violent clashes, civil war, or international conflicts. Apartheid policy in South Africa, violence in Rhodesia/ Zimbabwe, the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Sinhala-Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka, and the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan all have their roots in British imperial policy and decolonization.

Much of the ethnic composition of the United States, the Caribbean, parts of the Pacific, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia today has its origins in forced (slavery) or semiforced (the indenture system) labor migration within the British Empire. Similarly, the obvious or at times only latent racism displayed by the British colonizers towards the colonized contributed to the development of modern racist prejudice. On the other hand, the multiethnic composition of large parts of Britain today has its roots in the open British immigration policy towards former colonial subjects and commonwealth citizens.

The final question of whether the British Empire has been a boon or a bane to the colonial territories has been asked often, but cannot be answered satisfactorily. Advocates of empire—in accordance with the colonizers themselves—advance the argument that colonialism actually brought economic and political development to hitherto underdeveloped countries and regions. More critical scholars argue that colonialism in general and British imperialism in particular brought about a transfer of wealth from the periphery to the core and thus, in fact, delayed or prevented sustainable development in the colonies.

Edward Said

1935-2003

Edward Said is recognized as one of the most influential literary critics of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Said’s contributions to postcolonial and critical theory, the humanities, cultural studies, social geography, and the social sciences evade easy categorization given the startling breadth and range of his thought. Influenced by Michel Foucault, Giambattista Vico, Georg Lukacs, Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, and Theodor Adorno and a self-proclaimed admirer of Sigmund Freud, Said was among the first to introduce American academic audiences to structuralism, poststructuralism, and to a lesser extent deconstruction.

A critical scholar nevertheless deeply committed to humanism, Said was also a public intellectual known for his eloquent commitment to Palestinian self-determination. Born in Jerusalem, Said fled with his family to Cairo in 1948 and a few years later relocated to the United States. He studied at Princeton and then at Harvard, where he wrote a PhD dissertation on Joseph Conrad, then joined Columbia in 1963. Unexpectedly moved by the profound injustice of the dispossession of the Palestinians, with whom he increasingly identified as an exiled intellectual, he found the Six Days War of 1967 a politicizing moment and significant turning point in his life. Over the next several decades Said became a frequent commentator on U.S. foreign policy and Middle Eastern politics. He was a regular contributor to Al-Hayat (a London-based Arab daily) and Al-Ahram Weekly (an Egyptian daily) as well as serving as the music critic for the Nation.

Said is best known for his groundbreaking work Orientalism (1978). Widely acknowledged as a cornerstone text for postcolonial studies, this acclaimed work has also had profound influences on social geography, cultural studies, and radical history. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of discourse, Said exposes Orientalism as a Western system of thought that is linked to imperialism and the establishment of cultural hegemony and is an essentializing discourse that effectively produces the "Orient" as the West’s "other." Orientalism observes the West observing the Middle East, Arabs, and Islam, and two further volumes in the triology, The Question ofPalestine (1979) and Covering Islam (1981), sustain this focus. In the trilogy’s 1993 sequel, Culture and Imperialism, Said expands these insights to explore a more generalized relationship between cultural production and empire. In the latter text he draws on European writing (and one musical piece, Verdi’s Aida) on Africa, India, the Far East, Australia, and the Caribbean to show how an imperialist imagination is embedded in cultural production and how cultures of resistance to imperialism emerge in a context of decolonization.

The Question of Palestine (1979) was Said’s first major text on Palestine, and in it he endeavors to establish a broadly representative Palestinian perspective for a Western, and primarily an American, audience. This particular text documents the historical and political dispossession and erasure of the Palestinians by Zionist colonization and thus differs distinctly from Orientalism, which drew mainly on literary texts. However, in method Said effectively demonstrates that a hegemonic cultural attitude toward Islam, the Arabs, and the Orient is what makes the ongoing colonial violence against the Palestinians a possibility. Thus the "Palestinian problem" is a materialized effect of Orientalism. Covering Islam proceeds similarly but with a focus on the Western media’s role in representing, and imagining, Islam. Other books on Palestine include The Politics of Dispossession (1994), After the Last Sky (1986), Blaming the Victims (1988), and The End of the Peace Process (2000).

Said’s wide-ranging and often controversial thought is rooted in literary theory. His dissertation on Joseph Conrad’s letters was influenced by the Geneva school, a vein of literary criticism rooted in the phenomenological thought of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and became his first book, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (1966). For Said, Conrad’s letters revealed the uncertainty, difficulty, and reflexive struggle of a self-exiled Pole, an articulate writer who was nevertheless disoriented and not quite sure of his place in the world. An interest in the condition of the exiled writer, a theme that continues through his life’s work, is palpably present in this first book.

Said’s second book, Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975), began to establish his reputation as one of America’s foremost literary critics, as the text drew on contemporary French theory in its concerns to shift from theological "origins" to the problem of a secular "beginning" point for critical theory, where human action makes history, and a history of change. The text explores the relation of literature to philosophy, psychology, and critical theory through an engagement with the writings of Freud, Foucault, Freidrich Nietzsche, and Vico as well as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Giles Deleuze, and Claude Levi-Strauss.

The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983) is an early "bridging" text of Said’s thought. This integrative and synthetic work is interested in the material contexts—the "worldliness"—of writing. Increasingly impatient with an academic domestication of poststructuralist and decon-structive theories of textuality, Said argues that critical scholarship must be situated in material struggles so that the critic does not lose sight of the political context in which intellectual pursuits become possible. The text is an early critique of the narrow confines of academic discipli-narity, which Said argues is implicated in a tamed specialization of intellectual inquiry. His deep commitments to humanism are evident in this text, and he returns again to these themes in a series of lectures given at Columbia University, posthumously published under the title Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004). In this text Said reflects on the tensions between humanist, structuralist, and poststructuralist modes, and he suggests that although humanism is critiqued as essentializing and totalizing, a commitment to the humanistic ideals of justice and equality are nevertheless crucial for a critical scholar. Throughout his vast and disparate body of work, Said maintains a critical posture within humanism, a "contrapuntal" awareness perhaps made possible by the condition of being an exilic, border intellectual.

A talented pianist, Said also wrote extensively on music’s relation to society, and his critical writings often draw on musical metaphors. Musical Elaborations (1991), Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002), and the posthumously published On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain (2006) exemplify his significant contributions to this interdisciplinary area of humanistic study. In 2003 Said died in New York after a decade-long battle with leukemia.