Ania Loomba
Imperialism
Imperialism means, “a system in which
a country rules other countries, sometimes having used force to get power over
them” or another definition is “a situation in which one country has a lot of
power or influence over others, especially in political and economic matters”.
Imperialism has evolved since the struggle between prehistoric clans for scarce
food and resource but it has retained its bloody roots.
Key point
Imperialism is the expansion of a
nation’s authority over other nations through the acquisition of land or the
imposition of economic political domination.
The age of imperialism is typified by
the colonization of the Americas between the 15th and 19th
centuries, as well as the expansion of the united state, Japan and the European
powers during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Throughout history, many indigenous
societies and cultures have been destroyed by imperialistic expansion.
Political Theory
Imperialism is no more than an
inevitable result of the wealthy nations attempt to maintain their positions in
the world’s balance of power. The theory holds that the actual purpose of
imperialism is to minimize the nation’s military and political vulnerability.
The Age of Imperialism
The Age of Imperialism spanned between
the years 1500 and 1914. During the early 15th to the late 17th centuries,
European powers such as England, Spain, France, Portugal, and Holland acquired
vast colonial empires. During this period of “Old Imperialism” the European
nations explored the New World seeking trade routes to
the Far East and—often violently—establishing settlements in North and South
America as well as in Southeast Asia. It was during this period that some of
imperialism’s worst human atrocities took place.
Imperialism can be in the form of a
colony where a foreign country is in control of a protectorate with the local
government controlled by a foreign country. Before the independence we saw the
British government ruled on the Indian people and after independence we see the
British government go away and then United state America not like the British
people but some of them rules and regulation ruled in the India. Imperialism is
in many ways.
Colonialism
Colonialism is the
practice of establishing territorial dominion over a colony by an outside
political power characterized by exploitation, expansion, and maintenance of
that territory. From 1870s to 1900s, parts of the world were subjected to
colonialism. It started with European aggression, diplomatic pressures,
forceful invasion, and eventually colonization of those places. The societies
that faced this form of imperialism put up resistance to deny the Europeans the
chance to impose their domination.
Origin of the
colonialism
Colonialism
was a borrowed term to differentiate it from other types of expansionism. The
word “colony” is borrowed from the Latin word colonia which means “a place for
agriculture.” From the eleventh to eighteen centuries, the Vietnamese people
founded colonies outside their place which they later absorbed through a
process called namtien. The ancient type of
colonialism gave birth to the modern colonialism which came into effect during
the “Age of Discovery” where the Spain and Portugal discovered the South and
Central Americas during their sea traveling.
Colonialism reshaped existing structure
of human knowledge. No branch of learning was left untouched by the colonial
experience. The definition of civilization and barbarism rests on the
production of an irreconcilable difference between ‘black’ and ‘white’ self and
other. Colonialism expanded the contact between European and non-Europeans,
generating a flood of images and ideas on an unprecedented scale.
Colonialism and Postcolonialism
The giant composite
field of colonialism and postcolonialism studies has had a transforming effect
on virtually every academic field in the humanities and social sciences.
Anthropologists have been particularly innovative users of its
multidisciplinary perspectives, and have responded with vigour and creativity
when accused by practitioners of its deconstructive critiques of being
‘handmaidens’ of colonial power and heirs to the subjugating knowledge
strategies that underpinned imperial rule. In reality and any simple binary
opposition between ‘colonisers’ and colonised or between races is undercut by
the fact that there are enormous cultural and racial difference within each of
these categorises as well as cross over between them.
Race, class and colonialism
In the race, class and
colonialism they have been two broad tendencies in analyses of race and
ethnicity, the first, which steam from Marxist analysis, can be referred to as
the ‘economic’ because it regards social grouping, including racial once, as
largely determined and explained by economic structure processes. Colonialism
was the means through which capitalism achieved its global its global
expansion. Racism simply facilitated this process, and was the conduit through
which has been called ‘sociological’, and derives partly from the work of max
weber argues that economic explanations are insufficient for understanding the
racial features of colonised societies.
Globalisation and the future
of postcolonial studies
from the 11th
September 2001, the so-called global war on terror and the US invasion of
Afghanistan and Iraq, it is harder than ever to see our world as simply
‘postcolonial’. Globalisation, they argue, cannot be analysed using concepts
like margins and centres so central to postcolonial studies. Michel Hardt and
Antonio Negri’s Empire argues that the contemporary global order has produced a
new form of sovereignty which should be called “Empire” but which is best
understood in contrast to European empire.
