Colonial Expansion

W. Reinhard, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001

 There was no master plan

 often it happened as an unintentional consequence of some other action
 typical sequence occurred again and agan
 preventive occupation to keep out possible competitors

Countries used colonial expansion

 The Portuguese used this in sixteenth-century Brazil.

 Most European powers in nineteenth-century Africa.

 Colonies were expected to be profitable. At least they had to finance their own government.
 The famous British model of indirect rule did originate much less from political wisdom or respect for other civilizations than from the
necessity to keep administration costs down. In reality national budgets only profited from colonial empires in exceptional cases, because
infrastructural costs were considered the responsibility of the government, whereas colonial profits remained private.

The most common individual motives for participating in colonial activities

 Desire for extra profits and improvement of social status

- These were certainly not the only motives, but they were almost never absent. Of course, their character changed over time.

 Missionary zeal
- also changed over time. Instead of spreading the gospel and European civilization, modern colonizers followed the urge of a civilizing
mission to educate barbarians.

 In the age of imperialism, however, it became common conviction that inferior races could not be ‘improved,’ but were doomed to serve or to
die. Thus colonial adventurers could feel entitled to pose without restraint as the master race.

From the fifteenth to the twentieth century colonies usually represented one of three basic types, sometimes as a mixture:

(a) Trade and/or military bases such as the stronghold system of the Portuguese trade empire or Britain's naval bases in the nineteenth century or
the frontier forts of the US, Spanish ecclesiastical missions sometimes served a similar purpose.

(b) Colonies of settlement, probably the primitive type of colony, especially when combined with a kind of stronghold as in the case of the roman
‘Colonia.’ Larger settlement colonies could only be founded at the expense of indigenous people who were either removed (New England) or
transformed into a dependent labor force for an ‘improved’ economy (Spanish America, Algeria) or replaced by workers of foreign origin (Africans
in the Caribbean, East Indians in Guyana).

(c) Colonies of exploitation with only a small number of members of the ruling people present most of them only temporarily, to run business,
administration, and defense. Parts of colonial Latin America resembled that type, but it became the dominating type during nineteenth and
twentieth century colonialism with British India as the prototype and much of Africa to follow.

 Colonies of exploitation could not be ruled without massive collaboration of indigenous people.
 In reality, a broad range of options to cope quite successfully with colonial domination ranging between complete acceptance of western
patterns of behavior and very subtle methods of boycott was available to indigenous people, to some extent even to African slaves (see
Slaves/Slavery, History of).
 The traditional contrast between colonial lords as active initiators of colonial processes and colonial subjects who had no choice but to
suffer passively or at best to react against the actions of their betters has been questioned. But to believe after decolonization that
colonial rule was only a short episode without much impact on the colonies seems to be an anticolonialist oversimplification.

Tribe

The notion of tribe emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the course of colonial expansion. . Abandoned increasingly by
the majority of anthropologists from the middle of the twentieth century onward, the term nevertheless lived on in certain anthropological
constructions, until waves of criticism dealt final blows to a concept that is now largely defunct as a general comparative category. Those
anthropologists and historians who retain the contested concept of tribe use it mainly as an ethnographic tool and as equivalent to certain
vernacular or national legal terms referring to local conceptions of collective sociopolitical identity, while agreeing that a precise general definition
is almost impossible. This results in loose working definitions which see tribes as medium-sized, centralized, or acephalous entities displaying a
combination of basic characteristics:

1. They are usually associated with a territory, homeland, or tribal area, while using non-territorial criteria to distinguish between members
and nonmembers. Internally, access to territorial usage may be differentiated according to gender, age, status, wealth, and other aspects
of power.
 2. Ideologically and socially, tribal members usually share some dominant idiom of common origin, such as descent from a single ancestor,
emphasizing group cohesion over outside interests and internal differentiation. On the contrary, some amount of intertribal and
interethnic marriage is indispensable to ensure all kinds of (political, economic, social) alliances with other groups.
3. Although part of the tribal population live more or less permanently in the tribal territory, a considerable portion may live in the world
outside. Ritual and kinship ties and obligations are enacted to ensure and strengthen intimate networks among ‘home’ groups and
‘outside’ groups, serving as one among several inventories of group adherence within a wider world.

W. Reinhard, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001