3 Typology of Colonization and Colonialism

There was no master plan for colonial expansion. Quite often it happened as an unintentional
consequence of some other action. Nevertheless, typical sequences of actions occurred again and again,
for instance preventive occupation to keep out possible competitors. The Portuguese used this in
sixteenth-century Brazil, as did most European powers in nineteenth-century Africa. Military intervention
in Africa was sometimes not intended as permanent occupation, because it was much too expensive. But
when African resistance made a retreat impossible without loss of national prestige, the temporary
occupation became a permanent colony. If not a matter of prestige, colonial policy was always based on
a kind of cost-benefit analysis. 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 were indeed the desire for
extra profits and the improvement of social status. These were certainly not the only motives, but they
were almost never absent. Of course, their character changed over time. The conquerors of British India
were capital accumulating profit seekers, but like those of Spanish America still with the intention to
invest in social status and not in capitalist enterprise in the way of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. The second most common motive, 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
(Robinson 1972). Collaboration had already been a necessary precondition for the Spanish conquest. To
consider such collaborators as traitors, though, is an anachronistic value judgement of modern
nationalist historiography. People like the Tlazcaltecans quite rationally served their own interest
regardless of a Mexican nation that did not yet exist. Recent research on the colonial situation from the
perspective of people under colonial rule has corrected such simplifications. Non-European history no
longer looks just like an inversion of the eurocentric pattern when the colonialist image of benevolent
western heroes ruling inferior races for their own benefit is simply inverted in the anticolonial story of
western rascals systematically abusing helpless non-western victims. To some extent, the image of the
helpless native itself is a creation of latent racism. 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

Andre Gingrich, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), 2015

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 nonterritorial criteria
to distinguish between members and nonmembers. The degree of control of the tribal territorial base,
and its extension and location tend to change as a result of struggles with states or other opponents. To
the outside world, access to territorial usage appears to be confined to members of the tribe, although
neighboring groups and superior authorities may also enjoy rights of usage, of tribute, or of taxes.
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. This may also serve to legitimize a preference for ‘marrying within the tribe,’ which in
practice, however, is observed far less often than it is upheld in theory. 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. In the course of these interactions, tribal group
membership may change in many ways: individuals or groups may enter or leave a specific tribe and
whole tribes may also collapse or be created.