Colonialism

Colonialism is the pursuing, establishing and maintaining of control and exploitation of people and of resources by a foreign group of people. Implemented through the establishment of coloniality and possibly colonies, this colonization keeps the colonized territory and people socio-economically othered and subaltern to the colonizers and the metropole. While commonly advanced as an imperialist regime, colonialism can take the more particular and potentially autonomous form of settler colonialism, when colonial settlers pursue a more complete colonization of the land and people, often towards a replacement and possibly even genocide of the native populations.

Colonialism and its definition may vary depending on the use of the term and the context, with colonies having been set up since ancient times. But colonialism in its common modern sense has its origin in being a concept describing modern era European colonial empires. This modern colonialism developed and spread globally from the 15th century to the mid-20th century, with European colonial empires spaning 35% of Earth's land by 1800 and peaking at 84% by the beginning of World War I.

Modern colonialism developed a coloniality which complemented military colonial control through intersectional violence and discrimination, developing modern biopolitics of sexuality, gender, race, disability and class among others. Economically this was sustained by enforcing policies of mercantilism, restricting the colony to trade only with the metropole, strengthening the home-country economy. At first through the growing chartered companies and by the mid-19th century through the states themselfs colonialism shifted under new imperialism to the use of free trade, reducing market restrictions or tariffs, coercing independent or foreign colonial markets to open up, often through gunboat diplomacy or concerted interventionism, such as policing actions. From early on modern colonial politics were justified by beliefs of having a civilizing or often Christian mission to cultivate land and life.

Decolonization, while starting in the 18th century, did not at first overcome modern colonialism as such, only in the aftermath of World War II colonial power was questioned and challenged enough for nearly all colonies to gain independence between 1945 and 1975. Though often some coloniality remained, and postcolonial and neocolonial relations developed, externally and internally. Remaining as internal colonization an existential issue of indigenous peoples.