Dictionary:

colonialism

  (kə-lō'nē-ə-lĭz'əm)

A policy by which a nation maintains or extends its control over foreign dependencies.

The acquisition and colonization by a nation of other territories and their peoples. In this respect, colonialism is as old as society. The term took on a more specific meaning in the late nineteenth century when colonists saw it as the extension of ‘civilization’ from Europe to the ‘inferior’ peoples of ‘backward’ societies. It may also be seen as a search for raw materials, new markets, and new fields of investment. Sometimes, but not always, colonialism was accompanied by colonization; that is, the physical settling of people from the imperial country. Typical aspects of colonialism include: racial and cultural inequality between ruling and subject people, political and legal domination by the imperial power, and exploitation of the subject people. Many commentators see colonialism as a key cause of uneven development.

Although independence from former colonization has been achieved almost everywhere, most accept that it has been replaced by neo-colonialism.

The policy and practice of a strong power extending its control territorially over a weaker nation or people. Originally the Latin colonia simply meant a country estate. But already in classical Latin it acquired the meaning of such an estate deliberately settled among foreigners. This sort of colonization was commonplace in the classical Mediterranean and in medieval Europe. Medieval and early modern English governments colonized both Wales and Ireland in this classical sense, intending the English farmers to defend English rule against the hostile Welsh or Irish. The pattern of settlement in, for instance, the west of Ulster reflects this to the present day, with Protestant ‘colonial settlers’ planted amongst the native Catholics. In his influential book Internal Colonialism, Michael Hechter (1975) has examined the internal colonialism of the British Isles, claiming that peripheral regions were internal colonies of England.

But ‘colonial’ must be in distancing quotation marks because, where such colonization occurred a long time ago, the descendants of the settlers feel themselves as much part of the territory as those whose ancestors they displaced (in South Africa, for instance). Colonialism is more often thought of as an attribute of the late nineteenth-century imperialists who conquered large tracts of the globe to find themselves ruling, in Rudyard Kipling's phrase, ‘new-caught, sullen peoples, | Half-devil and half-child’ (The White Man's Burden). It is usually used pejoratively to denote an unwarranted sense of racial superiority and the set of attitudes, beliefs, and practices that sprang from this sense. It has been often argued that racism and xenophobia are colonialism brought home.

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Colonialism is a type of imperial domination of the non-Russian peoples who inhabited the southern and eastern borderlands of the Russian Empire and who subsequently fell under the control of the Soviet Union. It refers specifically to policies to spread Western civilization (a "civilizing mission") among peoples in those territories, and to integrate them into the imperial state and economy. It extends as well to the colonization by Russian and Ukrainian peasant settlers of lands inhabited by pastoral nomadic tribes.

Colonization

The Russian Empire's southern and eastern borderlands became its colonial territories. Russian expansion onto the plains of Eurasia had by the middle of the eighteenth century brought within the boundaries of the empire all the lands south to the Caucasus Mountains and to the deserts of Turkestan, and east to the Pacific Ocean. Much of the area consisted of vast plains (the "steppe") once dominated by confederations of nomadic tribes, who became the subjects of imperial rule and the empire's first colonized peoples. The grasslands where they grazed their flocks along the lower Volga River and in southern Russia (the Ukraine) attracted peasants from European Russia seeking new farmland.

The imperial government encouraged this southward movement of the Russian population (most of whom were serfs owned by noble landlords). Occasionally nomadic tribes fought to retain their lands. Prolonged resistance came first from the Bashkirs, Turkic peoples whose tribes occupied lands east of the Volga and along the Ural Mountains. During the eighteenth century many clans joined in raids on the intruders and battled against Russian troops. They joined in the massive Pugachev uprising of 1772 to 1774 alongside Cossacks and rebellious Russians. But in the end Russian armed forces invariably defeated the rebels.

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Russia's borders of the empire shifted further southeastward into Eurasian lands, bringing an increasingly diverse population into the empire. Peoples in these borderlands spoke many different languages, mostly of Turkic origin; practiced a wide variety of religions, with the Islamic faith the most widespread; and followed their own time-honored customs and social practices. Russia was becoming a multiethnic, multireligious empire.

The Imperial Civilizing Mission

In the reign of Empress Catherine II (r. 1762 - 1796), the empire's leadership began to experiment with new approaches to govern these peoples. These policies drew upon Enlightenment concepts of government that redefined the object of colonial conquests. They became the basis of Russian colonialism. Previously, the Russian state had extended to the princes and nobles of newly conquered eastern territories the chance to collaborate in imperial rule. It had required their conversion to Orthodox Christianity, and had periodically encouraged Orthodox missionaries to conduct campaigns of mass conversion, if necessary by force. Before Catherine II's time, the state had made no concerted effort to alter the social, economic, and cultural practices of the peoples on its southern and eastern borderlands. This authoritarian method of borderland rule demanded only obedience from the native populations.

In the late eighteenth century, some educated Russians began to argue that their empire, which they believed a civilized Western land, had the duty to spread civilization, as they understood it, to its backward peoples. They had two principal objectives. By spreading Russian culture, legal practices, and opportunities for economic enrichment, the empire could hope to recruit a progressive group from these peoples who would become willing collaborators in Russian domination. Equally important was their belief that Russia's own historical development made the spread of its newly acquired Western culture among "savage" peoples a moral obligation.

Catherine II herself traveled among the empire's eastern peoples at the beginning of her reign. Impressed by what she described as the "differences of peoples, customs, and even ideas" in Asian land, she looked for new ways to win the loyalty of the population. Encouragement of trade, education, and religious toleration appeared to her desirable and useful tools to strengthen the bonds between these colonial peoples and their imperial rulers. These goals suggested practical guidelines by which she and her advisers could build their empire on modern political foundations. These also confirmed in their eyes the legitimacy of their imperial domination of backward peoples.

Catherine II shared the Enlightenment conviction that reason, not religious faith, lay at the core of enlightened government. She did not abandon the policy of maintaining Orthodox Christianity as the state religion of the empire, but ended forced conversion of Muslim peoples to Christianity. In 1773, she formally accorded religious toleration to Islam. Her successors on the imperial throne maintained this fundamental right, which proved a valuable means of maintaining peaceful relations with the empire's growing Muslim population. They encouraged the conversion to Christianity of peoples holding to animist beliefs, for they believed that their duty was to favor the spread of Christianity. They also promoted the commercial exploitation of colonial resources and the increased sale of Russian manufactured goods in their colonial territories. The Western colonialists' slogan of "Commerce and Christianity" described one important aspect to Russia's civilizing mission. Self-interest as well as the belief in spreading the benefits of Western civilization provided the ideological basis for Russian colonialism. This new policy never fully supplanted the old practices of authoritarian rule and discrimination against non-Russians, which had strong defenders among army officers on the borderlands. But it, too, enjoyed powerful backing in the highest government circles. In the nineteenth century, their vision of an imperial civilizing mission brought Russia into the ranks of great Western empires.

Commerce and Christianity in Colonial Alaska

Alaska was the first area where Russian colonialism guided imperial rule. In the late eighteenth century Russian trappers had appeared there, having crossed the Pacific Ocean along the Aleutian Islands from Siberia in their hunt for fur-bearing sea mammals. The sea otter, whose fur was so highly prized that it was called "soft gold," was their chosen prey. They forced native peoples skilled at the dangerous craft of hunting at sea (mainly Aleutian tribesmen) to trap the animals, whose range extended from the Aleutians along the Alaskan coast and down to California. In 1800, the Russian government created a special colonial administration, the Russian-American Company, to take charge of "the Russian colonies in America." Its main tasks were to expand the commercially profitable fur-gathering activities, and to spread Orthodox Christianity and Russian culture among the subject peoples of this vast territory.

"Commerce and Christianity" defined the Russian Empire's objectives there. It operated in a manner somewhat similar to that of the British Hudson's Bay Company, also established in colonial North America. And like other overseas colonies of European empires, the Russians exploited Alaska's valuable resources (killing off almost all the sea otters), in the process confronting periodic revolts from their subject peoples. Faced with these difficulties, the Russian government finally abandoned its distant colony, too expensive and too distant to retain. In 1867, it sold the entire territory to the United States.

Colonial Turkestan and Imperial Citizenship

In seeking to create a unified, modern state, the Russian Empire moved toward establishing a common citizenship for the peoples in its multiethnic, multireligious borderlands in the late nineteenth century. It began this effort in 1860s and 1870s, at the time when it freed its peasant serf population from conditions of virtual slavery to its nobility. Reformers in the government conceived of an empire founded on a sort of imperial citizenship, extended to former serfs and to native peoples.

That was the period of the empire's last major colonial expansion, when its military forces conquered a large part of Central Asia. The settled and nomadic populations of Turkestan (as the area was then called) spoke Turkic languages and were faithful Muslims who looked to the Ottoman Empire, not Russia, for cultural and religious leadership. The Russian colonial administration was deeply divided on the proper treatment of their unwilling new subjects. Some preferred to rely on the old policies of authoritarian rule, restrictions of the Muslim religion, and the encouragement of Russian colonization. Others took their inspiration from Catherine II's colonialist policies. The latter argued for progressive colonial policies including religious toleration of Islam, respect for the ethnic customs and moral practices of Turkestan's peoples, and the development of new crops (especially cotton) and commercial trade with Russia. They hoped that, as the powerful Minister of Finance Sergei Witte argued in 1900, full equality of rights with other subjects, freedom in the conduct of their religious needs, and non-intervention in their private lives, would ensure the unification of the Russian state.

This progressive colonialist program was notable by according (in theory) "equality of rights" to these imperial subjects. Colonial officials of this persuasion believed that they could extend, within their autocratic state, a sort of imperial citizenship to all the colonial peoples. They withheld, however, the full implementation of this reform until these peoples were "ready," that is, proved themselves loyal, patriotic subjects of the emperor-tsar. Opposition to their policy came from influential civilian leaders who judged that the state's need to support Russian peasants colonizing Turkestan territories had to come first. Their reckless decision led to the seizure from nomadic tribes of vast regions of Turkestan given to the peasant pioneers. Colonization meant violating the right of these subjects to the use of their land, which led directly to the Turkestan uprising of 1916. Coming before the 1917 revolution, this rebellion revealed that the empire's colonialist policies had failed to unify its peoples.

Orientalism in the Caucasus Region

To the end of the empire's existence, colonialism rested on the assumption of Russian cultural superiority and often expressed itself in disdain for colonial peoples. Yet not all of these subject groups were treated with equal disregard. In the territories of the Caucasus Mountains (between the Black and Caspian Seas), imperial rule won the support of some peoples, but faced repeated revolts from others. Resistance came especially from Muslim mountain tribes, who bitterly opposed domination by this Christian state. They sustained a half-century war until their defeat in the 1860s, when many were forced into exile or emigrated willingly to the Ottoman Empire. The conquest of the region produced an abundance of heroic tales of exotic adventures pitting valorous Russians against barbaric, cruel, and courageous enemies. These tales created enduring images of "oriental" peoples, sometimes admired for their "noble savagery" but usually disparaged for their alleged moral and cultural decadence.

Russian colonialism had a powerful impact on the population there. The Christian peoples (Georgians and Armenians) of the region found particular benefits from the empire's economic and cultural policies. Armenians created profitable commercial enterprises in the growing towns and cities of the Caucasus region, and were joined by large numbers of Armenian migrants from surrounding Muslim states. Some Georgians used the empire's cultural window on modern Western culture to create their own national literature and history. These quickly became tools in the Georgians' nationalist oppositional movement. In the Muslim lands along the Caspian Sea where Azeri Turks lived, investors from Russia and Europe developed the rich oil deposits into one of the first major sources of petroleum for the European economy, a source of immense profit to them. The port of Baku became a boomtown, where unskilled Azeri laborers worked in the dangerous oil fields. They formed a colonial proletariat living among Russian officials and capitalists, and Armenian merchants and traders. The new colonial cities such as Baku were deeply divided both socially and ethnically, and became places in the early twentieth century of riots and bloodshed provoked by the hostility among these peoples. Nationalist opposition to empire and ethnic conflict among its peoples were both products of Russian colonialism.

Colonialism in the Soviet Union

The fall of the empire in 1917 ended Russian colonialism as a publicly defended ideal and policy. The triumph of the communist revolutionary movement in most of the lands once a part of the empire put in place a new political order, called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The communist leaders of the new Soviet state preached the Marxist-Leninist program for human progress. They persecuted all religious movements, and denounced imperialism and colonialism, in Russia as elsewhere in the Western world. Their promise was liberation of all colonial peoples. But they did not permit their own peoples, previously in the empire's colonial lands, to escape their domination. Their idea of "colonial liberation" consisted of organizing these peoples into discreet ethno-territorial units by drawing territorial borders for every distinct people. The biggest of these received their own national republics. Each of these nations of the Soviet Union had its own political leaders and its own language and culture, but the "union" to which they belonged remained under the domination of the Communist Party, itself controlled from party headquarters in the Kremlin in Moscow.

The empire's eastern peoples experienced a new, communist civilizing mission, which proclaimed the greatest good for backward peoples to be working-class liberation, national culture, and rapid economic development under state control. Colonization reappeared as well when, in the 1950s and 1960s, millions of settlers from European areas moved into Siberia and regions of Central Asia to cultivate, in enormous state-run farms, most of the remaining lands of the nomadic peoples. Colonialism within the lands of the former Russian Empire did not disappear until the Soviet Union in its turn collapsed in 1991.

Bibliography

Brower, Daniel. (2003). Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empire. London: Routledge/Curzon.

Brower, Daniel, and Lazzerini, Edward, eds. (1997). Russia's Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700 - 1917. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.

Jersild, Austin. (2002). Orientalism and Empire: The North Caucasus Mountain Peoples and the Georgian Frontier, 1845 - 1917. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.

Khodarkovsky, Michael. (2002). Russia's Steppe Frontier: The Making of a Colonial Empire, 1500 - 1800. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.

Layton, Susan. (1994). Russian Literature and Empire: Conquest of the Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Slezkine, Yuri. (1994). Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Suny, Ronald Grigor, and Martin, Terry, eds. A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin. New York: Oxford University Press.

—DANIEL BROWER

European powers and persons representing them undertook a vast program of overseas colonization extending throughout the early modern period, which had the effects of energizing a world economy by encompassing the New World within it and of stimulating a massive emigration of Europeans.

The Atlantic Islands

In the course of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese and the Spaniards discovered, conquered, colonized, and administered a series of island possessions that became early experiments in imperialism. In the 1480s and 1490s, the Spanish crown conquered Gran Canaria, Tenerife, and La Palma, the richest of the seven Canary Islands. The administrative apparatus set up to govern the colony anticipated aspects of the administration of the future empire. First there was a survey and apportionment of land in a repartimiento; there was no dividing up of natives—the form that repartimiento later took in the New World. Each island was considered a municipality, administered by a cabildo, or 'city council'. The islands were settled by soldiers and by immigrants from Castile and Andalusia, many of them single men who married indigenous women. The economy of the Canaries in the sixteenth century was based on sugar, a monoculture.

The Portuguese had a papal grant to settle Madeira, an uninhabited island, in 1425. Its prosperity after the middle years of the fifteenth century was based on the production of sugar, wheat, and wine good enough to be exported. Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) was authorized to settle the Azores in 1439, by which time the Portuguese had already placed sheep on several islands to provide food for passing ships. By the end of the 1440s, the island of Santa Maria was already exporting wheat to Portugal. The colonization of the central and western isles took longer. Foreigners, particularly Flemings, were recruited to settle there in the 1460s and 1470s. Pico, one of the westernmost islands, became a leading wine producer and was important in the three-cornered trade with North America and the West Indies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the key products of which were New England barrel staves, Caribbean molasses, and Atlantic Island wine.

Italians in the service of the Portuguese crown sailing off West Africa discovered the arid Cape Verde islands. The Portuguese established a plantation and pastoral economy run by slaves from Africa and a small group of white colonists as landlords, merchants, and civil and church officials. After the discovery of the New World, the Portuguese islands served as nodal points in the great web of interoceanic shipping routes that soon developed.

Spanish Colonization

The Spaniards' strategy of colonization in the New World was to found cities: They founded 190 towns and cities by 1620. These were built uniformly on a Roman grid plan. They were self-governing entities governed by cabildos, had scant commercial functions, were populated by plantation owners and an Indian underclass, and had no industry to speak of. The most important cities were viceregal capitals such as Mexico and Lima. In 1630, 58 percent of the Spanish population of the Audiencia of New Spain lived in Mexico City, and 55 percent of the population of the Audiencia of Lima lived in Lima City. Exploration and settlement of the interior regions were organized from viceregal capitals such as Mexico, Lima, and Bogotá. The Spanish New World colonies were hypercentralized because the crown ruled the territories directly and created appropriate institutions of control, issuing some 400,000 decrees pertaining to American colonial affairs between 1492 and 1635, or around 2,500 annually. In an administrative sense, they were not colonies but kingdoms; hence they were governed by viceroys.

This urban colonial network required large numbers of settlers. A total of at least 150,000 persons moved from Spain to America before 1550. Throughout the sixteenth century, between 250,000 and 300,000 Spaniards emigrated. The Amerindians were forced, through the repartimiento system, to work in enterprises (either farming or mining) called encomiendas, feudal estates that were inheritable. Africans came as slaves, first from Europe, then, by the mid-1550s, imported directly from Africa for service on sugar plantations or in the mines.

Spanish colonization efforts in Asia centered upon Manila, the center both of trade with China and Japan and of the effort to Christianize the Filipinos. Evangelization was made easier by the political decentralization of Philippine society, which made armed resistance to Spain all but impossible. The Spanish colonists, a few thousand people in the seventeenth century, lived off the Manila galleon trade and left the direction of the country mainly to missionaries and a few bureaucrats.

Portuguese Colonization

The most striking aspect of the Portuguese seaborne empire was its extreme dispersion in chains of forts along various continental coastlines and islands. By the time of Prince Henry's death in 1460, the Portuguese had reached Sierra Leone, which was 1,500 miles down the west African coast. There they established fortified trading posts, feitorias, close to the sea, guarded by caravels bearing canons. This style of settlement, which the Portuguese later introduced into Asia, required few settlers and was designed to facilitate trade.

Brazil was settled in the sixteenth century (after 1530) by a mixed feudal-commercial system wherein coastal lands were placed under the control of hereditary proprietors. Settlers were taken there and introduced cattle raising and sugar cultivation. Sugar was the ideal crop for coastal Brazil, which had quick access to Europe and the capacity to outprice the Atlantic islands. Thousands of Portuguese arrived as settlers, attracted by quick money in the sugar industry. When the Amerindians of the coast, who had been conscripted to work on sugar plantations, perished, they were replaced by African slaves who were already resistant to most Old World diseases.

The Portuguese crown began to take back governance of Brazil from the hereditary landholders as early as 1549, when it reacquired the Bahia captaincy and named a governor general. Settlements were widely dispersed, with a Portuguese population of only 30,000 in 1600, scattered among fourteen captaincies along 4,000 miles of coastline.

The Portuguese empire in Asia was established between 1509 and 1515 by capturing the sea passages leading to and from the Indian Ocean. Goa, on the Malabar coast of India, was the main naval base, followed in importance by Macão, off the Chinese mainland near Canton. The Portuguese empire in Asia was tiny in extent, consisting of only a few strategic islands and coastal trading posts that controlled most Asian trade routes. The territory of a trading post was negotiated with local authorities to achieve a form of colonization, but one of a purely commercial nature. The Portuguese settled near the centers of production and markets and at the intersection of trade routes, taking advantage of trading networks already established before their arrival. This system could run efficiently with few settlers, who did not require an infrastructure of public services, and it left local trade in the hands of the indigenous communities. The majority of Portuguese settlers in Asia were soldiers, while the Spanish empire, after the conquests of Mexico and Peru, was by and large a civilian empire.

Colonies in the Caribbean

Europeans of different origins established colonies of different styles. Spanish settlements in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo were based on ranching, mining, and, in the seventeenth century, sugar. The English and French established plantations on their islands to produce labor-intensive crops like sugarcane, worked by indentured servants and, later, African slaves. The Dutch established trading posts, such as Curaçao. In 1600, all New World settlements were still Spanish. The English and French begin to colonize in the first quarter of the seventeenth century in part because the Dutch Navy in the Caribbean protected them from the Spanish. At the same time, the British began to colonize the outer islands, starting with St. Kitts and Barbados, which served as bases for further expansion. The French then established a Compagnie des Isles d'Amérique and settled Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1635. It was easy (both for French and English settlers) to obtain grants because the islands were thought fairly worthless before sugar was introduced. In the first phase of settlement, tobacco and cotton were the main crops.

British Colonization

British colonial development in the New World was focused both on the Caribbean and the North American mainland. The disinterest of the English government in direct management of the colonies was matched by the penchant of settlers in the thirteen colonies for self-government, inasmuch as distaste for central authority had played an important role in their decision to emigrate. The economic life of the colonies was differentiated early on, with plantations in the south, which grew cereals, cotton, and, later, tobacco, and a more varied economy in the north, characterized in New England by commercial shipping, fishing, and timber. In the eighteenth century, large numbers of immigrants, first from Germany and later from Ireland, were attracted by the prosperity of the British colonies, only to submit to the lure of the frontier once they had arrived.

The British had a colonial stake in Asia since the formation in 1600 of the East India Company, a trading organization whose business grew steadily at the expense of the Portuguese. In the eighteenth century the company had its own army; its rapacious rule in Bengal stimulated Parliament to appoint a governor general in 1773. Over the next half century the British steadily occupied the whole of India, but the company continued in an administrative capacity until it was finally dissolved in 1858.

French Colonizaton

In 1534, Jacques Cartier (1491–1557) established a fort on the site of what is now Quebec City. The French settled Acadia in 1604 and Quebec in 1608. The entire early French enterprise in Canada was based on a single product: fur. Beaver pelts, the best material for hat felt, could not be found in France, were light in weight, had a high value relative to bulk, and were easily transported. Quebec was organized along feudal lines, divided into huge rural estates, or seigneuries, many of which persisted after the British absorbed the colony in 1763. Further south the French established plantations along the Mississippi River in Louisiana, a colony that prospered from the late seventeenth century (with an interval of Spanish rule) until the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. A number of French efforts to establish trading colonies in Brazil (Fort Coligny/Rio de Janeiro in 1555–1560, Ibiapaba in 1590–1604, and São Luis do Maranão in 1612–1615) were all squelched by Portugal.

Dutch Colonization

Dutch expansion was slow, steady, and on the whole peaceful. The Dutch East India Company, chartered in 1602, acted like a state within a state and imposed sole control over Holland's Asian interests. The first solid Dutch base was obtained in 1605 with the capture of the Portuguese fortress at Amboyna in the Moluccas. In 1619, the Dutch founded the city of Batavia (now Jakarta, on Java), which became the center of Dutch power in Asia. The Dutch also acquired a series of factories on the Indian coast and in 1638 a foothold in Ceylon, which they called the "Cinnamon Isle." By 1661 the Dutch were effectively in control of the entire island. The Dutch empire, like the Portuguese one it largely replaced, was protected by its very size and the way it was scattered all over the map.

Between 1624 and 1664 the Dutch established a colony in the Hudson Valley, called Nieuw Netherlands, with its capital at Nieuw Amsterdam, on Manhattan island; it was a shipping and farming colony whose total population reached 10,000 persons. In 1657, the Dutch established Cape Colony at the southern tip of Africa, to protect its seas lanes to Asia. It was a tiny colony, reaching a population of 15,000 only in the eighteenth century. Less successful was the colony of New Sweden along the South River in Delaware, which had been established by a joint stock company in 1632 and was overrun by the Dutch in the early 1650s. In 1624, the Dutch Company temporarily acquired a huge empire in the Brazilian "bulge" when they captured Bahia, which they held for thirty years.

A Comparative Overview

In comparative perspective, British and Dutch empires were decentralized and heavily privatized. Companies were the preferred form of colonization. The Spanish empire, whose colonial administration was highly centralized, was just the opposite. The Portuguese liked the centralization model but lacked the administrative infrastructure to overcome the problems created by distance (Asia) and scale (Brazil). The French were unsuccessful for political reasons and because of the weakness of their navy compared to those of the English and Dutch. Where possible, they established plantations (Louisiana, the Caribbean) or feudal-like domains (the Quebec seigneuries). They were out-maneuvered in North America and lost the richest of their Caribbean islands, Saint Domingue (now Haiti), to a revolution. In economic terms the Spanish colonies constituted a kind of experiment in mercantilism whereby colonies were to become productive entities that trade with the motherland. The Portuguese and Dutch colonies were purely economic outposts, with only a few exceptions like Brazil or the Cape Colony. The southern colonies of the future United States were, in their inception, plantation economies organized by companies; the northern colonies were increasingly drawn into commercial shipping networks of the New World economy.

Bibliography

Boxer, C. R. The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800. London, 1990.

——. The Portuguese Seaborne Empire. New York, 1969.

Gibson, Charles. Spain in America. New York, 1966.

Parry, J. H. The Spanish Seaborne Empire. London, 1966.

Véliz, Claudio. The Centralist Tradition of Latin America. Princeton, 1980.

—THOMAS F. GLICK

The control of one nation by “transplanted” people of another nation — often a geographically distant nation that has a different culture and dominant racial or ethnic group. (See ethnicity.)