Imperialism vs. Colonialism
4 March 2023
The words “imperialism” and “colonialism” are used interchangeably nowadays. Colonialism in fact refers to the expansion of human settlement with or without the support of any larger political entity, while imperialism refers to expansion of political, military, and economic influence with or without any new settlement of people.
The Ottoman Empire based in Istanbul exerted political control over most of the Middle East and Southern Europe and extracted economic tribute therein for over six hundred years. Turkish soldiers were posted to garrisons in far-flung provinces and Turkish tax collectors and appointed officials grew rich in them at the expense of the conquered peoples. But few if any Turks actually settled in any of the regions outside of what is now Turkey. Thus, when the Ottoman Empire was defeated by the British in WWI and lost some 90% of its land holdings, there was no mass exodus of ethnic Turks. Aside from Turkey itself and some parts of Greece, Turks had never lived in any of these places, they had just controlled and taxed them. The Ottoman Empire is thus one of the most successful examples of pure imperialism with little or no colonial component.
Perhaps the best example of pure colonialism with no imperial component is the Afrikaner population of Southern Africa. This Dutch population of roughly three million has maintained a separate existence in Southern Africa for almost four centuries with no support from the Netherlands or any other country. They have always outnumbered the English in that part of the world. Yet for most of this time they were dominated by the English settlers who enjoyed the support of the British Empire.
Of course in practice imperialism and colonialism are usually intertwined to varying extents and the British Empire is perhaps the best example of such a mixture. Australia was highly colonial and involved the settling of large numbers of people from the British Isles. India by contrast was the jewel in the imperial crown, but proportionately few English people ever lived there. Of course, the sheer size of India meant that even just the families of British officers and bureaucrats constituted a sizable population and attracted some non-government fellow travelers as well. George Orwell and Rudyard Kipling were both born in India to Anglo-Indian families. There were enough such families in the 19th century to create a new city, Simla — in the Himalayas, the only part of India that English people found sufficiently cool enough be lived in year round. But the colonial population of India was too sparse and too dependent on government to survive India’s independence from the Empire. The subsequent return of English people from India was a small and largely invisible human tragedy. In the movie Look Back in Anger, Richard Burton’s father-in-law sits in his living room in England and sadly reminisces on hearing the regimental band play at the station for the last time. In the movie Shakespeare Wallah, the heroine is asked how she feels about going “home” to England and she answers that she’s never been there.
Ian Smith, too, had never been to Britain until he was stationed there briefly during WWII and years later on official visits as a representative of the Rhodesian government. Colonials were not perceived by the British as foreigners, but simply as weird or slightly sinister Englishmen, out of step with contemporary Britain. The sad old colonel in Look Back in Anger must have felt at least as alienated as the disaffected working class youths the movie is supposed to be about.
Rhodesia was mostly pure colony. The only military support it ever received from imperial forces was in 1896-97 during the Second Matabele War, known now in Zimbabwe as the First Chimurenga. Not only was Rhodesia economically and politically self-sufficient, but it was not even colonized by Britain so much as by the Cape Colony under Cecil Rhodes. Thus it was not so much a colony of Britain as a colony of the English settler population of South Africa — a colony of a colony. And it was later abandoned by both the Empire and by South Africa after South Africa came under Afrikaner control.
But despite its only tenuous ties to the British Empire, there was something imperial nonetheless behind the idea of Rhodesia. The Afrikaners had no desire for contacts with either the English or with black Africans. They wanted to be left alone to form their own ethnic separatist republics. But the English in both South Africa and Rhodesia did not want to be left alone to pursue ethnic English separatism. They wanted to build a scale model of English civilization that in some capacity would include everyone within it. They were aware that Afrikaners and black Africans did not want any part in English civilization. That was why there were two Boer Wars and two Matabele Wars. They planned to erect a new colossus in Africa whose benefits would be obvious to everyone.
To some extent, this vision was realized. It just didn’t survive for long after connections with Britain were severed. The English settler populations simply were not large enough to sustain it as they were in Australia, Canada, and the U.S., where it might be said that the British colonial projects succeeded. Neither were the non-English populations in Africa sufficiently won over to sustain the English model as they proved to be to some extent in post-independence India, where one might say the British imperial model succeeded.
The Afrikaners, who never had an imperial option, proved to have more staying power in Africa than the English. Rather than trying to influence national or even provincial government in South Africa after the end of Apartheid, they have founded a new settlement, Orania — in the Northern Cape, which they are attempting to keep 100% Afrikaner well into the 21st century. The last vestiges of English-style policy in African affairs are perhaps to be seen today in South Africa’s Western Cape province, what was the original Cape Colony more than a hundred years ago. This is the only province of RSA not currently dominated by the ANC, the party of national government. Western Cape is by far the most competently governed part of RSA and indeed of all sub-Saharan Africa. Like India, it can perhaps be considered a success of the British imperial model. However, unlike India which is large enough in Asia to carry the torch forward, Western Cape finds itself flooded with refugees from other provinces and other African countries and its functioning systems are rapidly being overwhelmed.
The interplay between colonialism and imperialism is deeply entrenched in the English-speaking world and its culture and is actually depicted uncannily well in the opening scenes of the original Star Wars movie. Luke Skywalker lives with his aunt and uncle, his parents having been killed years earlier in some kind of altercation with the unruly natives. Yet young Luke is not afraid to be the only white man for miles around as he cruises the perimeter of his aunt and uncle’s massive land holdings in his landspeeder, a science-fiction variant of the Land Cruiser so beloved by Rhodesians. In a manner typical of second-generation colonials, Luke was born on Tatooine and feels he belongs there. He invests his money in droids with the idea of one day starting his own farm. It is not the sand people who finally kill Luke’s aunt and uncle, but storm troopers of the imperial forces who are supposedly stationed on Tatooine to protect them.
Questions of what rights the sand people and other local life forms will have under an independently governed Tatooine seem far off and are not even brought up in the story. The main focus of the Star Wars saga is defeating the empire.
Minus the landspeeder, this is also the story of America, of Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, Abraham Lincoln’s log cabin, and George Washington’s war against Britain. And after independence, America too became an empire in its own right, with its own colonists. The Indian Removal Act signed by Andrew Jackson was not intended to remove Indian nations from North America, but only from the United States, the rest of the continent to be “Indian Territory” effectively treated as a foreign country. But enterprising Americans like Charles Ingalls settled there anyway, seeing it as their “manifest destiny” in express contradiction of U.S. policy. The western American settlements that were not part of the original thirteen colonies became colonies of colonies, much as Rhodesia was a colony of Cape Colony. And the relations between the new and old colonies likewise began to resemble what relations had been between the old colonies and the old empire.
At the end of Little House on the Prairie, the U.S. government determines that the land the Ingalls family has settled on in fact belongs to the Osage. Ingalls learns that the U.S. Army is coming to evict him and the other settlers. He is not personally angry at either the Osage or the government, whom he acknowledges are both within their rights, but he feels that in the long run it will not matter. Other settlers will eventually arrive and the tide will turn. Mrs. Ingalls and the Ingalls family dog are depicted in the book as actively disliking Indians, but Pa Ingalls doesn’t seem to bear them any ill will. He simply observes that “The Injun knows when he’s licked.”
And he was right. The tide finally turned during the Gold Rush era when so many prospectors and fellow travelers settled in the west that the U.S. government would have risked a new civil war had it tried to evict them all. The various Indian Wars were seldom provoked by any premeditated plan to evict or massacre Indians, although the result was the same. U.S. forces often found themselves on doomed missions to keep the peace between Indians and settlers. Groups of Indians also encroached on each other’s territory as they were pushed out by white settlement. The Battle of Little Bighorn was fought by the Lakota defending land they had recently taken from the Crow. Twenty years later in Rhodesia, the First Matabele War began when the English attempted to end Matabele raids on the Shona. The Matabele had themselves crossed the Limpopo only half a century earlier when they left what is now KwaZulu-Natal to get away from the Afrikaners, who themselves had fled the Western Cape to get away from the English.
In both cases imperial policy followed colonial initiatives. Had more Englishmen settled in Rhodesia earlier, it might have resembled something like Montana or Colorado today.
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However, even with overwhelming colonist numbers, the British model can’t really function for long without some kind of institutionalized imperial entity. The connection can be something as symbolic as the portrait of the queen in the corner of Rhodesian postage stamps. But even that only for as long as the empire actually continues to exist as a reality behind the symbol. Or it can be supported by the creation of a new sub-imperial central government such as that of the United States or Australia, or India. And even that only for so long as those central governments are willing to continue to actively fill that role. This is what the aborted Central African Federation was supposed to be in the 1950s. This reliance on some kind of government connection is crucial in the British model precisely because it is not based on ethnic or racial separatism.