Colonialism is cultural not economic.
Suppose European colonialism began with Columbus, though other people, like the Chinese and the Arabs and also the Israelites, who colonized the Canaanites. were also peoples who invaded and controlled for long times a less culturally advanced people. What conquerors do is bring their religion, dominate the natives with their own political structure and, by the way, gain economic advantage, as when the Israelites descended into a land of milk and honey and that Cortez did find gold enough to laden ships to travel back to Spain. What the American colonists found were settlements for places to live. They had some fertile land but only some of it and went to the east coast of America because Europe was not hospitable to those people. They had nowhere else to go and that meant being willing to displace or kill the indigenous people.
The great land grab of colonization took place in the Nineteenth Century because in the Eighteenth the American colonists were able to set up a separate nation because they were as culturally advanced as the English homeland (consider the art of Paul Revere and the cosmopolitan views of the Founding Fathers) and so simply to be regarded as Englishmen who required decent representation in Parliament. The Nineteenth Century European powers came to divide the African continent where the local peoples were indeed culturally backward and also to take concessions as well in China and India because of their political disorganization, the torpor of culture over a long period of time and the military technology and organization the Europeans brought with them. The underdeveloped world, as it came to be called, was ripe for the picking and the Europeans exhibited themselves as the grand peoples, luxuriating, if not financially, in tnheir sense of the white man‘s burden to civilize the entire world. The capping adventure of colonialism was the Spanish American War where the United States appropriated what was left of the Spanish Empire that had itself overtaken the countries that included indigenous people, possibly because of the fear by the United States that the Philippines would fall to the Japanese, who were developing as a non-European power which was itself soon enough to be a colonizer, taking control of Korea. If there are no people to dominate, then “colonization” is just a metaphor, as when we speak of the colonization of the Moon and Mars. These are bereft of people and exploration is delayed for both technical reasons and nothing worthwhile to be found there as of yet except for the glory that was also bestowed on the countries who hired people to engage in that.
American slavery is a version of colonization in that people were imported from very underdeveloped cultures to their own homeland after having abandoned a system of temporary lower class English workers who served as indentured servants. This is to be distinguished from immigration which, with the exception of English and Scottish and Lowlander immigrants, came from not that very much underdeveloped people who could become assimilated into the American mainstream in a few generations, while the African descendents had to remain in legal and social subjugation for hundreds of years, from 1619 to the mid Twentieth Century.
And then, quite quickly, just a generation after the Spanish American War, there was a shift to decolonization, though not yet to ex-slave oppression. Perhaps as a result of the cataclysm of the First World War, the new League of Nations established a Trusteeship Council whereby previously held minor colonies were now regarded as trustees, which meant that those same colonial powers were now enjoined to rule these places for the best interests of their native populations, which might seem a redefinition rather than a difference except that previously colonial powers had no responsibility at all for tending to the well being of those living in colonies. Moreover, when the French and the British dealt with the former provinces of the Ottoman Empire, they did not treat them as colonies but instead established them as separate sovereign states, however much within the sphere of influence of a major power, so that Lebanon and Syria were under French influence while Iraq and Transjordan were nations influenced by Great Britain, while Palestine remained a territory directly controlled by Great Britain.
The aftermath of the cataclysm of the Second World War also led to major decolonization. India and Pakistan were given independence as was Palestine, and the Netherlands gave up Indonesia and the United States gave up the Philippines, while the attempt of Vietnam to free itself from the French and then the Americans was temporarily thwarted by Cold War issues, the Cold War also responsible for the attempt by the United States to restore Cuba to its own sphere of influence, even though economic interest in the United States were also anxious to restore Cuba to American control.
One of the lasting impacts of colonialism was the explanation for it that remains prevalent. Lenin in his book “Imperialism” (1917) thought that colonialism was the result of capitalist societies gaining minerals and poor labor conditions and low wages from these underdeveloped peoples. Foreign peoples and societies were being exploited for the economic gain of the colonial powers. That was so even though working class Tories in England supported imperialism and the colonialist powers mostly earned less than they spent on their colonies. But the idea persists that the underdeveloped countries are victims, kept in their immiseration, rather than the result of unequal economic, social and cultural development.
The Leninist view of colonialism lasts through the present day in that Africa continues to be economically exploited even though it seems that the Chinese, in particular, are being generous in giving loans to Angola and other African countries when reports say that the loans are onerous and will lead to burdensome debt even if the Africans are getting skyscrapers and residential facilities. The Chinese are also getting an advantage with leverage for influence on Africa so as to compete with America, the other twenty first century superpower. So money goes to Africa but that does not mean money to Africa’s advantage. The same thing happened in early Twentieth Century colonialism when Theodore Roosevelt had to enunciate his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine to say that Britain would not be allowed to control and reorganize the debt of Venezuela because that would constitute an intrusion of a European power into South America.
The real end to colonialism in Africa was what might seem a trivial cultural event: the approval by American audiences of the movie “Black Panther'' in 2018 which portrayed an Afrofuturism which showed an imaginary and undiscovered kingdom in Africa which combined advanced technology with dancing choreographed to be similar to the moves of cheerleader and marching bands found in Historically Black Colleges and Universities. It was amusing and a pleasant fantasy, however much I wished there were more movies about actual African American heroes like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Dubois. What was pivotal, however, was that Afrofuturism did away with the view of cultural exploitation, which is the idea that culture is owned, like a property, by a people and so should not be used by other peoples without permission or compensation. That cultural appropriation has occured quite literally in the case of the Elgin Marbles brought from Greece to London and, more generally applied to Jazz, a form of music drawn from African roots and that had become the basis of American popular music even if very distinct from the white music at the time during the Big Band Era. But the imagined country of freely included skyscrapers and airplanes, those of Western invention while retaining a kind of chieftainship government, and African writers in the present century engage in novels that had not existed before European cultural domination. Of course Africans can write novels, which goes away the idea that forms of literature are the property of a people and so not to b]er used by other peoples. Culture proliferates and is the property of whomever uses it. So cultural decolonization ended abruptly.
Not that cultural appropriation was ever other than an oxymoron in that culture is never a property which by being owned by one thing is not owned by someone else but culture a free idea available to anyone inspired to be influenced by it . Don’t reduce a writer or artist to the national or ethnic groups to which it belongs. Jacob Lawrence is an American artist who uses bold colors and patches of black that can be considered characteristic of African American art, and he is indeed African American. He also portrays the history of Black slavery though he also does the same with World War II. Is he allowed to do this because he is Black or because he is American or just because he is an artist who can claim whatever topics and techniques he cares to? Is “Rhapsody in Blue” an appropriation? Some might think so. But in that case, Picasso was allowed to use Spanish influence only until he moved to France and he had always considered himself cosmopolitan. Should the New Testament writers be rid of vestiges of what had been taken from the Old Testament because they didn’t own it? Should Aaron Copland not rewrite old Appalachian tunes because he was of Jewish extraction or Liszt write Hungarian rhapsodies? Cultural appropriation is a ridiculous idea that is recognized in modern Africa which builds skyscrapers and writes novels, forms of art that originated elsewhere.
The last example of a Leninist version of colonialism is Israel which was established by European Jews, never mind they were not very welcome there in Europe but in diaspora for two thousand years from the Israelite homeland from when the Israelites had invaded Canaan and which Jews had remained in Israel in much fewer but continuous numbers since Roman times, always promising for thousands of years a promise of “Next year in Jeruselem”, but neverthedless regarded as interlopers into the Arab realm that had lasted for only 1400 years, and the Arab population was darker skinned and lesser developed and therefore thought of as exploited even though this was a religious or ethnic conflict or a clash of civilizations in that Palestinians were anxious to get work permits to enter Israel so as to make a living in the prosperous Israel rather than in their own more traditional forms of enterprise, more concerned to overthrow Israel rather than make its own people prosperous. Arabs living in Palestine did not consider themselves as of a Palestinian ethnic identity until after the 1967 war, just Arabs who would reclaim their homes when the Arab nations would expel the Israelis. Gazans had destroyed the hydroponic farms in Gaza when Israel left Gaza in 2005 and so sacrificed a market for fruits and vegetables to Europe because Israeli enterprise was essentially corrupt while economic enterprise is in the Western view neutral in that it can lead someone or anyone to turn a profit. Sure, Israel had profited from German reparations and American remiittances but oil rich Arab countries could have made the West Bank and Gaza into their own land of milk and honey. The Leninist desire to abolish the last colonial power persists even though it is not based on economic exploitation but so as to control violent resistance against the Israelis by the Arabs within and near their midst.
The Netanyahu government, the Americans, and the Hamas leadership all think the Israel-Hamas War is the last fight in what is considered by some a Leninist colonialist war, even though it is not. The Netenyahu government believes the point of the war is to destroy Hamas and intimidate the Palestinian Authority so that the West Bank will be compliant to Israel. The United States thinks that finally a post-Netanyahu government can move to a permanent two state solution. Hamas started the war as its last chance to thwart an alliance between Israel and modernizing Arab states such as Saudi Arabia which have economic interests in fuller trade with Israel. But the United States is under pressure to have Israel and Hamas arrive at a ceasefire without eliminating Hamas because of domestic political pressure. As it is, Biden is stretching the time to allow Israel to prevail as long as he can, as was true in previous American support of Israel, but the time is running out and Israel has not managed yet to destroy Hamas and so end that threat once and for all.
Moreover, the supposed occupation of the Palestinians was not that in that there was no previous country in which the Palestinians held sovereignty, though Jordan qualified as an occupier of the West Bank until Jordan decided to end its war with the Palestinians by granting full decision making about the territory to the Fatah movement led by Yasir Arafat. But never mind the claim of priority as legitimating the Palestinian people. They consider themselves an ethnicity even of recent vintage, as do the Ukrainians, who have developed as a western people since the end of the Cold War, however long and uneven was the long term relationship between Russia and Ukraine. There are other ethnic groups like the Palestinians. There are the Kurds and the Basques and they have to decide to go to warfare as the way to get their independence as separate national states. Sometimes, like the United States wins, and sometimes like the Confederacy, loses in getting its independence. The Palestinians have been resolute in their leadership at least to become independent and regain all of Israel to its own Palestinian ethnicity, but there is no right for an ethnicity to become a state, whatever Woodrow Wilson thought, but only whether an ethnicity will persist and perhaps prevail.