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An enduring relationship of domination and mode of dispossession, usually (or at least initially) between an indigenous (or enslaved) majority and a minority of interlopers (colonizers), who are convinced of their own superiority, pursue their own interests, and exercise power through a mixture of coercion, persuasion, conflict and collaboration. The term both denotes this relationship and serves as an interpretation of it – customarily one in which the experiences of colonizers and the colonized are at odds. Derived from the Latin word colonia (estate, distant settlement), and typically promulgated within the framework of an empire, colonialism was first used as a term of disapprobation in eighteenth-century debates about the morality of slavery, and has since been conceptualized as a distinctly Western modality of power that has been closely connected to the evolution of CAPITALISM, MODERNITY AND EUROCENTRISM.

(1) Concept and imagery. Colonialism is commonly viewed as the chief variant and consequence of imperialism: the tangible means by which disparate parts of the world became subordinated to the drives and dictates of a separate and distant imperial centre (metro-pole or mother country), and struggles over territory, resources, markets and national prestige became displaced overseas . The term colonization denotes the array of expansionist projects – exploration, war, geopolitical rivalry, military conquest and occupation, commerce, migration, settlement, state formation and cultural representation – from which particular colonialisms arise.

A common – and not inaccurate – image of colonialism is of a STATE-centred system of power characterized by brute exploitation, astonishing cultural arrogance and racism, which reached its heyday in the early twentieth century, when European colonial empires spanned the globe (the British Empire covering 20 per cent of the worlds land surface), and colonial rule (then justified as a civilizing mission) seemed secure to its protagonists, in spite of widespread anti-colonial resistance. Colonialism has also been viewed as symptomatic of an epistemological malaise at the heart of Western modernity – a propensity to monopolize and dictate understanding of what counts as right, normal and true, and denigrate and quash other ways of knowing and living. Yet it is more than just a will to exercise dominant control, or a proprietary project that constructs the world as the wests bequest -although it is surely both of these things. Nor has it simply been a hierarchical and diffusion-ist process, solidified in a core-periphery relationship, which spawned what Frantz Fanon (1963 1961, pp. 37-8) described as a world cut in two and a colonial world divided into compartments – with the colonized enjoined to emulate the West. Colonialism has also been characterized by subversion and, some argue, by inherent flux and contradiction, ambivalence and hybridity. Not feeling at home in empire was a visceral experience for the colonizer the world over.

It has become commonplace to observe that colonialism involves a mutual interdependence of forms, at root because colonial identities are constructed in relation to both a metropolitan core and indigenous/colonized lands and peoples. Identities are formed and stretched across both metropolitan/colonial and colonizer/colonized divides, creating what Edward Said (1993, pp. 3-61) – a key thinker and influence on geographers – dubs overlapping territories and intertwined histories. The interdisciplinary critical project of post-colonialism, which is inspired, in part, by a desire to speak to the Western paradigm of knowledge in the voice of otherness, has sought to show that Western/metropolitan subjectivity has not been constituted in a self contained box, but through this long, stretched and often violent process of colonial exchange, and tries to expose and destabilize the way in which Western and non-Western, and colonial and post-colonial, identities have been shaped by potent binaries – of civilization and savagery, modernity and tradition and so on.

This critical reconfiguration of Western history and culture is intrinsically linked to what many see as the cornerstone of colonialisms spatiality: the importance of displacement for both colonizer and colonized (and for both their knowledge systems and ways of life), and the subsequent difficulty of ever going back to some pristine or authentic connection between place and identity that is uncon-taminated by the experience of colonization. Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, Said (1993, p. 7) writes in an influential passage, none of is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about forms, about images and imaginings. Colonialism can be distinguished from imperialism in terms of the local intensity and materiality of this geographical struggle, centrally over home and territory. Said spurred interest in how colonialism works as a cultural discourse of domination animated by images, narratives and representations – and mediated by class, race, gender, sexuality, nation and religion – as well as a material project and feat of power. Over the past twenty years, colonialism has been studied as a cultural technology of rule imperilled by various investigative modalities.

Said deploys the term imaginative geography to capture the connective imperative between geography and discourse within the unequal framework of empire: the dramatisation of difference between us and them, and here and there, with texts creating not only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe. In famously showing how the Orient was produced, its meaning regulated and Western dominance over it shaped, by Western knowledge, institutions and scholarship (by a discourse of Orientalism), Said does not collapse the distinction between representation and reality. Rather, he underscores how orientalism and other colonial discourses exert authority by creating asymmetrical relationships between Western and other knowledge systems. It is through this process of knowledgeable manipulation that distorted images and stereotypes of foreign lands and peoples become taken-for-granted, traits of difference become ascribed to particular spaces, places, environments and natures, and other peoples are deemed unable to represent or govern themselves. This is what Said (1978, p. 63) means when he describes the Orient as an enclosed space and a stage affixed to Europe, and David Arnold (2005, p. 225) when he describes how British observers affixed India to alien European ideas of landscape and nature – as part of the Tropics . While Said has been criticized for obscuring how non-Western peoples responded to this epistemo-logical onslaught, he revealed how colonialism revolves around grammars of difference, othering and exclusion that are acutely spatial – that function as trait geographies.

(2) History and interpretation. As much of the above implies, there is more than one model of colonialism. Indeed, it is important to recognize how different meanings and models of colonialism have evolved and operate a posteriori. Important distinctions have been drawn between different types of colonies: exploitation colonies (e.g. British India, French Indochina; slave colonies, protectorates and dependencies), which were established primarily for the purpose of capitalist economic extraction, where tiny expatriate colonial elites often governed large subject populations, and ideologies of race and paternalism played a pivotal role in colonial rule; settler colonies (e.g. North America and Australasia), whose political economies were premised on the availability of extensive tracts of cultivable and resource-rich land, and where indigenous peoples were systematically displaced by colonists and native populations plummeted due to disease; and maritime enclaves (e.g. Aden, Hong Kong, Jakarta and Malacca), which served as commercial and military nodes in encompassing imperial networks. While these are ideal types – for instance, French Algeria and Spanish Peru were both extraction and settler colonies – a large literature identifies the distinct power relations pertaining to these different colonial formations. The close association of colonialism with European/white minority rule has meant that the term has been deemed inapplicable to some situations – until recently, the colonial period of US history, where colonists along the Atlantic seaboard soon outnumbered native people. And the salt water association between colonialism and distant overseas possession explains why expressions such as internal colonialism have been used to describe situations in which colonialist relationships exist within the borders of, or contiguous to, an imperial state or kingdom (e.g. between England and its Celtic fringe, especially Ireland).

The history of colonialism has also been divided into distinct periods: Spain and Portugals initial sixteenth-century conquest of the New World; the seventeenth-century creation of an Atlantic world revolving around the circulation of people and commodities, and centred on slavery and the racialized plantation economies of the Caribbean; the eighteenth-century extension of European (especially British and Dutch) trade and dominion in Asia; the nineteenth-century building of European land empires in Africa and Asia and the emergence of the USA as a significant empire-builder; the maturation of colonial export economies between 1900 and 1945; and a postwar welfare-minded colonialism that became entangled with independence struggles and DECOLONIZATION.

Since the 1980s work on colonialism -much of which is either aligned with, or sees itself as a response to, post-colonialism -stems from the recognition that the postwar break-up of Europes colonial empires did not quickly or necessarily put once colonized regions on a par with the West – at any level. In 1965, Kwame Nkrumah coined the term neo-colonialism to describe how the West (and especially the USA) was perpetuating colonialism while upholding ideals of independence and liberty, the contradiction being as apparent in development models, which were the vehicles of a new cultural imperialism, as it was blatant in new international investment and trade relations (Young, 2001, pp. 44-56; cf. development geography; third world; transnational corporation). Some remarkable theoretical treatments of colonialism from this era – for example, the work of Fanon and Aime Cesaire – alight on the enduring and nefarious psychological influence of colonial categories of thought and social pathologies on post-independence politics and nationalism. And if, as this suggests, the colonial past was not over, then Derek Gregory (2004b, pp. 6, 117), adds what now seems an obvious rider: that the colonial past is not even past, empire is being revived through the creation of new colonizing geographies of division, partition and enmity (the war-torn middle east currently bearing the brunt of them) that displays many affinities with past colonial ideas and practices. The United Nations has declared the period 2001-10 the Second International Decade for the Eradication of Colonialism.

Indeed, there is now arguably a greater range of opinion about colonialism than there has been for 50 years, including burly affirmations of its supposed benefits that feed on imperial nostalgia. On the other hand, there has been a radical re-reading of the Wests conception of its cultural evolution, and much academic soul searching, not least within European and North American geography, which has strong ties with empire, blasting apart disciplinary allegories of objectivity, progress and self contained development (cf. geography, history of). Many discourses and practices that have been deemed central to geographys make-up and heritage – exploration, mapping, surveying, environmental determinism, geopolitical model-building and latterly GIS – have been pressed into (and are still designed for) imperial service.

cartography has been a colonizing tool par excellence. Maps brought undiscovered lands into spatial existence, emptying them of prior (indigenous) meanings and refilling them with Western place-names and borders, priming virgin (putatively empty land, wilderness) for colonization (thus sexualizing colonial landscapes as domains of male penetration), reconfiguring alien space as absolute, quantifiable and separable (as property), drawing mapped space into the unifying framework of Western knowledge and reason, and, along with the clock and calendar, effecting a fundamental reorganization (standardization) of the relations between time and space (Edney, 1997; cf. time-space distanciation). Little wonder, then, that concepts and metaphors of mapping and location have a seminal place in post-colonial theory.

(3) Critical problematics. While recent work on colonialism eludes simple characterization, it can usefully be located within a series of interrelated spatial poles of interpretation, which grapple with whether colonialism, in extremis, can and should be treated as uniform or diverse, coherent or fragmentary, centred or decentred, and whether it put in train a cultural history of affinity or difference, connection or separation, inclusion or exclusion. These analytics can be traced through two pairs of watchwords that infuse work in the field of colonial studies and the wider project of post-colonialism.

With regard to diversity and specificity, recognition of the historical-geographical diversity of colonialism is often registered as a warning about the perils of generalizing about it from particular locations (Algeria, India and the Caribbean being the crucibles of much theorizing). Colonialism is conceived as less amenable to abstraction than imperialism, as more localized and differentiated than models suggest, and in need of more comparative research. This critical impulse to extend what Fanon called the will to particularity – to expose the duplicity of Western universals and absolutes – has been manifested in calls to bring metropole and colony into a unitary analytical field (Cooper and Stoler, 1997a, p. 1), to conceptualize colonialism as a forged concept involving both similitude and difference (Lloyd, 1999, p. 7), and to re-examine those processes (both violent and intimate) that colonizers and the colonized shared, as well as those that set them apart.

A range of recent scholarship on struggles over who was inside and who was outside the nation or colony, who were subjects and who were citizens, demonstrates the importance of escaping older scholarly containers and mapping … difference across nation and empire. Starting from an analytical standpoint of liminality (how colonialism operates in terms of what it excludes and places outside its domain of comprehension and action), and from the premise that significant gaps existed between metropolitan/imperial prescriptions of power and the daily realities and pressures of colonial rule, a feminist-inspired literature examines how colonialism involves incessant struggles over the making and protection of cultural boundaries and frontiers – struggles that are gendered, sexualized and racialized, and that work to demarcate the foreign from the domestic, the civilized from the wild or savage and home from away (Stoler, 2002; Blunt, 2005).

Emphasis is now routinely placed on the spatiality of such struggles and dynamics, and geographers have been particularly concerned with how colonialism operates through: (i) particular sites and contact zones, such as ships, forts, plantations, trade posts, ports and cities, native reserves, mission stations, museums and exhibitions; (ii) the networks and institutions – such as the London-based Royal Geographical Society and Seville-based Council of the Indies – that coordinated the flows of people, goods, orders and information connecting this array of places and spaces; and (iii) the inscription devices and systems of representation – forms of recording, writing, and calculating distance and measuring difference, such as maps, journals, ledgers, paintings and despatches; practices of exploration, observation, fieldwork, classification and synthesis; and discourses justifying colonialism

- that both shaped and were shaped by such sites, domains and networks. This body of work emphasizes that Europeans ability to know, physically reach and govern distant and far-flung lands was something made, practiced and performed (and thus amenable to criticism and re-invention) rather than given (and was not some innate and distinguishing European quality and mark of its superiority).

However, such site-specific and de-centred readings can arguably lose sight of colonialisms trans-historical traits and general effects – such as (for some) its propensity to racialize difference the world over, and (for others) the way in which the state is deemed to be the bearer of the most rational and civilized practices of rule – and thus undermine an anti-colonial politics that is responsive to the commonalities of experience among the colonized. Anti-essentialist and non-teleological approaches to colonial history that refuse to generalize and conceptualize colonialism in extremis, or as a totality, can trivialize its impact, and can serve divisive ethnic and nationalist agendas in the post-colonial world that repeat … colonialisms own strategy … to regionalize, split up, divide and rule. Conceptual and ethical tensions also arise when critical affiliation with the colonized (and other so-called injured identities) is derived from a critical stance that underscores colonialisms inherently fragmentary character, and sees both colonialisms civilizing mission and third world nationalisms and revolutionary movements as doomed to failure and self interest. One the other hand, geographers operating at the former margins of empire complain about the metro-centric focus of both older imperial histories, and newer critical accounts of the colonizing impact that metropolitan-based initiatives (such as cartography and travel) had on outlying regions. Viewing the colonized world from the (former) imperial centre -which is where a good deal of critical work on geography and empire emanates from – can blunt understanding of the specific and changing composition of colonial power in particular localities (Harris, 2004).

With regard to discursivity and dislocation, geographers have considered how a wide range of spatial practices and representations of space work as colonizing discourses – as textual and visual scriptings and spaces of constructed visibility that have shaped what Europeans understood to be out there and framed how interaction was to proceed and be recorded (Duncan and Gregory, 1999). In prosecuting such ideas – travel writing being a prime focus – geographers have been critical of the reduction of colonialism to issues of discourse and representation, and a concomitant erasure of historical-geographical specificity, which has characterized much (especially literary) work in this area, and have coined expressions such as spaces of knowledge and geographies of truth and trust to underscore the materiality of discourse and the situated and embodied nature of colonial knowledge and power (Gregory, 2001b). Nevertheless, much of this literature has been preoccupied with the agency and texts of European/ Western/colonizing projects and actors, and either overlooks native agency or subordinates indigenous knowledge to the gaze of the Western/metropolitan/post-colonial critic by representing it as the background noise against which the colonizing West stakes its claims to truth and power. While the difficulties involved in bringing native agendas and other voices back into the colonial spotlight should not be underestimated, work that aims – laudably -to expose and question previously undisclosed connections between discourse and domination runs the risk of reinforcing the ideas, images and categories (of, for example, exoticism, primitivism and race) that it sets out to challenge. It does so, in part, Nicholas Thomas (1993) has pointed out, by obfuscating how colonial encounters operate as two-way and intersubjective (albeit still unequal) processes rather than as a oneway projection of desire and fear, or as a unitary imposition of power.

All of this helps to dispel the illusion of a seamless or ineluctable process of Western expansion, and makes the current promulgation of a post-colonial geography that seeks to assess what about geography (as a discipline, discourse and practice of power) might need decolonizing more than a belated or ironic gesture, as some have suggested.

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