Colonialism
• Definition: political, social, economic,
and cultural domination of a territory
and its peoples by a foreign power
• Context (1500s-1900s):
– seeking sources of precious goods
– empire-building, expansion of
capitalism, Industrial Revolution
• Goals of colonizers
– appropriation of land, labor, natural
resources …plantation economies
– control of trade, taxation, state
monopolies
– expansion of markets – new
infrastructure
– mission civilisatrice – “civilizing mission”
Nations & States
• Nations – group identity tied to
territory
• States - defined territory (borders)
– often from colonial era
• Monopoly on legitimate use of force
(armed forces)
• Central government
– Authoritarian?
– Democratic?
• Administrative structures and units
(states, republics, provinces)
• Management of resources
– projects of “development”
– issues of environment and
“conservation”
THE NATION-STATE
• This is obviously a hybrid word,
linking the idea of the “nation”
with the idea of “state”. While the
former refers to what might
loosely be termed “people”, that
is, to a cultural entity often
defined in terms of ethnicity, the
latter refers to a set of institutions
through which public authority is
exercised within a particular
territory….’
• (Robert Holton 1998)
COMMUNICATIONS 
STATE
• State: exercise of authority on a territory
(sovereignity)
• Nation: cultural identity
• Examples ?
Communications are essential for running
a state
Benedict Anderson: communications
create the state
‘Imagined communities’:
‘[the state] is an imagined political
community... It is imagined because the
members of even the smallest nation
will never know most of their fellowmembers, meet them, or even hear of
them, yet in their minds of each lives
the image of their communion’
(Anderson 1983)
Nations & States, cont.
• Problems:
– Mixing, splitting of ethnic groups
(e.g. Kurds)
– Colonial era policies favoring one
group
– How to manage ethnic diversity
– Granting local autonomy
– Policies of assimilation and
control
• Production of conflict
Indigenous Peoples and
the State
• Definition
• descendants of earliest settlers
• live in, but do not control gov’t of
the state
• Marginalization, stigmatization
• State policies and conflict
• intervention, control, takeover,
resettlement, cultural modification
Indigenous Peoples, cont.
• Genocide/Ethnocide/Ecocide
– New diseases, killings
– Disruption of subsistence
economies and trade relations
– Extraction of resources, damaging
ecosystem
• Loss of political autonomy
– Direct rule/indirect rule – new
power structures and categories
– “Superiority” of Europeans – mental
colonialism
Indigenous Peoples, cont.
• Cultural modification
– Language, schooling in
dominant language
– Religious conversion
– Laws affecting gender & family
– Laws affecting customs
• ISSUE: clash between small-scale
cultures and commercial cultures
• mobility
• extensive land use, questions of
“productivity”
• communal property rights
• worldview
• Ethnocentrism: what is progress?