• The term colonialism originates from colony, referring to people detached from a larger nation and settling in a distant land, initially implying migration and emotional ties with the parent nation.
• Over time, the new settlement could evolve into a Nation-State, yet remain subordinated to the dominant power.
• In its modern sense, colonialism involves political domination, economic exploitation, and military control by powerful states over weaker regions.
• Marxists popularised the term in the 1920s through Communist International resolutions, giving it analytical and ideological prominence.
• Although earlier societies had colonial elements, colonialism acquired global significance in the modern era with expanding European powers.
• Spain, the earliest major colonial power, was followed by the English, while Portugal established dominance over the Indian Ocean after discovering new sea routes.
• Germany, Belgium, and Italy acquired territories in Africa and nearby regions, with Belgium creating the notorious Congo Free State and Italy establishing Eritrea in 1885.
• The British Empire expanded across Asia, Africa, South America and the Pacific, with India and South Africa as its most prominent colonies.
• France created extensive colonial possessions in Africa, Asia, and South America, contributing to the global map of imperial control.
• The earliest critiques of colonialism came from Marx and Engels, particularly on British domination of Ireland.
• A systematic economic critique emerged from Indian nationalists like Dadabhai Naoroji, M.G. Ranade, and R.C. Dutt, who formulated the Drain of Wealth theory to highlight colonial plunder and home charges.
• J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism (1902) advanced the critique by linking imperialism to capitalist overproduction and underconsumption.
• Further theoretical insights came from Hilferding (Finance Capital), Rosa Luxemburg (capitalist accumulation), and Lenin, who viewed imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism.
• Colonial experiences in Latin America, Africa, and Indonesia offered new perspectives in the 1920s–30s, expanding the empirical base for analysing imperialism.
• Liberation movements and revolutions of the 1960s, including Cuba and Algeria, generated a surge of writings on colonial and neo-colonial structures.
• Andre Gunder Frank, Furtado, Dos Santos, Prebisch, Baran, Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein, Arghiri Emmanuel, and Cardoso enriched the study of dependency and global inequality.
• The dependency school argued that economic dependence persists even after political independence, as colonies remain underdeveloped capitalist economies dominated by external forces.
• It viewed the bourgeoisie of dependent countries as incapable of autonomous development, though cases like India challenge this assumption.
• Wallerstein’s world-systems theory identified a core, periphery, and semi-periphery in the global capitalist order.
• Core regions possess high-value production, while the periphery is marked by low technology, low wages, weak states, unequal exchange, and foreign capital domination.
• Semi-peripheral states show stronger state control, economic nationalism, and potential mobility within the world system.
• Thinkers like Cabral, Franz Fanon, and Edward Said highlighted the cultural dimensions of colonialism, including psychological domination and Orientalism.
• Bipan Chandra analysed the colonial structure, colonial modernisation, stages of colonialism, and the nature of the colonial state, adding depth to Indian historiography.

Meaning and Definition

• Colonialism emerged as a modern historical phenomenon, developing alongside industrial capitalism.
• It represented a distinct stage between the traditional economy and the modern capitalist economy in colonised regions.
• Colonialism formed a specific social structure, where economic and social control rested with a foreign capitalist class.
• Its structure changed with the evolution of capitalism as a global system, reflecting shifts in world economic dynamics.
• Colonialism cannot be reduced to mere political domination over traditional societies; it encompassed deeper structural transformations.
• Nor was it simply a result of the docility or disunity of colonised populations or the racial arrogance of European rulers.
• Explanations that view empires as transnational organisations mobilising global resources are incomplete since they ignore the internal dynamics of the colony.
• The notion that colonies were transitional economies destined to naturally evolve into capitalist economies is incorrect.
• The theory of “arrested growth”, which blames colonial stagnation on pre-capitalist remnants, misrepresents the reality of colonial transformation.
• Apologists like Morris D. Morris falsely portrayed colonialism as attempted modernisation or capitalist transplantation hindered by tradition.
• The colonial economy was neither pre-capitalist nor capitalist, but a hybrid creation — a form of distorted capitalism.
• Integration into the world economy did not generate genuine capitalist development within colonies.
• Colonies did not evolve as replicas of the metropolitan economy; instead, they became its opposite, its non-developmental counterpart.
• Colonialism actively underdeveloped social and productive forces, creating structural contradictions within the colonial economy.
• These contradictions eventually propelled colonies toward the next stage, including struggles for freedom and structural transformation.
• Colonialism creates internal disarticulation of the rural economy while enforcing external integration into the world capitalist system, ensuring that expanded reproduction of capital benefits the imperialist metropolis, not the colony.
• It constitutes a social formation where multiple modes of production coexist—from feudalism and petty commodity production to agrarian, industrial, and finance capitalism.
• Unlike capitalism, where surplus extraction is based on ownership of means of production, under colonialism surplus is appropriated through control over state power.
• Understanding colonialism as a social formation (not a mode of production) shifts focus to the primary contradiction being national, not merely class-based.
• This makes the central struggle one of national liberation, a political struggle against external domination rather than an internal class conflict.

Features

• The colony is integrated into the world capitalist system in a subordinate position, reflecting structural dependence.
• Unequal exchange defines colonial trade: the metropolis produces high-value, high-technology goods, while colonies produce low-value, low-productivity goods with low technology.
• Colonies become sources of raw materials, whereas the metropolis specialises in manufactured goods, reinforcing dependency.
• Infrastructure such as railways in India was developed to serve British industrial interests, not local developmental needs—aptly captured by Tilak’s phrase “decorating another’s wife.”
• The colony is externally integrated with the world market but internally disarticulated; agriculture supports the metropolitan economy, not indigenous industry.
• Drain of wealth occurs through unrequited exports, as well as expenditure on armed forces and colonial civil services.
• A defining feature is foreign political domination, which sustains the exploitative structure.
• Thus, the four core features of colonialism are: unequal exchange, external integration with internal disarticulation, drain of wealth, and foreign political domination.
  • Integration of the colony into the world capitalist system takes place in a subordinate and subservient position, where the needs of the metropolitan economy and its capitalist class determine the basic issues of the colony’s economy and society.
    This subordination is far more crucial than mere linkage with the world market, since even independent capitalist or socialist economies are linked with the global market.
  • Arghiri Emmanuel and Samir Amin analyse colonialism through the concepts of unequal exchange and internal disarticulation of the colonial economy.
    The different disarticulated parts of the colony are connected not internally but through the world market and imperialist hegemony exercised by the metropolitan economy.
    The agricultural sector of the colony does not relate to its industrial sector but instead to the global capitalist market and the market of the metropolis.
  • Marx and Engels had already highlighted this exploitative international division of labour, where the metropolis produced high-technology, high-productivity, high-wage goods, while the colony produced low-technology, low-productivity, low-wage goods.
    International trade therefore became an instrument of exploitation.
    Similarly, the colony was forced to specialise in raw materials, while the metropolis specialised in manufactured goods.
    Even infrastructural development—such as railways in India—was undertaken in the nineteenth century to serve the interests of British industry, not Indian industrial development.
  • A third key feature of colonialism is the drain of wealth, or the unilateral transfer of surplus to the metropolis through unrequited exports.
    Early Indian nationalists strongly emphasised this phenomenon.
    A large part of colonial state expenditure—such as on the army and civil services—represented a similar external drain of surplus.
    Thus, while surplus was produced in the colony, it was accumulated abroad.
    Hamza Alavi described this as deformed extended reproduction.
  • The fourth basic feature is foreign political domination, expressed through the existence and functioning of the colonial state, which maintained and enforced the entire structure of colonial exploitation.