What is Colonialism?

It's easy to confuse orientalism and colonialism (and imperialism), so I thought that I would complement my entry on orientalism with an entry on colonialism. 

By the way, the picture above is a still from the 1984 film A Passage to India, an adaptation of the British writer EM Forster's novel.  This novel is set during the time when India was a British colony struggling to become independent.  In the scene pictured above, the Englishwoman Adela Quested (the sometime fiancee of colonial civil servant Ronnie Heaslop) is traveling to the Malabar Caves.  She is riding with Dr. Aziz; later she will falsely claim that he tried to rape her in the cave.  This will result in a trial and Dr. Aziz's humilation.  Ironically, Adela was initially very sympathetic towards India and its people.  For more information about this movie and a clip from it, see this link:

http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/37349/A-Passage-to-India/overview


To distinguish among the three terms...orientalism, imperialism, and colonialism....

Orientalism (that is, the meaning that literary critic Edward Said has popularized) is more about how Westerners interpret the East.  In other words, orientalism is the belief that Westerners are better able to interpret the East and Easterners and that Easterners cannot interpret or represent themselves on their own.  Orientalism leads to Westerners' interpreting the Other to suit themselves. 


Imperialism and colonialism, on the other hand, are political and economic terms.  The former, imperialism, refers to one country's political, economic, and sometimes cultural domination over another.  Colonialism, the latter, refers to the practice of settling a country as the British settled in America (before we became independent), India, or their territories in Africa.  However, the British were not the only colonizers.  The Romans, the French, and the Spanish, to name three nationalities, colonized various regions.  For more information about this distinction, see this link to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/colonialism/

This timeline from the University of Iowa will give you a broad overview of how many nations were involved in colonialism:

http://www.uiowa.edu/~c016003d/Resources/Imperialismtimeline.htm

Or you may prefer these statistics from Mt. Holyoke:

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pol116/colonies.htm

Otherwise, the timelines can be fairly overwhelming.  Below is one professor's timelines that cover the British Raj and India's struggle for independence:

http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum210/tml/indiatml/indiatml3.htm

http://web.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/hum210/tml/indiatml/indiatml4.htm

Here is the BBC's timeline for Africa.  Note that it begins in prehistoric times.
 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specials/1624_story_of_africa/page96.shtml

Below is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's timeline on the Guinea Coast, an area that includes some of Nigeria.  It covers arts and culture as well as politics and economics, but it seems to be the most detailed and authoritative timeline that I've seen:

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ht/10/sfg/ht10sfg.htm

Finally, here is a timeline on the Congo that covers both the colonial era and independence:

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/hhanson/241/congotimeline.html

The BBC's timeline is more detailed:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1072684.stm

Even if we focus on the settings of Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart, ignoring every other former colony, there is still much to investigate on this topic.  I will conclude by making one more distinction.  First published in 1898 (in serialized form), Heart of Darkness is a colonial novel since Conrad wrote it at a time when Belgium still occupied the Congo and Britain had a considerable empire.  Conrad himself lived in the Congo for a very short period.  Things Fall Apart, on the other hand, is a post-colonial novel even though Achebe wrote it in 1958, just *before* Nigeria became independent.  Achebe is from the colony that became Nigeria, and even though the novel is set in the 1890s, he depicts Okonkwo from the perspective of a member of his ethnic group (Igbo).

For more information about post-colonialism, see this link:

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Intro.html

As this article's author states and the example of Things Fall Apart demonstrates, we use the term post-colonial a little more loosely than one would imagine.  However, it is still a useful term, and a distinction between Conrad's perspective and Achebe's must be made and maintained.