Colonies - Colonisation - Colonialism: A Typological Reappraisal
Colonies - Colonisation - Colonialism: A Typological Reappraisal
Abstract
Colonies, colonisation and, in particular, colonialism are concepts carrying heavy ideological
subtexts – yet they loom over the current debate about the dynamism of the Iron Age Medi-
terranean. Forty years after M.I. Finley’s ‘attempt at a typology’, this paper tries to thin out
the terminological jungle: by employing cross-cultural historical comparison, it demonstrates
how complex and manifold seemingly straightforward ideal types are; and that ‘colonies’ and
‘colonialism’ in the classical period of European imperialism were altogether different from
the settlements Greeks and Phoenicians established in their Mediterranean diasporas.
leaves the ground of normative indifference, violates intellectual rigour: ‘Die Worte,
die man braucht, sind dann nicht Mittel wissenschaftlicher Analyse, sondern
politischen Werbens um die Stellungnahme der anderen. Sie sind nicht Pflug-
scharen zur Lockerung des Erdreichs des kontemplativen Denkens, sondern
Schwerter gegen die Gegner: Kampfmittel.’4
Weber’s appeal for intellectual rigour may sound somewhat old-fashioned in an
academic world soaked with post-modernist paradigms, but it should make us
aware for the pitfalls of analytical terminology. If concepts are loaded with norma-
tive assumptions – negative and positive – they are likely to prove difficult to oper-
ate in an analytical investigation. Terminological accuracy is hence the precondi-
tion for any serious academic debate.
Colony, colonisation, let alone colonialism are terms loaded with historical, if
not ideological weight; and around them and their applicability to processes of
expansion, settlement and conquest in the ancient Mediterranean has evolved a
vigorous discussion which has not always been led sine ira et studio. Especially in
the Anglo-Saxon world, which is only too aware of its own complex colonial past
(and no less of the patterns of neo-colonial dependency that characterise our pre-
sent), the debate as to whether and how ‘colonial’ (and, respectively, ‘post-colo-
nial’) paradigms should be applied to the study of the Greek – and, often ignored
– Phoenician overseas expansion. Whereas a book published a few years ago has
undertaken to reverse the perspective and view colonisation in the Iron Age Medi-
terranean through the eyes of the ‘colonised’ (i.e. the local populations of the areas
affected by overseas settlement),5 some scholars have suggested that ‘colonial’ ter-
minology be dropped altogether from the discussion.6 Still others have embraced
the jargon of ‘post-colonial’ studies, some very cautiously and for purely analytical
reasons,7 some more cheerfully and with considerable anti-colonial zeal.8
Classicists and archaeologists from outside the Anglo-Saxon world dealing with
the Iron Age (and indeed other periods of antiquity) find it difficult to understand
Wirklichkeit aus Idealen heraus scharf zu scheiden. Ein “Idealtypus” in unserem Sinne ist, wie noch
einmal wiederholt sein mag, etwas gegenüber der wertenden Beurteilung völlig Indifferentes, er hat
mir irgend einer anderen als einer rein logischen “Vollkommenheit” nichts zu tun.’
4
Weber 1956b, 325.
5
Hodos 2006; see also Hodos 2010.
6
Most notably Osborne 1998, 119–20; 2005; 2009; Purcell 2005, 134–35. See also Hall 2007,
93–94 (who calls the colonial terminology ‘misleading’); and Horden and Purcell 2000, 395–400
(who have a much wider scope and emphasise the ‘cosmopolitan’ character of the ‘Mediterranean
colony’, which has been, they criticise, often been represented as ‘monochrome’).
7
Most prominently Malkin 2004.
8
For instance Webster 1996; 1997; Webster and Cooper 1996; van Dommelen 1997; 1998;
2002; 2005; 2006.
Colony
Essentially, a colony is a collectivity of people. However, Finley demonstrates how
manifold the seemingly straightforward concept actually is. He takes into account
a vast array of variables: resources, the labour force, demography and the socio-
political framework in which colonisation occurs. However, his study remains
indeed an attempt at a typology (albeit a very sophisticated one), as Finley focuses
on the variables rather than on classifying types of colonies. A true typology needs
to establish some sort of hierarchy, through which Finley’s parameters can be
ranked, resulting in a classification.12
9
Dunbabin 1948 and Boardman 1999 may have pursued a Greek perspective in their work; they
may have underestimated local elements in ‘colonial’ cultures; their language may seem outmoded;
their investigation may also have been implicitly guided by modern paradigms (the British Empire);
but the allegation of ‘colonialism’ seems far-fetched.
10
Networks: see the contributions in Malkin et al. 2009. Elites and patterns of consumption: see,
for instance, Kistler 1998; Matthäus 1999–2000; Malkin 2002; Niemeyer 2003a; Kistler and Ulf
2005; Lemos 2005. For an overview and discussion, see Ulf 2009.
11
Finley 1976.
12
For European colonial empires in general, see Geiss 1976; 1991; 1994; 2007; Reinhard 1983;
2008; Osterhammel 1997; 2009; Marx 2004. For the British Empire, see Ferguson 2004; for the
Spanish Empire, see Elliott 1990; Brown 2005.
Demography appears to be the most decisive variable: how many people are
involved in the establishment of colonies? Frequently, processes of colonial
expansion entail the transfer of substantial (sometimes: entire) populations.13
Overseas settlements in the Iron Age and in Hellenistic Asia and Egypt, Roman
coloniae, Spanish, French and English ‘plantations’ in the Americas and Australia
– they all depended on the influx of newcomers, who eventually outnumbered
the locals. Other colonies are founded and maintained by settlers who were still
numerous, but less numerous than the local populations (English, Dutch and
German settlers in Southern Rhodesia, South and South West Africa; Spanish
and Portuguese settlers in Latin America; the French Maghreb; Dutch Indies).
Still others involve the mobility of only a few civil servants deployed for the
administration of conquered territories (British India, European colonies in sub-
Saharan Africa).
Colonies established by few or some migrants tend to be peripheries of strong
political centres (‘empires’). Almost invariably, they are imperial colonies politically
depending on the motherland (British India, Africa; in principle, provinces of the
Persian, Roman, Ottoman, etc. empires). Colonies with substantial immigrant
populations are sometimes imperial (British and French North America, parts of
Spanish South America, Australia) sometimes non-imperial (Greek and Phoenician
colonies in the Iron Age). The stronger the immigrant population of the colony
(New England, the Thirteen Colonies in North America), the stronger is usually its
strife for political independence from the motherland.
Immigration in strong numbers usually results in the assimilation, marginalisa-
tion or extinction of the original population (North America, Australia, some
parts of Latin America, Greek colonies in the Iron Age). Extinguished or shrink-
ing local populations often require the importation of labour from third parties
(African slaves in the Americas, free Chinese workers in Indonesia). Colonial
immigration in smaller numbers tends to entail the enslavement or disenfran-
chisement of local populations and/or the creation of a colonial elite of immi-
grant descent (Spanish America, British India, Africa, Iron Age Mediterranean,
Hellenistic Asia and Egypt). Imperial colonies usually become subject to tributary
exploitation, with taxes and contributions being extracted by, and transferred to,
the centre.
Another factor, largely independent of the other variables, is the driving force
behind the establishment of colonies. We need to distinguish between individual
and collective motivations. Individuals settle away from home because they seek
adventure or freedom. First and foremost, however, they pursue ‘happiness’ in
13
Here, further questions of gender and age arise. Who migrates? Young men? Men and women?
its original, very basic meaning: leaving behind dismal economic conditions,
they hope for better luck abroad. They are both pushed and pulled. Collectivities
also use colonies to improve their wealth; but they serve political and strategic
ends, as well. To colonies, societies export excess labour force (like the Greeks),
through colonies they gain access to markets and deposits of raw materials, from
colonies they obtain agricultural goods and tributes. Arable land, raw materials
and trade are the economic pull factors allowing further differentiation. But col-
onies are also the starting points for further imperial expansion; they can serve as
naval bases or command centres; and they can be used to infiltrate enemies.
Finally, an all important parameter is space. The distance or proximity between
motherland and colony is decisive (albeit decreasingly, with improving technology)
for the relationship between the two entities and the quantity of migrants. In a
pre-modern environment, sea routes tend to narrow the gap and create proximity
over substantial distances. Accordingly, most colonial expansions throughout his-
tory resulted in overseas colonies (with the Russian East and the American West,
which can hardly be labelled ‘colonies’, being the most significant exceptions).
Given the chameleon like manifoldness of colonies, the term is hardly opera-
tional as an ideal type. British Nigeria, ruled by a limited number of professional
British administrators who were dispatched for limited periods of time, and Greek
Sicily, which was settled by a massive wave of immigrants from, but not territori-
ally annexed by, mainland Greece, have hardly anything in common. If used as an
analytical concept, ‘colony’ needs to be broken down to its constituent parts. We
have to distinguish between at least four types:14
1. Pure imperial colonies (‘provinces’), established through conquest for the pur-
pose of tributary exploitation; low influx of colonial immigrants (specialised
administrative personnel only): British India, French Indochina, British Egypt,
African colonies, provinces of (Assyrian, Persian, Roman, Ottoman, etc.)
empires. Special cases are the Hellenistic empires, the Seleucid one in the first
place, where military conquest was flanked by colonial settlement of Greeks and
Macedonians.
2. Imperial settlement colonies, established through massive settlement colonisa-
tion flanked by military power with the purpose of exploiting local labour and/
or exporting excess population. Colonisation may involve extinction or margin-
alisation (New England, Canada, Australia) or disenfranchisement (Southern
Rhodesia, South and South West Africa, French Algeria) or importation of
labour-force deported from third countries (Caribbean). Colonies are dependent
14
The following considerations are inspired by Osterhammel 1997, 17–18.
on imperial centres (‘motherland’), but ties tend to be loser than in the case of
pure imperial colonies (often resulting in independence).
3. Pure settlement colonies, established through massive settlement colonisation,
often flanked by violence, with the purpose of land seizure. This type of coloni-
sation tends to result in local populations being marginalised (the Russian East,
the American West, Greek Sicily, Magna Graecia, partly Phoenician colonies in
North Africa, Sardinia and Spain).
4. Outpost colonies, established through conquest or peaceful agreement, with a
moderate influx of (usually specialised) colonial immigrants, for the purpose of
gaining (strategic or commercial) access to a hinterland: Hong Kong, Batavia,
Malacca, Singapore, Aden, Shanghai, Pithekoussai, Phoenician trading posts in
Spain, Sicily and North Africa.
The typology yields some rather surprising results – and it confronts us with
a big caveat. First, if the dynamics of the Iron Age Mediterranean is comparable
to any development in the modern age, it is the land-based frontier type of
colonisation we encounter in 18th- and 19th-century North America and Russia
(and, to some degree, the colonial networks of outposts like Hong Kong and
Singapore) rather than the imperial forms of colonial conquest we have to look
at. Second, the way a historian of the modern world would define the concept
of colony (as a political entity created, by means of invasion, on the base of pre-
colonial conditions, whose foreign authorities are permanently dependent on a
spatially distant ‘motherland’ or imperial centre, which lays exclusive claim to
the colony15), is not applicable to ancient colonial settlements. Namely the ele-
ment of permanent dependence on a ‘motherland’ is generally absent from the
Iron Age Mediterranean. We should, therefore, be very cautious when applying
another other concepts – ‘colonisation’, ‘colonialism’ – largely associated with
the modern definition of colony to ancient societies.
Colonisation
The most general definition of colonisation could be ‘invasion’ or ‘seizure of land’.
There is colonisation without colonies (frontier colonisation like in the Russian
East and the American West or ‘internal’ colonisation claiming so far unsettled
15
Osterhammel 1997, 16: ‘Eine Kolonie ist ein durch Invasion (Eroberung und/oder Siedlung-
skolonisation) in Anknüpfung an vorkoloniale Zustände neu geschaffenes politisches Gebilde, dessen
landfremde Herrschaftsträger in dauerhaften Anbhängigkeitsbeziehungen zu einem räumlich entfern-
ten “Mutterland” oder imperialen Zentrum stehen, welches exklusive Besitzansprüche auf die Kolonie
erhebt.’
areas from nature) and there are colonies without colonisation (the case of pure
imperial colonies above). The common theme is expansion: societies exporting
people to distant places, creating networks of outposts or pushing forward their
boundaries into ‘barbarian’ peripheries are growing, regardless of whether they
expand as political entities (empires, such as the Roman or British) or civilisations
(Greek or Phoenician, for instance). Colonisation appears to be a sub-type of
expansion: expansion as the result of permanent mobility of many ordinary people
as opposed to expansion involving the temporary mobility of armies and few
administrative staff.
Defined as such, the conquest of the American frontier was colonisation, estab-
lishing British India was not; the Romans’ sending out veterans to build coloniae
was, Caesar’s conquest of Gaul was not; the foundation of Syracuse was, the trans-
formation of the Attic League into an informal empire was not; the development
of the east Elbian frontier in mediaeval Germany was, the establishment of the
network of the Hanseatic League was not – and so forth.
Once again, we find the processes of expansion in the Iron Age Mediterranean
under scrutiny in this series of articles and ‘colonial’ expansion from the 15th cen-
tury onwards on opposite sides of the hermeneutic fence. Assyrian and Roman
imperial expansion rather than the Phoenician and Greek city-states’ migratory
expansion in the Mediterranean (and Black Sea) are the ancient parallels to the
processes that resulted in the colonial empires of the 19th and 20th centuries. This
makes it doubtful that colonialism – a term tailored for the conditions created by
such modern colonial empires – may work as a guiding concept for the study of
Phoenician and Greek expansion.
Colonialism
But what is colonialism? It has been defined as ‘domination of people from another
culture’. But this definition is too inclusive to be of analytical value; it embraces all
forms of imperial rule, colonial or not, which by definition include cultural differ-
ence between the rulers and the ruled. To sharpen the ideal type, J. Osterhammel
has added three attributes: colonialism implies (1) that one society completely
deprives a second one of its potential for autonomous development; that an entire
society is ‘remote controlled’ and reconfigured in accordance to the colonial rulers;
(2) that the ruling and the ruled are permanently divided by a cultural gap; (3) the
intellectual ‘yoke’ of an ideology whose purpose it is to legitimise colonial expan-
sion. According to Osterhammel, colonialism is the rule of one collectivity over
another, with the life of the ruled being determined, for the sake of external inter-
ests, by a minority of colonial masters, which is culturally ‘foreign’ and unwilling
16
Osterhammel 1997, 21: ‘[…] eine Herrschaftsbeziehung zwischen Kollektiven, bei welcher die
fundamentalen Entscheidungen über die Lebensführung der Kolonisierten durch eine kulturell
andersartige und kaum apassungswillige Minderheit von Kolonialherren unter vorrangiger Berücksi-
chtigung externer Interessen getroffen und tatsächlich durchgesetzt werden. Damit verbinden sich in
der Neuzeit in der Regel sendungsideologische Rechtfertigungsdoktrinen, die auf der Überzeugung
der Kolonialherren von ihrer eigenen kulturellen Höherwertigkeit beruhen.’
17
It is the achievement of Hodos 2006 to have shown this process of giving and taking. Cf. for
Sicily, De Angelis 2003; for Magna Graecia, Musti 1988; for the Pheonicians, Coldstream 1982;
Niemeyer 1990; 1995; 2002; 2003b.
18
Briant 1982, 255.
in the Weberian sense, the dynamism of the period and the changes brought
about by the mobility of people and ideas. Colonialism, on the other hand, is a
much more exclusive category, from which classicists and archaeologists, when
dealing with phenomena intrinsic to their period, should wisely abstain.
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