The territorial history of Global Asia involves many centuries of interaction among empires and colonies; that history underlies the violence of national state territory today, in our world of imperial modernity and US empire. All national state territories have been formed over centuries by accumulating settler colonies woven together by imperial authorities. Accumulating, overlapping, and conflicting settler and imperial territorial claims produced local conflicts, global wars, international law, and inequity enforced by colonial and imperial elites in the world of nations.
Imperial territories, in many shapes and sizes, dominate territorial history, because they create enduring archives and infrastructure. At any scale, in any cultural milieu, empire is a territorial process, a dynamic, mobile, territorial formation, extending outward into frontiers — typically with military force — penetrating down ranks of wealth, power, and authority from cities to towns to villages, forming social power relations that channel wealth and status up the ranks toward a central apex. Potentially embracing inequitably vast social and cultural diversity, empire has no fixed boundary, but limits and frailties imposed by cost of maintaining the upward flow of capital accumulation. Strengthening empire means expanding, deepening, and securing power to move assets upward toward the center; challenges to that control increase the cost and potentially weaken imperial power.
A colony is a territory where a group of people have moved to settle in a space occupied by other people. Colonies of settlers have come from elsewhere (at some point in the past); they are transplants, like colonies of bacteria in a host medium. They can likewise interact with the host in many ways: they can mingle and mix, dominate, submit, or remain separate nd marginal. Over the centuries, societies have grown as colonies of settlers arrive in various patterns traveling spaces of mobility expanding in scale over time. All localities begin with settlers arriving. Social space is typically inscribed somehow by the settler sequence. Strategic places on routes of mobility become specialized sites for settlers who live in in mobile spaces where towns and cities provide their homes and livelihoods. Its design as a place for mobile settlers makes urbanism a paradigmatic colonial process.
Colony-empire relationships are ancient, ongoing, complex, dynamic, multi-faceted, and hotly contested. Early-modern overseas European colonies and subsequent colonial conquest currently appear as the singular dominant model for colony-empire relationships in the Americas, Asia, and Africa, where colonialism and imperialism represent contrasting ways to describe Western domination, focused respectively on culture [Weber] and political economy [Marx].
to be continued — work in progress …
in the age of anti-colonial nationalism, when native cultures in colonial host environments.
f migrant settlers inside tions from omake that assumption, and when imperial troops form colonies, it clearly makes sense, as it did in ancient Romans and Mongol colonies . Colonies have diverse imperial connection. Countless migrant settlers have formed colonies in distant places: nomads, farmers, missionaries, merchants, artisans, and many others have formed culturally distinct territories in many spaces occupied by other cultures. That kind of settler mobility, settlement, and colony formation accumulates historically to produce most human environments, including all major cities.
At the same time, colonies have also served and developed inside empires. Empires have grown and strengthened by incorporating colonies into imperial ranks to augment the flow of wealth, power, and authority up the ranks. Colonies can also become unwitting imperial territories and still cling to other identities; they can begin as tools of empire, succeed or fail in that capacity, and develop opposing, independent agendas, which can fragment imperial territory.
Empires fall apart when constituent colonies become imperial territories internally strong enough to refuse to obey old imperial agendas and to independent control of their own resources.
wealth, power, and authority. That range of possibilities populated Global Asia …. ancient times to the present. . . … to be continued …. the world of mobility and settlement around the Central Asian Steppes and Sare evident historically. Some examples illuare useful. are host environments, mingled home to elsewhere. in foreign countries in recent history. , the mobility of many groups across state borders of businesses, missionaries, workers, students, and others across e business transnational businesses, missionary n call it into. on the frontier. That assumption Many colonies colonies Thave various kinds ofThe relationship idea of colonialism implies malignant a colonial process understood as invasive and pathogenic. ……… to be continued …. pandemic pathogens; specifically, in Africa and Asia, where European colonies formed empires, by extending their power forcefully outward, spatially, with military conquest, and downward vertically, with various forms of state power, to create modern state territories, where social movements emerged among people who identified themselves as representing the original native host medium invaded and conquered by colonial foreigners.
Empire and colony have acquired their distinctive contemporary identities in popular and academic discourse as ideas formed in the modern world of national states, where every nation has empires and colonies in its past and must work to construct itself, by contrast, as a cultural space of belonging with a permanent organic heritage inside its homeland.
That same contrast separates the idea of the nation from imperialism and colonialism, which have a more elaborate academic opposition.
Imperialism is an idea identified with Marx, Lenin, and the communist critique of capitalism: in that view, imperialism can continue after the official end of empires, because imperialism is about economic exploitation and imposed inequity rather than being a specific political form.
Colonialism, on the other hand, is identified with Weber and Cultural Studies. It is the foreign occupation of cultural territories where foreigners have inserted and reproduced their economic and cultural power inside a native cultural space. Foreign cultural values, languages as well as economic interests and political systems were imposed upon peoples who must free themselves of that foreign domination, or contamination, to become truly self-ruling and sovereign. Nations thus emerge as natives rising up to overcome and expel colonialism. The invasive species analogy is useful here, along with ideas of ecological survival, preservation, and restoration.
The academic opposition of empire/imperialism and colony/colonialism is a Cold War construct ………..ng these two strands together can begin by noting that colonies form imperial territories that expand with the multiplication and integration of networks among imperial colonies …. to be continued ..