On “colonialism versus empire” as frames for modern South Asian History.
“Colonialism” literally refers to an ideology or process of producing and maintaining colonies; it seems to be applied exclusively to European colonies, going back to Greek and Roman times, when ancient “empires” consisted of Greek and Roman settlements (colonies) scattered around the Mediterranean. Rome is the model (See Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton University Press, 2010.)
Enforcing Roman law among peoples subjected to the military power of Roman rulers in and around Roman colonies produced Roman imperial subjects who were not Roman and subjected to superior Roman authority and power; that subjugation became the basis of what we could call subaltern identities. Colonial subjects were ranked as imperial subjects; fighting colonial power meant fighting imperial power in or around a Roman colony; living with Roman power became practical and its influences suffused local societies. That colonial modeling of empire has been imported into modern world history.
The term colonialism has not been applied to pre-modern Asian imperial territories, which were in fact formed in ways similar to the empires built around colonies around the Mediterranean. The idea that colonial subjugation to imperial territorial expansion has produced modern nation-state territories is becoming acceptable with reference to Xinjiang, Tibet, Kashmir, NE India, and elsewhere. It is very more broadly useful in a long-term view but has been buried under the global authority of national territorialism.
What are called “national territories” all across Eurasia today were formed by many centuries of mobile colony formation by imperial powers and with the subjugation of peoples who became subjects under forms ruling authority which came from elsewhere — notably North India and North China — and which produced superior classes of people who lived and settled among locals and wrote their history — e.g. in South India, South China, and Central Asia — creating what came to be called “civilizations.” Imperial status ranks that formed territorial power relations and underpinned cultural authority in the classical Asian empires have been turned into timeless traditions bleached of their imperial conquest heritage by imperial authorities who composed the texts that modern scholars have used to write pre-modern Asian history.
When modern scholars use European colonialism as a frame for modern history, they implicitly endorse that civilization frame, by treating the only relevant colonial conquest narrative as beginning with Europeans. The politics of that framing become more obvious when we notice that Hindutva ideologues have extended the timeline of colonial subjugation back to include the Mughals. We can usefully extend it back further to include the colonial conquests by Hindu imperialists who established Brahmanical hegemony.
That longer view thus takes seriously the long and diverse historical layering of imperial power relations, over many centuries, which came to include the long period of European ascendancy to the higher echelons of imperial authority in South Asia. Colonialism studies instead start with the “rise of the West” and project modern colonial domination back to early European settlements. This seems most compelling in Bengal, which became the “beachhead” for British European expansion, its imperial capital, and the homeland of Indian nationalism; so it seems that British imperial domination was in the cards in Bengal from the outset, which is hardly true.
The truth is well known: coastal British colonies became centers for inland imperial expansion by engaging with, emulating, and expanding military dynamics and strategies of territorial power around their settlements; and like imperial powers before them, by attracting allies to their cause from various levels in existing imperial ranks. So modern colonial imperialism in South Asia was embedded in evolving dynamics of imperial territorialism, as it was also fed and enriched by networks of mobility and capital accumulation in which the British scrambled for supremacy around the world, and which included a great many non-British actors who made the British Empire possible. Landed, commercial, and ruling elites at various levels around South Asia made The Raj possible and made it work. Those alliances and interdependencies began to fray as upwardly mobile subaltern groups scrambled to capture higher and higher levels of imperial authority; that scramble became nationalism.
The survival and renovation of imperial ranks inside national politics is increasingly prominent today. All of this leads me to argue that studies of “colonialism” may provide a good way to draw a line between Europeans and subject Others on all the continents and thus to unify the world history of European expansion, which makes sense and is useful politically; but colonialism does not capture the historical dynamics of power relations in Asia that actually explain how Europeans rose for a time to the top ranks in the world of imperial capitalism. Colonialism is better understood when it is located inside processes of empire that reach far back into the Asian past and continue into the future. [Ref: “Imperial Modernity: history and global inequity,” Third World Quarterly, 33:4, 2012, 581-601)