Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
than one continent and at best a wedge of a second. They were homebodies
compared with Queen Victoria.” During the colonial era, enormous parts of
the earth's surface were drawn into sustained contact with one another to a
degree never encountered previously; far from being an exchange of equals,
this process was clearly designed to facilitate European exploitation of vast
swaths of the globe. As Harvey (1989a:264) puts it, “the world's spaces
were deterritorialized, stripped of their preceding signi
cations, and then
reterritorialized according to the convenience of colonial and imperial
administration.” As dependency and world-systems theorists have repeatedly
emphasized, the rise of the West in many ways was predicated on its conquest
of the non-West. In other words, “not only did the 'Rise of the West' follow
'the Decline of the East.' The two were also otherwise structurally and cyclic-
ally dependent on each other as inextricably interrelated parts of a single
global economy” (Frank 1998:276).
There are innumerable attempts at explaining the origins and sources of the
European success, all of which are tied to the tendency of capitalism to expand
over time. More functionalist approaches to this issue represent colonialism as
the spatial
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fix of mercantile capitalism (and, in a subsequent wave in the nine-
teenth century, of industrial capitalism as well) in light of the persistent need to
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find markets for overaccumulated surplus value at the core (cf. Harvey 1982).
Such an argument, however, does not address the means by which Europeans
came to dominate their colonies, i.e., the speci
c advantages they enjoyed,
including powerful navies, the horse, superior military technologies (guns, can-
nons), and the widespread epidemics that decimated indigenous populations,
particularly in the New World. Moreover, Europe's very political separation
into competing powers—in contrast to the Muslim world, India, or China—
fostered intense rivalries and arms races that generated a self-reinforcing series
of changes. In the view of world-systems theory, colonialism witnessed numer-
ous hegemons dominate the global economy at successive historical moments,
including Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and Britain, and later, the U.S., a
pattern that may be indicative of long wave cycles of capital accumulation in
the capitalist economy (Modelski and Thompson 1988).
Needless to say, colonialism entailed dramatic consequences for colonized
peoples everywhere, although the impacts varied widely by time and space.
The construction of the Eurocentric world order was, among other things, a
violent program of enslavement, mass extermination and genocide, broken
treaties, and displacement. Whole societies were turned upside down; some
were extinguished altogether. Some of this violence Europeans visited upon
one another as competition among di
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ed, par-
ticularly in the nineteenth century. Finally, it is imperative to note that
colonialism was also accompanied, indeed de
ff
erent imperial states intensi
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ned, by the imposition of com-
modity production on a global basis: all over the world, non-commodi
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ed
social systems—hunters and gatherers, subsistence farmers, autarkic com-
munities, feudal empires, and non-monetized exchange systems—fell prey to
the onslaught of Western colonialism.
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