The acquisition and colonization by a nation of other territories and their peoples. This term took on a more specific meaning in the late 19th century when colonists saw it as the extension of ‘civilization’ from Europe to the ‘inferior’ peoples of ‘backward’ societies: ‘the institution of British legal regimes…was underpinned by a certain type of violence that served to facilitate colonialism…These legal landscapes were founded…upon a mythological hierarchy wherein white peoples were accorded the label of civilized in contrasting them from savage, non-white (read: non-European) peoples’ (Rossiter (2007) J. Hist. Geog. 33, 4). Colonialism also entailed colonial philanthropy: ‘a new doctrine of responsibility toward the unprivileged, a doctrine which received its chief impulse from the Evangelical emphasis on the value of the human soul, and hence, of the individual’ (E. Howse 1953). Colonialism is also seen as a search for raw materials, new markets, and new fields of investment; see Giordano and Matzke, and Redclift (both in (2001) PHG 25, 4). Characteristics of colonialism include inequality between rulers and subjects; political and legal domination by the imperial power; and the exploitation of the subject people. Many commentators link colonialism with uneven development; see, among others, Dutt (1992) Am. Econ. Dev. 82, 2 on India, and K. Cox (2002).

Sometimes, but not always, colonialism was accompanied by colonization; that is, the physical settling of people from the imperial country. Lester (1998) TIBG 23, 4 argues that ‘in their new colonial environment, settlers, who were initially divided by prevailing British social boundaries of class, gender, religion and ethnicity, soon faced an imperative for solidarity’. Although independence from former colonization has been achieved almost everywhere, most accept that it has been replaced by neo-colonialism; see Dutt (1992) World Dev. 20, 8.