>>> nathan at newman.org 07/12/01 03:42PM >>>
(((((((((
CB: Surely you are not saying that the examples you give were not colonialism .
((((((
Yes, that's what I'm saying, since I think it is useful to distinguish colonialism from the broader rise of Western capitalist dominance of the globe.
((((((
CB: I would have thought that paleo-colonialism was Western capitalist ( a redundancy) dominanacy of the globe. In the beginning , capitalism outside of Europe was all colonialism.
(((((((
We may be entering definitional land, as with the debate on fascism, and maybe colonialism is too multi-faceted in meanings to bother using, but I think its worthwhile to distinguish it from settlement, genocide and the other measures benefitting the West.
(((((((
CB: What was and is colonialism except a bunch of ways of exploiting colonized peoples to benefit the "West" , including through settlement and killing colonized peoples en masse ?
((((((
Colonialism was a specific mechanism for dominating another nation from a minority position, as with the British Raj or other economic mechanisms to extract an economic surplus from the dominated population to the advantage of the colonial state.
In the cases above, most obviously with settlement of the US, the settlement population through sheer numbers and mass murder where necessary became a majority rather uninterested in extraction of surplus from the indigenous population.
(((((((((
CB: But not in Southern Africa
(((((
The dominance of oil in the Middle East has colonial aspects, from the deals cut with the Sauds and in Kuwait, but those all preceded the creation of Israel, which at times as much threatened specific economic interests in the region through messing with those deals - a point made by some conservatives for many years. Israel had less of a traditional colonial use to the West than a military counterweight in the proxy war of the Cold War, but that was actually a relatively late-breaking alliance that became significant only after 1967 as a number of countries in the region were drifting into the Soviet orbit.
(((((((((
CB: Israel is a part of the neo-colonialist and post-neo-colonialist ( "Imperial" ?) structure. It may have had a somewhat unique role and unique others causes, but all that dovetailed with the main ,post WWII, colonialist program.