>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
True that that was the end product of Southern Africa, but that was from the position of English colonialism. That contrasts with the earlier settlements of Afrikaaners which I referred to who tried to separate from the African population (viciously so at points). With the British, they also tried to separate violently in the Boer War and failed. They failed to achieve an independent settler state and instead were folded into the British colonial project in southern Africa.
But to see the Afrikaaner project as deliberate colonialism is to ignore their violent opposing objectives to British colonialism embodied in the Boer War. If the Afrikaaners had been successful, their state would not necessarily have been better than colonial-oriented Apartheid South Africa but it would have been a different enough phenomena to be worth distinguishing from colonialism.
Similarly, the zionist motivation for Israel was of very different character from the British goals in the region, with convergence and opposition of goals at various points through 1948. It flattens the whole character of the multi-faceted struggle of multiple parties in the region to reduce it to a flat single goal of colonialism, especially since economic exploitation for the benefit of outside forces was hardly a factor until very late.
-- Nathan Newman