Talk:Analysis of Western European colonialism and colonization

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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment[edit]

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Basurtodiaz, ErnestoTiburcioM. Peer reviewers: Laurbarden.

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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment[edit]

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 9 September 2020 and 18 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): CallMeEz7.

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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment[edit]

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 23 August 2021 and 3 December 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Cdmarte.

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Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment[edit]

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Crcarey. Peer reviewers: Christopher Connors, Saw2188.

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Article moved[edit]

Moved article to Western European colonialism and colonization, which is a more descriptive title of the article's content and scope. Crcarey (talk) 19:52, 13 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

So it looks like this article was moved from an original title of "Impact of Western European colonialism and colonisation", and I don't necessarily disagree with the reasons why it was moved nor the effect that this move has on the scope of the article. This topic of "Western European colonialism" is extremely broad, so I think the move to make it more general is a good thing (so that this can be more of an encyclopedia article that cites secondary sources that already discuss this topic as it is named; rather than be more like a WP:OR or WP:SYN essay. It's hard to differentiate the two when the latter are often written on Wikipedia by grad students or PhD candidates.)
At the same time, the "Impact of" title really made it clear that this framing of a historical topic comes from the academic field of postcolonial studies, which rather explicitly advances a particular political agenda. Again, not an agenda that I necessarily disagree with or even have strong opinions about, but just naming this article "Western European colonialism and colonization" now makes it seem like Wikipedia can judge "Western European colonialism" as a discrete category with enough internal similarities to be contrasted to "Eastern European colonialism" or whatever other types of colonialism; but yet is somehow a unique and separated enough subtopic to be contrasted with "colonialism" in general (was there another area of the world participating in the "Age of Discovery" that we don't know about?).
I hope I'm making sense and not rambling incoherently here, to anybody else reading this that was also troubled by the title, but who might not have the time or energy to propose or effect a solution to this problem. What is the problem? Essentially it's in the hatnote on this article right now: This article is about the evaluation of European colonialism. For other examples of colonialism, see colonisation. Notice that the hatnote does not link to a specific page about European colonialism, which exists but is short and was recently created. It just links to Europe and colonialism; implying that "European" colonialism is different from "colonialism" in general without proving it. In other words, Wikipedia is subtly presenting a kind of historical negationism of the quintessential and prototypical Early Modern European character of colonialism, but without any WP:RS-based justification for doing so (c.f. French law on colonialism).
Maybe I can make my point clearer with some analogies. Right now we have an article simply called apartheid, but there are some people who would want to move it to a title like "South African apartheid". That title is not wrong per se, because apartheid typically only refers to the South African policy, in the same way that Holocaust is both a word with a general meaning (that is derived as political exploitation of its original, most widespread use! this is important!) but also a word that specifically refers to one set time and place. So "South African apartheid" would be problematic in the way that it would suggest the presence of other types of "apartheid", like... "Israeli apartheid", where the application of the word "apartheid" to Israel is hotly disputed, but Wikipedia does have the power to make a false equivalence between the applicability of the term "apartheid" to South Africa and its applicability to the modern State of Israel.
Basically, I've read enough work from academic historians to realize that the way that Wikipedia organizes its articles on historical topics, often reflects biased; outdated; or misinterpreted shadows of ideas that might have indeed originated in quality secondary sources, but they get seriously and fatally distorted as they are filtered through the readings nonprofessional editors who seek to write about topics which they find personally interesting, but may not have enough context or study to be able to place into categories or taxonomies that reflect the most learned and up-to-date understandings that we have of (social) scientific topics. This argument is somewhat "elitist" and perhaps against the consensus culture and "anyone can edit" culture we have at Wikipedia, but we all should be thinking about these things as we write about serious topics with real-world impact.
tl;dr please consider how this title might be misleading because of the suggestions that the "Western European" qualifier make about the historical scope and origins of colonialism. Rigley (talk) 16:22, 16 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

General comments[edit]

Hi Crcarey, you did quite the overhaul of this page. It's impressive. Here are some suggestions and critical comments for improvement.

  • The lead section could probably be a bit longr and descriptive for such an in depth page. What are some of the major insights?
  • The page seems relatively Africa-centric and in future could be developed to be a bit more global. Though there are many global elements.
  • I would have liked to see you link to your classmates' page on Why Nations Fail when your discuss Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson work
  • Did Mamdani categorize between settler and exploitative colonialism? I don;t recall that, but of course it's possible. I have to admit I don't like the categories much. Settlers could easily be exploitative (witness Southern Africa).
  • The See Also section could be better
  • Really I am impressed with this article and don't have nearly as many critical comments as for others I have evaluated.

Chrisblattman (talk) 01:29, 12 May 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Move to Western European colonialism and colonization[edit]

"Impact and evaluation of" seems unencyclopedic and pointless. Thoughts? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 18:22, 22 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]

"Benign colonialism" section ?[edit]

Oh please, don't insult people's intelligence! Britain and East India Company benign contribution was a famine that lead to 30 million deaths!

And the US invasion of Iraq completely destroyed the economy of that country.Kishorekumar 62 (talk) 05:47, 18 February 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The section on the British is laughably biased, as you rightly pointed out. It needs a full re-write.
92.251.181.191 (talk) 05:13, 27 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

And what About Religion?[edit]

No mention of Christianity, that was one of the greatest legacies of colonialism.--Inayity (talk) 04:29, 10 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This should really be changed from 'Western European Colonialism' to 'Modern Period Colonialism'[edit]

Only talking about the Western European colonial powers is arbitrary, and ignores the very similar colonial empires of Japan and the USA. The article doesn't benefit from such a narrow focus, and I can't really see there being much downside to including the aforementioned countries. While I see that there are enormous differences between Western European colonialism and say, Russian or Turkish imperialism, the geographic specificness really doesn't do many favours. 130.56.79.28 (talk) 05:03, 7 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Article moved[edit]

Firstly, 'evaluation of' implies a non-neutral point of view, and is manifestly inappropriate for an encyclopaædia. The only articles that should appear on Wikipedia with a title that contains 'evaluation of' are articles that describe the process of evaluating something, such as Evaluation of machine translation, and evaluations of issues are, by their nature, biased.

The "impact of" was retained in the title because this article focuses only on the impacts of colonialism & colonisation, and does not attempt to recount/describe events that occurred, etc.

Finally, "colonization" was changed to "colonisation" in keeping with the 'consistency within articles' principles of Wikipedia:Manual of Style#National varieties of English as the article's body is written in British English, not American English.

This is a rather conservative move; the more radical proposals on this page should be debated before any move attempted. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nickc8 (talk • contribs) 09:19, 21 August 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Adding new sections[edit]

I added a section on the different varieties of colonialism in order to discuss their different impacts. I will be adding a section on Exploitation Colonialism to this same heading next. Crcarey (talk) 22:27, 21 April 2016 (UTC)[reply]

References[edit]

Name[edit]

Why both colonialism and colonization? There is no colonialism and colonization article. Yes, Colonization=/=Colonialism, but in the European context, we talk of colonialism (see the disambig note on that page) so shouldn't this be moved to a simpler title at Western European colonialism? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 10:19, 29 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I agree. The distinction is not an important one for an article of this scope.—Brigade Piron (talk) 10:45, 29 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Brigade Piron: Since nobody else cares to comment, I think we can move it. But perhaps even simpler - European colonialism? I don't think we need to distinguish it from the pretty mucn non-existent Eastern European colonialism? --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 19:45, 31 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know: I can see the rationale behind the "Western" part in the title to distinguish it from the European forms of colonialism originating in the East (Russian Empire/Habsburg Empire for example): that would probably merit a move discussion. I think you could probably go ahead and cull the "colonization" part now though. —Brigade Piron (talk) 17:21, 1 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

GA Review[edit]

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This review is transcluded from Talk:Western European colonialism and colonization/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.

Reviewer: Piotrus (talk · contribs) 10:24, 29 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]


I will try to clear this off GA queue quickly. This is a student's project. First, is the nominator and author of the 2016 expansion, student editor User:Crcarey still with us? Please respond. There are issues to be fixed, but for now, quickly: there are outstanding citation needed tags. Citations need to be provided, or this will be a quick fail. Second quick fail warning: empty " Postcolonialism and postcolonial literature" section. It needs, well, to be written. Third note: there are book citations, but they are missing page numbers. Those need to be added. More detailed comments will be offered if I see that we have an active editor interested in resolving those issues. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 10:24, 29 November 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Piotrus, nothing has been done here or to the article in over a month. The student editor has made one edit since you posted the above, on December 7, yet didn't respond here despite the automatic user talk page post that this review had commenced the week before. I think it's probably time to close this as unsuccessful. If the editor returns and is still interested, he or she can address the issues you've already raised and renominate. BlueMoonset (talk) 18:33, 30 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. Failing this as the usual student-ends-class-student--student-stops-giving-a-damn-student-wastes-volunteer-time failure. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 13:20, 31 December 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Why 'analysis of' rather than just 'Western European...'[edit]

This seems to be an unusual way of titling an article, and nor does it seem particularly necessary. Thoughts? Moreover, the difference between "colonialism" and "colonization" can be made in the article, can't it? Do these need to both be in the headline? Therefore I suggest the article be renamed to "Western European Colonialism." Will wait a few days for objectors and if there are none make the move. Cleopatran Apocalypse (talk) 06:36, 12 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the current title is rather a mess. However, the Analysis of is intended to reflect the fact that this article was intended to deal with historiographical and theoretical approaches to colonialism, mostly in the era of New Imperialism and mostly in Africa. It's a valid subject for an article to introduce people to the Robinson and Gallagher debate, the comparative debate of direct/indirect rule etc. which would not fit into a general article on the history of colonialism. Personally, I think this might be clarified by a better title which uses the word "historiography" and perhaps makes the African dimension explicit. —Brigade Piron (talk) 16:17, 13 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
If that's the article, then let's call it that. "Historiography of Western European Colonialism." What do you think? I agree that it is perfectly acceptable to have an article that deals explicitly with a set of theoretical debates in a literature... assuming there has been a great deal of it (as this page shows). Cleopatran Apocalypse (talk) 12:34, 14 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Let's go one step better: Historiography of Colonialism. Folks should be pretty clear about just who is doing the colonizing.... Cleopatran Apocalypse (talk) 12:36, 14 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not opposed to Historiography of European Colonialism but still think some kind of reference to New Imperialism is necessary to distinguish it from the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the Second British Empire etc. How about Historiography of Colonial Africa? Some amount of trade-off is unfortunately inevitable. —Brigade Piron (talk) 12:41, 14 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
NB: I note we already have Historiography of Colonial Spanish America... —Brigade Piron (talk) 12:44, 14 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I would support a name change in the direction of "Historiography of". This would necessitate a change in the lead though, which seems to be making arguments about colonialism, while a good article on historiography talks about the arguments and isn't about making them in the text. "Analysis of" lends itself to being applied to POV essays, which we don't want to encourage. -Indy beetle (talk) 23:29, 14 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
But the article doesn't refer primarily to the colonization of Africa. It is about colonialism as a political practice. What about simply Historiography of Colonialism? Cleopatran Apocalypse (talk) 01:49, 15 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Ah - so this entire page was written as a student class project. Basically it's a college or high school essay that was shoehorned into a Wikipedia article? And now here we are spending time mucking with it. Kind of amusing... Certainly explains the peculiar structure. Cleopatran Apocalypse (talk) 01:51, 15 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Cleopatran Apocalypse: I suspected as much once I saw the Wiki Education bar on this talk page. They truly need to make students understand that this is not how to write a Wikipedia article. TNT this as WP:NOTESSAY and salvage what we can. -Indy beetle (talk) 02:10, 15 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Yep. Well, given that we really have a free hand here, why don't we actually make the page about the historiography of colonialism. That is, the page reports and documents the different ways that colonialism has been talked about and documented. Kind of meta, but obviously metaness is a major part of the social sciences and there is no doubt a large literature on the historiography of colonialism. It would mean that a lot of the page as it stands now — for example, the parts on the substantive aspects of colonialism — gets deleted, but I think that's fine.
I am not a maximalist in terms of Wikipedia philosophy. We all only have so much time on the planet. I would support making this a shorter, tighter, focused article specifically about the topic we rename it to be (maybe we end up with two articles). If no one dissents I will dig up some lit specifically on the historiography of colonialism and get to it. Cleopatran Apocalypse (talk) 04:31, 15 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Also I'd like to list a few other benefits of the historiography angle: it would allow explicitly addressing the different ways that the phenomenon called colonialism has been conceptualized and imagined over time, eventually leading of course to post-colonial perspectives. Hm. I think that's it. And actually that is nothing more than what the page would be.... But I just want to emphasize that this is a good idea! Cleopatran Apocalypse (talk) 04:33, 15 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I would be cautious about dealing with all colonialism ever in an article of this scope which is why I suggested an African scope which is where most of the literature and the discussions (indirect rule, causes/reason for expansion, etc) all originate. Seen objectively, colonialism would encompass everything from the Spanish conquest of the Americas in the 1500s to the Russian Empire's subjugation of Central Asia in the 1800s to the the British Empire in the 1950s. It would also include plenty of non-European topics. As such, the concept of colonialism is potentially vast and frankly has very little historiography which considers it such. Historiography of colonial Africa and Historiography of colonial Asia etc might be more manageable. —Brigade Piron (talk) 09:49, 15 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Cleopatran Apocalypse: I'm not denying the usefulness of such an article or notability of the topic, but if you read the article it is quite obvious that it is not about historiography. Only the "Modern theories of colonialism" section delves into this area. What you're suggesting would, in my opinion, would necessitate the writing of a completely new article. Thus, we should scrap this one and create new article(s). -Indy beetle (talk) 01:08, 16 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]
None of this work appeals to me right now. I like the idea of a "Historiography of X Colonialism" series of articles, drawing explicitly on discussions of how the history of those colonial episodes have been told. Dealing with this page, however, is just rather off-putting. It is a big sprawling mess, it alternates between addressing substantive and conceptual issues, and the only uniting them is this vaguely-defined "Analysis of...."
Whether it is so bad that it should be outright deleted is an interesting question. I am not a maximalist in terms of Wikipedia theory: if this page exists only as the result of a long-ago school project, is not being maintained, had no clear conceptual foundation in the first place, then why keep it? Delete it and fold the content onto other pages if it makes sense to do so. If I should nominate it for deletion, please advise. Cleopatran Apocalypse (talk) 06:25, 29 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Why not write a replacement text in WP:Sandbox first? I disagree with Indy beetle that there is nothing of value in the current article - the sections on (i) direct vs indirect rule, (ii) Land, property rights, and labour and (iii) Reorganization of borders and (iv) settler colonialism are not optimally structured or phrased but do address serious issues of historiographical debate. I fear if every page required "a clear conceptual foundation", we would have very few articles left.—Brigade Piron (talk) 10:14, 29 July 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Interjection: While I support a Historiography of colonialism article, this is not that article, save for a few bits as mentioned above. However, there is no cause for deletion here, since this is an abundantly discussed topic of research and writing and the page largely serves to outline that scholarship. Is this topic itself notable? Clearly. See for example these works designed to review that literature in different fields and different timeframes. (Note that the Oxford Bibliographies each have scores of entries, but most are visible only behind a paywall.)

  • In international relations:
  • In sociology:
    • Go, Julian (2009). "The 'New' Sociology of Empire and Colonialism". Sociology Compass. 3 (5): 775–788. doi:10.1111/j.1751-9020.2009.00232.x. ISSN 1751-9020. Retrieved 2020-10-26.
    • Oxford Bibliographies on "Empire and Colonialism"
  • In anthropology:
  • In literary and critical theory:

I recommend shortening the title to Analysis of European colonialism, and general edits to improve the article.--Carwil (talk) 19:05, 26 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

As another interjection, while I agree wholeheartedly that the current title and article are both a bit of a mess, it is completely nonsensical that this article exists but European colonialism redirects to History of colonialism, which is only mentioned in passing in a section link here. The solution might be to turn European colonialism into a decent dab pointing at all the different ways of considering it or it might be helpful as this article is fixed to turn it into something that would deserve to receive that redirect itself. — LlywelynII 19:26, 9 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

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