1. Colonialism and Postcolonialism
INTRODUCTION
© 2015 Joshua E. Polster. All Rights Reserved. No part of this work or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied, modified or adapted, without the prior written consent of the author.

2. What is Colonialism?
Colonialism: a political-economic act by various European nations that explored, conquered, settled, and exploited large areas of the world.
The age of modern colonialism began about 1500, following the European discoveries of a sea route around Africa’s southern coast (1488) and of America (1492).
With these events sea power shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and to the emerging nation-states of Portugal, Spain, the Dutch Republic, France and England.
By discovery, conquest, and settlement, these nations expanded and colonized throughout the world, spreading European institutions and culture.

3. Characteristics of Colonialism
Political Domination
The Establishment of a Government
Large-Scale Religious Conversion
Forced Economic Dependence

4. Justifications for Colonialism
Economic
Colonialism provided a huge natural resource base for small European powers
Colonies provided ready markets for finished products
Religious: The need to spread Christianity
Cultural: “White Man’s Burden”

5. Colonialism in the Americas (1763)

6. British Empire in 1914

7. Colonial Africa (1800s)

8. Post-Colonial Era The post-colonial era (after World War II)
The post-colonial era is when former colonies (within and outside of countries) became independent from their colonizers. Colonizers, however, still maintain power over their former colonies in other ways, such as economic and/ or cultural.
The post-colonial era is when the world defined itself into three main sections: the West or “first world" (Western Europe, U.S., Australia), the East or “second world” (what was Communist Europe under the USSR), and the “third world" (Asia, Africa, Central and South America, the Mideast. India and Pakistan).

9. Post Colonial Africa

10. Orientalism
In both the colonial and post-colonial era, there was the practice of Orientalism: a dominant culture’s presentation of another culture in order to reduce it to a mystified, exoticized, often feminized object/other.
This sets up a binary system of opposition, which helps to create an ‘inferior’ identity for the opposing nations, and, at the same time, create and strengthen the ‘superior’ identity of the dominant culture.