internal colonialism

the incorporation of culturally distinct groups by a dominant group into one national identity, centralized political rule and a national economy. In many analyses the process has similarities with external COLONIALISM, whereby one state subordinates another. In contemporary literature on this subject there are two main areas where the concept is at the centre of analysis. One is in Latin American scholarship, where the term has been used to analyse the relationship between Europeanized social groups and indigenous groups (often called Indians) with different languages, beliefs and ways of life. Stavenhagen (1975) argues that internal colonialism emerged in Latin American countries with independence from Spain and Portugal in the 19th century and with the development of capitalist economies. Indian communities lost their lands, were made to work for strangers, were integrated into a monetary economy and incorporated into national political structures. This led to a form of ethnic stratification which, in Stavenhagen's analysis, operates alongside changing social class relationships.

In Europe and the US, the concept has been used to discuss ethnic and race relations and the emergence of nationalist movements within established nation states. The term gained currency with the civil rights and black power movements in the US in the 1960s, when comparisons were drawn between the position of black people in the US and the situation in Africa, where European colonialism was giving way to independent states. Hechter (1975) produced one of the most influential academic formulations of the concept, and, by using it to analyse national development in the UK, widened the debate. Hechter used aspects of WORLD SYSTEMS analysis to argue that internal colonialism involves the subordination of peripheral cultural groups by core dominant groups partly as a result of the uneven industrialization of territories. Those groups in the most advanced regions achieve dominance over those groups in the less advanced. Later this may lead to the emergence of nationalist movements in those regions, as was the case in some European countries and Canada in the late 1960s. See also NATIONALISM, CENTRE AND PERIPHERY, IMPERIALISM.

Collins Dictionary of Sociology, 3rd ed. © HarperCollins Publishers 2000

References in periodicals archive

All senators with conscience, who are not from water bordering communities, should support those from the affected communities to resist internal colonialism.

Senators Who Support FG's Bid To Take Over Rivers And River Banks Won't Be Welcome At Home -Odumakin

To understand the historical allowance of such profit-generated incidents, many scholars (see Robinson 2015) turn to the theory of internal colonialism. Specifically, internal colonialism provides insights into the perpetuation of high poverty levels in West Virginia and many other areas of the Appalachian region.

"Do We Really Want to Go Down That Path?": Abandoning Appalachia and the Elk River Chemical Spill

Mentioned by a former prime minister as warning against the undemocratic consequences of his ouster and fiercely resisted by the prime ministerial hopefuls, the name brings back memories of what the PPP's foundation documents described as 'internal colonialism' perpetrated in our early decades.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman

The monograph ends with a short discussion of some of Navjot's ongoing projects, including Soul Breadth Wind, a multi-channel video work that addresses the Indian state's longstanding extraction of mineral wealth from the Chhattisgarh region at the cost of marginalizing its indigenous populations in a situation akin to an internal colonialism, reminding the reader that the artist's tryst with the region and its dense entanglements as well as a desire to respond to them, continues to grow.

The Thirteenth Place: Positionality as critique in the art of Navjot Altaf

(33) Other scholars argued that Black people were the victims of internal colonialism, and a powerful argument was forwarded in Harold Cruse's reference to "The American Negro: A Subject of Domestic Colonialism," in an essay titled "Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American" that was first published in Studies on the Left (Volume 2, Number 3, 1962) and was republished in his collection of essays, Rebellion or Revolution?

From one colonial situation to another: politics, universalism and the crisis of the African intellectual

Hechter, Michael, 1973, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

The nexus of enmity: ideology, global politics, and identity in the twenty-first century

Hechter, Michael (1977), Internal Colonialism. The Celtic fringe in British national development 1536-1966, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

The Nation State as Subdued History/Der Nationalstaat als Uberwundene Geschichte

(18) Hechter's concept of internal colonialism contains two basic arguments.

"Colonizers with party cards": Soviet internal colonialism in Central Asia, 1917-39

The authors overall recuperate the Celtic peoples as active agents rather than passive victims of internal colonialism while also redressing their elision in academic discourse.

Michael Newton, ed. Celts in the Americas

He looks at police brutality and internal colonialism in the 1930s, black mobilization around the 1939 local elections, the intersection of racial control and the war-time economy in which Detroit was at the center, Black Nationalism in Sherrill's Michigan Chronicle, forging a legacy for Garveyism and the UNIA in the post-war years, and the UNIA during the Civil Rights era.

"By our own strength"; William Sherrill, the UNIA, and the fight for African American self-determination in Detroit