KEY CONCEPTS OF COLONIALISM & GLOBALISM

GLOBALISM

Despite the balance between its good and bad effects,
identified by critical globalists, globalization has not been a
politically neutral activity. While access to global forms of
communication, markets and culture may indeed be worldwide
today, it has been argued by some critics that if one asks how
that access is enabled and by what ideological machinery it is
advanced, it can be seen that the operation of globalization
cannot be separated from the structures of power perpetuated
by European imperialism. Global culture is a continuation of an
imperial dynamic of influence, control, dissemination and
hegemony that operates according to an already initiated
structure of power that emerged in the sixteenth century in the
great confluence of imperialism, capitalism and modernity. This
explains why the forces of globalization are still, in some senses,
centred in the West (in terms of power and institutional
organization), despite their global dissemination.
(p. 113.)

COLONIALISM

Although slavery existed in many periods and in many
societies (e.g. many African societies had ‘slaves’), they were
not commercial slaves in this modern sense. Slavery was often
associated with exogamous groups, captives or members of other
groups outside the community, but the post-Renaissance
development of an intense ideology of racism produced the
peculiarly destructive modern form of commercial, chattel slavery
slave/ slavery in which all rights and all human values were set aside and from
which only a few could ever hope to achieve full manumission
(legal freedom). Many of the pseudo-objective, ‘scientific’
discourses by which colonialism justified its practices flowed
from the need to rationalize such an indefensible commercial
exploitation and oppression, on a mass scale, of millions of human
beings. It has been suggested by some commentators that
slavery gave birth to racism, at least in its modern form, just as
racism became the excuse for slavery’s excesses (Davidson 1994).
Race and racial prejudice in their modern forms have thus been
intimately bound up with the colonial form of the institution of
slavery, to the degree that it seems almost impossible to
disentangle them.
(p. 213.-214.)

Key concepts in post-colonial studies / Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin.
1998.

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