Postcolonial Concepts: Colonialism and Imperialism

Colonialism and Imperialism
Colonialism
Colonialism is a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another. One of the difficulties in defining colonialism is that it is hard to distinguish it from imperialism. Frequently the two concepts are treated as synonyms. Like colonialism, imperialism also involves political and economic control over a dependent territory. The etymology of the two terms, however, provides some clues about how they differ. The term colony comes from the Latin word colonus, meaning farmer. This root reminds us that the practice of colonialism usually involved the transfer of population to a new territory, where the arrivals lived as permanent settlers while maintaining political allegiance to their country of origin. Imperialism, on the other hand, comes from the Latin term imperium, meaning to command. Thus, the term imperialism draws attention to the way that one country exercises power over another, whether through settlement, sovereignty, or indirect mechanisms of control.

(Source: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/colonialism/)

According to Edward Said, and many others, the main difference between colonialism and imperialism is that while the former involves actual occupation of the colonized lands, the latter is the ideology that underwrites colonialism and that can also shape even the contemporary perceptions of the developing world in the West.
Source: https://postcolonial.net/glossary/colonialism/

Imperialism
In postcolonial theory Imperialism always refers to the ideology that promotes a worldview in which one group of people or a nation assumes that it is inherently superior to other peoples or nations and hence has the right, or obligation, to bring their civilization message to the so-called “inferior’ or “primitive” cultures. While the term Imperium comes from the Roman system of imperial government, in most postcolonial studies only the 19th and 20th century imperialism is studied, as it coincides with the rise of mercantile and later industrial capitalism.

In so many ways it is this imperial mind-set and ideology that underwrites the Western colonial project in the 19th and 20th century. While some actually believed in this way of thinking the non-West, for most nations and its leaders the “civilizing mission” worked as a legitimizing strategy to justify the occupation of non-Western lands for extracting raw materials. One could say, a la Edward said, that imperialism provided the ideological scaffolding, and still does, for the physical occupation of non-western lands.
Source: https://postcolonial.net/glossary/imperialism/
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