TYPES OF COLONIES

D. K. Fieldhouse has proposed a helpful classification of European colonies based on the numbers, population ratios, and economic functions of groups not indigenous to a given territory.¹⁵ His five types, slightly modified for purposes of my analysis, are as follows:

Pure settlement colonies, in which European immigrants and their descendants became a substantial majority of the population. These colonies began as small, compact territories and gradually but steadily expanded along a frontier separating lands occupied by settlers from lands occupied by indigenous peoples. Settlers wanted land but did not need indigenous labor to work it. Labor was supplied by the settlers themselves or by imported slaves. Colonial boundaries generally marked a racial and cultural “frontier of exclusion”¹⁶ between settlers and indigenous people. As boundaries pushed steadily back from coast to interior, the area’s original inhabitants experienced land dispossession and massive psychological as well as physical dislocation.

2. Mixed colonies, in which a substantial number of settlers lived in the same territory as a larger indigenous population. Settler well-being depended upon ready access to—and a high degree of control over—indigenous labor. Physical proximity of the two groups meant that a mixed colony featured a “frontier of inclusion.”¹⁷ Over time the colony became mixed in a second sense, as the sexual unions of settlers and indigenous peoples produced a group classified as racially hybrid.

3. Plantation colonies, in which a small settler minority owned and managed plantations producing agricultural commodities for export. Labor on the plantation and in the settler household was performed by slaves. The first slave generation was imported from another area and was unfamiliar with the colony’s terrain, hence amenable to close control by slaveholders.

Over time a separate racial category emerged from the sexual unions of settlers and slaves.

4. Colonies of occupation, in which few if any settlers were present. The vast majority of the population was indigenous to the territory. The most visible European presence was that of military personnel and civilian administrators sent out by the metropole; a few traders and missionaries might also be present. These individuals were only temporarily stationed in the colony and eventually returned to the metropole, which they considered their homeland.

5. Trading settlements or naval bases comprising tiny parcels of coastal or riverine land. Few Europeans lived in these enclaves. Those who did were typically temporary residents whose main function was to foster commercial relations with people living outside the settlements.

The European presence in the New World quickly became a settler presence. Hence the most economically viable and strategically important colonies in the Americas were of the first three types: bna (pure settlement), New Spain and Peru (mixed), Brazil and islands in the Caribbean (plantation). The more peripheral mainland colonies of Spain could be classified as colonies of occupation. Settlements that began as trading enclaves or naval bases rapidly evolved into the other types.

In phase 1 Old World colonies, in sharp contrast, nonindigenous groups played a minimal role. The coastal enclaves dotting African and Asian coastlines are examples of Fieldhouse’s fifth type. Areas of more extensive inland influence like Luzon and the Zambezi valley come closest to mixed colonies. But even these are better classified as colonies of occupation.

The sole Old World candidate for any of Fieldhouse’s first three types was South Africa. There the Dutch East India Company and French Huguenot immigrants and their Boer (“farmer”) descendants exterminated or enslaved the indigenous Khoikhoi and San peoples and imported slaves from Madagascar and the East Indies.

Accompanied by their slaves, they migrated inland to pursue farming and herding activities. By the eighteenth century Boers were pushing eastward into an increasingly contested frontier on the other side of which were Bantu-speaking Africans, whose large numbers and ability to resist European diseases made extermination impossible. South Africa resembled a pure settlement colony with respect to the settlers’ behavior toward Khoikhoi and San, their efforts to extend an inland frontier, and their obsessive concern with maintaining racial purity. In areas controlled by settlers could be found elements of a mixed colony, in that whites constituted a minority of the total population and a mixed-blood, or “colored,” community soon emerged. Traces of a plantation colony could also be found, to the extent that settlers relied heavily upon slaves to perform manual labor and domestic service. South Africa’s historical path thus parallels settler-dominated societies in the New World.¹⁸ South African settlers set the stage for interracial conflict on a grand scale by attempting to apply the methods and worldviews of New World settlers to an Old World land whose demographic and epidemiological features were quite different.

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Source: Abernethy David B.. The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415-1980. Yale University Press,2002. — 524 p.. 2002

TYPES OF COLONIES

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