Scholars use the term colonialism to refer to a wide range of interrelated forms of domination, both in the past and today. If read literally, it refers to the process by which a society transplants itself, creating a new community in a new territory that retains links to its origin. But this basic sense highlights a fundamental contradiction. Very rarely in history have societies expanded into empty frontiers. What was new for colonists was already known to and occupied by another society. Particularly when applied to European colonialism, colonies were both expansion and dispossession. The results furthermore were neither replication nor assimilation, but a system of racial governance in which one society imposes its institutions on another.
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