Colonization
Spanish and Portuguese Colonization
British, Dutch, and French Colonization
Demise
Further Reading
The process of establishing an outpost, or colony, of a state, economy, and/or people at some distance from the location of the establishing entity.
Although not all examples of colonization in history have involved the creation of a system of political control by the establishing entity over the colony, such control has conventionally been regarded as standard since the sixteenth century.
Colonization is one of the main ways in which imperialism has functioned in the past five centuries. Reasons for establishing colonies have varied, typically involving some combination of the following goals: to secure or enhance trade, to establish or control the production of certain commodities, to solve social problems in the colonizing country by settling particular groups of its inhabitants abroad, and to create military bases for strategic purposes. Whatever the stated reasons for establishing a colony, the historical development of successful colonies has usually gone beyond those intentions or rendered them obsolete, often in a short time. Almost all cases of colonization since the sixteenth century have relied on trade, regardless of formal intentions, and colonies played an important role in the construction of the global economy.
Spanish and Portuguese Colonization
The first significant European colonial ventures of early modern times were closely linked to trade. The small colonies established by Portugal in Asia and East Africa in the sixteenth century were essentially bases from which the Portuguese could attempt to redirect parts of the Asian-European and intra-Asian seaborne trade into Portuguese ships. They were both trading centers and naval bases, located at strategic points in the commercial system of the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Although they developed substantial populations (especially Goa, in southwestern India) and became centers for significant intercultural contact, they never acquired large territories before the expansion of Portugal's African colonies in the late nineteenth century. (The Portuguese colony in Brazil, however, eventually became one of the largest countries in the world.)
The initial Spanish colonies in the Caribbean area were also small, intended in part as bases for exploration in search of routes to Asia or as sources of wealth in America, and in part as sites for the production of commodities for export to Europe to keep the Spanish colonial enterprise solvent until the other intentions could be realized. The discovery and conquest of Mesoamerican empires in Mexico and Peru, and even more, the discovery in the 1540s of rich mines of silver in those countries, transformed the process of colonization, leading Spain to attempt to govern its expanded American colonies directly and to build a colonial economy around the extraction of silver.
Between the sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries, the Spanish government tried to restrict trade between Spain's American colonies and Europe strictly to fleets of Spanish ships under naval convoy and through relatively autocratic colonial governments to limit economic development to levels necessary to support the silver enterprise. In reality, both because of the growth of a Western population of European and mixed European-Indian descent and because of secondary consequences of silver production, the Spanish colonial economy developed beyond the restrictions placed on it by the colonial administration, engaging in extensive intercolonial and export trade and importing European and Asia goods through massive smuggling. An unresolved tension between colonial government and expansive economy existed throughout the period of Spanish rule, until the wars of independence dismantled most of the Spanish colonial empire in the first third of the nineteenth century.
British, Dutch, and French Colonization
Colonies were also a primary means by which the overseas expansion of northwest European peoples took place in the early modern era. The first permanent English, French, and Dutch colonies in North America, products of the early seventeenth century, were economically (and in every other way) quite marginal enterprises that got by on a combination of trade with indigenous populations (fur in French Canada, in New Netherlands, and in New England), production of export products (tobacco in Virginia and Maryland), and smuggling (and occasionally piracy) in the Spanish colonies.
Their circumstances were transformed by the establishment in the West Indies of colonies devoted to the production of sugar, a highly profitable commodity with a large and growing European market. The English took the lead in creating sugar colonies (using systems of production introduced by the Portuguese), but the French, Dutch, and several other nationalities followed suit. Around a complex set of trade relations that involved the West African slave trade (to supply labor), the production of food in North America to feed the slaves, and the transportation and distribution of sugar and sugar products in Europe and elsewhere, a highly dynamic Atlantic economy was created. This economy flourished throughout most of the eighteenth century. It was anchored in colonies established by the major European powers, preeminently Britain and France. The political arrangements of these colonies permitted modern capitalist economies to be maintained and made it possible for substantial populations of Europeans and Africans (the latter involuntarily, through the slave trade) to settle in America, thereby creating additional sectors of the Atlantic economy. On the other hand, colonial governments were supposed to be responsive to the policies of the imperial states that appointed them, and as in the Spanish colonies, there was always a tension between the interests of colonists as participants in the multinational Atlantic economy and the national aims of the imperial states. This tension led to revolution in most of the British North American colonies in the 1770s and to the creation of an independent country, the United States, in their place.
Woodruff D. Smith
Source Citation (MLA 7th Edition)
Smith, Woodruff D. "Colonization." Encyclopedia of World Trade: From Ancient Times to the Present. Ed. Cynthia Clarke Northrup. Armonk, NY: Sharpe Reference, 2013. 193-195. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 4 June 2015.