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Colonialism
Also written: Colonization, Settler colonialism
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At a glance
Source-by-source
“Colonization can be defined as some form of invasion, dispossession, and subjugation of a people. … The colonizer/colonized relationship is by nature an unequal one that benefits the colonizer at the expense of the colonized.”
Racial Equity Tools defines colonization as the invasion, dispossession, and subjugation of a people — not necessarily military, often beginning as geographic or economic encroachment and producing institutionalized inequality. It links "ongoing and legacy colonialism" to present-day power relations and to the development of white supremacy as a justifying philosophy.
“Colonization requires the dehumanization of peoples who are Indigenous to an area so that their land is stolen, their culture is erased, and peoples are eliminated for the economic benefit of empire building.”
APA defines colonization as the dehumanization of Indigenous peoples to justify stealing land, erasing culture, and empire-building, and names settler colonialism as the form that displaced and killed Indigenous populations in the United States. It frames the legacy as dislocation, dispossession, and white privilege, with decolonization as the corrective process.
“The European Age of Exploration that began in the 16th century led, for good and ill, to the subjugation of less technologically advanced peoples as European colonies. … One consequence of World War II was the rapid shedding of empire in the late 1940s, climaxing globally in the 1960s.”
The Diversity Style Guide's colonialism entry is historical and geographic, tracing European colonization from the 16th-century Age of Exploration to mid-20th-century decolonization. Its descriptive, period-survey framing documents the history rather than setting a usage rule, complementing the structural definitions RET and APA supply.
Synthesis
“Colonialism” (and “colonization”) is usable structural vocabulary, defined as invasion, dispossession, and subjugation — and as an ongoing relationship, not only a historical era. Racial Equity Tools defines colonization as “some form of invasion, dispossession, and subjugation of a people,” with a “colonizer/colonized relationship… by nature an unequal one that benefits the colonizer at the expense of” the colonized. APA gives the Indigenous-specific mechanism: colonization “requires the dehumanization of peoples who are Indigenous to an area so that their land is stolen, their culture is erased,” and it names settler-colonialism. The Diversity Style Guide adds a historical reference frame.
Racial Equity Tools and APA treat colonialism as a present-tense structure with living consequences, which is why it cross-links to the Indigenous chapter and to the other structural concepts (systemic racism, classism). The Diversity Style Guide instead frames colonialism as a historical period: the European Age of Exploration from the 16th century through mid-20th-century decolonization. It supplies chronology, not a present-tense reading.
Audience notes
- Journalists and editors. “Colonialism” and “settler-colonialism” are precise terms — use them for the structure, and be specific about who dispossessed whom rather than a passive “colonization happened.”
- Advocates and internal comms. Racial Equity Tools and APA frame colonialism in the present tense: name continuing dispossession and land/culture impacts, not just 16th-century history. (The Diversity Style Guide, by contrast, treats it as a historical period.)
Related terms