- Colonization:
In the Colonial Era, colonialism in this context refers mostly to Western European countries' colonization of lands mainly in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania. The main European countries active in this form of colonization included Spain, Portugal, France, the Kingdom of England (later Great Britain), the Netherlands, and the Kingdom of Prussia (now mostly Germany), and, beginning in the 18th century, the United States. Most of these countries had a period of almost complete power in world trade at some stage in the period from roughly 1500 to 1900. Beginning in the late 19th century, Imperial Japan also engaged in settler colonization, most notably in Hokkaido and Korea.
While many European colonization schemes focused on shorter-term exploitation of economic opportunities (Newfoundland, for example, or Siberia) or addressed specific goals (Massachusetts or New South Wales), a tradition developed of careful long-term social and economic planning for both parties, but more on the colonizing countries themselves, based on elaborate theory-building (note James Oglethorpe's Colony of Georgia in the 1730s and Edward Gibbon Wakefield's New Zealand Company in the 1840s).
Colonization may be used as a method of absorbing and assimilating foreign people into the culture of the imperial country, and thus destroying any remnant of the cultures that might threaten the imperial territory over the long term by inspiring reform. The main instrument to this end is linguistic imperialism, or the imposition of non-indigenous imperial (colonial) languages on the colonized populations to the exclusion of any indigenous languages from administrative (and often, any public) use.
- Settler Colonialism:
In the context of the United States, early colonial powers generally respected the territorial and political sovereignty of the indigenous tribes, due to the need to forge local alliances with these tribes against other European colonial powers (i.e. British attempts to check French influence, etc.).[citation needed] The Euro-American colonial powers created economic dependency and imbalance of trade, incorporating Indigenous nations into spheres of influence and controlling them indirectly with the use of Christian missionaries and alcohol.[22] However, with the emergence of an independent United States, desire for land and the perceived threat of permanent indigenous political and spatial structures led to violent relocation of many indigenous tribes to the American West, including the notable example of the Cherokee in what is known as the Trail of Tears.[19]
Frederick Jackson Turner, the father of the "frontier thesis" of American history, noted in 1901: "Our colonial system did not start with Spanish War; the U.S. had had a colonial history from the beginning...hidden under the phraseology of 'interstate migration' and territorial organization'".[22] While the United States government and local state governments directly aided this dispossession through the use of military forces, ultimately this came about through agitation by settler society in order to gain access to indigenous land, which in some cases (especially in the American South) used in order to build a plantation society and perpetuate the practice of slavery in the creation of said plantation.[19] The settler colonialism extended past the removal and extermination of the Indigenous people. The practice of disappearing the prior existence also was implemented, and continues to be perpetuated in local histories.
