Where does colonialism come from?

Abstract

This paper reflects on the medieval and classical antecedents of modern colonialism. In its first section, it focuses on Pisa’s medieval experience in order to contribute to a genealogy of colonial imaginings and practice. Unable to expand inland and surrounded by hostile polities, Pisa amassed a number of colonial possessions during the eleventh and twelfth century, primarily in Sardinia, but also in the Balearic Islands, North Africa, and in the Levant. Sidestepping the findings of an important debate about whether colonial phenomena in radically different eras can be seen as ‘continuous’ with their predecessors (both sides of this debate present convincing arguments that are consistent with their respective definitions – i.e. ‘the Ancients Greeks or Romans set up colonies’, ‘modern colonialism is entirely unprecedented’), this paper’s second section refers to settler colonialism as a specific mode of domination and outlines how it was practiced in classical antiquity. Each section is followed by an epilogue touching on the intellectual afterlives of the ‘empires’ outlined by each section.

Keywords:

• Colonialism
• Pisa
• Rudolf Borchardt
• Dante
• Hannah Arendt

Notes

1. See Michael Mitterauer, John Morrissey, Pisa nel medioevo. Potenza sul mare e motore di cultura (Viella: Roma, 2015). The book has a chapter entitled ‘Rete commerciale e protocolonialismo’ (‘commercial networks and protocolonialism’), 109–204.

2. See Sandro Petrucci, Re in Sardegna, a Pisa cittadini. Ricerche sui ‘domini Sardinee’ pisani (Bologna: Cappelli, 1988).

3. See Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994).

4. Rudolf Borchardt, Pisa. Ein Versuch (Zürich: Verlag der Corona, 1938); and Rudolf Borchardt, Pisa, solitudine di un impero (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi Editori, 1965).

5. Rudolf Borchardt, The Passionate Gardener (Kingston, NY: McPherson, 2006).

6. See Heinz Politzer, “Rudolf Borchardt, Poet of Assimilation: The Extreme Case of an Extreme Tendency”, 1 January 1950. Available at: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/rudolf-borchardt-poet-of-assimilationthe-extreme-case-of-an-extreme-tendency/ (accessed 11 August 2017); Theodore Ziolkowski, “The Paradox of Rudolf Borchardt: Antimodern Modernist, Anticlassical Classicist”, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 14, no. 1–2, (2007): 227–32; and Ziolkowski reviews Ernst A. Schmidt, Rudolf Borchardts Antike. Heroisch-tragische Zeitgenossenschaft in der Moderne (Heidelberg, Universitätsverlag Winter, 2006).

7. See Borchardt, Pisa, 78.

8. Charles Verlinden, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization: Eleven Essays with an Introduction (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1970).

9. See Maurizia Tazartes, “La giovane misteriosa salvata dal fiume”, Il Tirreno, 7 April 2013. Available at: http://iltirreno.gelocal.it/pisa/cronaca/2013/04/07/news/la-giovane-misteriosa-salvata-dal-fiume-1.6842961 (accessed 8 August 2017).

10. Borchardt, Pisa, 73.

11. Ibid., 64.

12. Ibid.

13. Ibid., 69.

14. Ibid., 71.

15. ‘Ma ecco improvviso il turbine nuovo: le bandiere di quella che fu la prima crociata dell’occidente salgono sui pennoni Pisani; le flotte di quella unica città si avventano sul branco delle isole tirreniche, prima sulla Sardegna saracena, poi, fra Barcellona e Marsiglia, piombano sul regno saraceno delle Baleari. Un’armata di cittadini e di cavalieri prende d’assalto le fortezze di Maiorca, conquista la città, rompe ogni resistenza, distrugge, cattura; e mentre riporta alla foce dell’Arno le navi cariche di un enorme preda, trascina l’Europa in una nuova storica epoca’. Ibid., 72.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., 73.

18. Ibid., 73–74.

19. See ibid., 74.

20. Ibid., 79.

21. David Herlihy, Pisa nel Duecento. Vita economica e sociale d’una città italiana nel medioevo, Pisa, Nistri-Lischi Editori, 1990 (David Herlihy, Pisa in the Early Renaissance: A Study of Urban Growth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958)).

22. See Herlihy, Pisa nel Duecento, 16.

23. See ibid., 98.

24. See ibid., 92, 93.

25. See ibid., 195.

26. Ibid., 197.

27. Ibid., 206.

28. Ibid., 207.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid, 94.

31. Borchardt, Pisa, 137.

32. Ibid., 87.

33. See Mohamed Adhikari, “Europe’s First Settler Colonial Incursion into Africa: The Genocide of aboriginal Canary Islanders”, African Historical Review, (49, 1, 2017) 1–26.

34. Michel Balard, Alain Ducellier (eds), Coloniser au Moyen âge (Paris: Colin, 1995). There are obvious continuities between classical and medieval modes of colonial ‘othering’.

35. On Dante’s relationship with the Templars, see René Guénon, L’esoterismo di Dante (Milano: Adelphi, 2001 [1925]); more recently, Raffaele K. Salinari, “Dante e i Pirati dei Caraibi”, il manifesto, 10 June 2017. On the Templars’ colonial empire and its demise see Helen Nicholson, The Knights Templar: A New History (Stroud: Sutton, 2001); less reliably, see David Hatcher Childress, Pirates and The Lost Templar Fleet (Kempton, IL: Adventures Unlimited Press, 2003). Legend has that some Templar escapees fleeing persecution in Paris had sailed west from La Rochelle and reached a land that may have been what would become ‘America’ before returning. They probably had not, but Dante would have heard the rumours.

36. Anthony Pagden cites this passage as opening epigraph to his European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), vii.

37. See Richard Waswo, The Founding Legend of Western Civilization: From Virgil to Vietnam (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997).

38. ‘Né dolcezza di figlio, né la pièta/del vecchio padre, né ‘l debito amore/lo qual dovea Penelopè far lieta’. See Dante, Divina Commedia, XXVI, vv. 94–96. I am using H. W. Longfellow’s English translation.

39. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

40. Ibid., vv. 102–105: “L’un lito e l’altro vidi infin la Spagna,/fin nel Morrocco, e l’isola d’i Sardi,/e l’altre che quel mare intorno bagna”. In English: “Both of the shores I saw as far as Spain,/Far as Morocco, and the isle of Sardes,/And the others which that sea bathes round about”.

41. Ibid., XXVI, vv. 112–120. ‘O frati,’ dissi, ‘che per cento milia/perigli siete giunti a l’occidente,/a questa tanto picciola vigilia/d’i nostri sensi ch’è del rimanente/non vogliate negar l’esperïenza,/di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente./Considerate la vostra semenza:/fatti non foste a viver come bruti,/ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza’ (emphasis added).

42. See Nicolàs Wey Gómez, The Tropics of Empire: Why Columbus Sailed South to the Indies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).

43. Moses I. Finley, “Colonies – An attempt at a Typology”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 26 (1976), 167–188. Michael Sommer, in “Colonies – Colonisation – Colonialism: A Typological Reappraisal” (Ancient West and East, 10 (2011), 183–193), also argues that modern colonies are inherently different from Greek and Phoenician precedents.

44. Finley, “Colonies”, 176.

45. Ibid., 177.

46. Ibid., 183.

47. See Verlinden, The Beginnings of Modern Colonization.

48. Edward Cavanagh, Lorenzo Veracini (eds), The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016).

49. Francis Bacon had famously written On Plantations in 1625 to express his concern. See Sarah Irving, “‘In a Pure Soil’: Colonial Anxieties in the Work of Francis Bacon”, History of European Ideas, 32 (2006), 249–62.

50. Borchardt, Pisa, 68.

51. Albert Galloway Keller, Colonization: A Study of the Founding of New Societies (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1907), 25.

52. Albert Venn Dicey, “A Common Citizenship for the English Race”, Contemporary Review, LXXI, (April 1987), 457–76. Dicey believed that the best way to organise Anglo-American relations in the context of increasing imperial and racial tensions was through the establishment of an isopolity, a classical Greece-inspired form of common citizenship.

53. See Duncan Bell, “From Ancient to Modern in Victorian Imperial Thought”, The Historical Journal, 49, 3, 735–759.

54. John A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study, London, James Nisbet, 1902; V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (London: Penguin, 2010 [1917]); and Joseph A. Schumpeter, “The Sociology of Imperialism”, In Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes (Cleveland, OH: Meridian, 1955 [1918]), 3–99.

55. See James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-world, 1783–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

56. See Claude Mossé, La colonisation dans l’antiquite (Paris: F. Nathan, 1970), 36–50, and especially p. 36. See also Alexander John Graham, Colony and Mother City in Ancient Greece (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1964).

57. Mossé, La colonisation dans l’antiquite, 39.

58. See ibid., 42.

59. Ibid., 37–8.

60. See Greg Woolf, “Diasporas and Colonization in Classical Antiquity”, In Immanuel Ness (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 2013). DOI: 10.1002/9781444351071.wbeghm172.

61. Mossé, La colonisation dans l’antiquite, 44–50.

62. See, for example, Gocha R. Tsetskhladze (ed.), Greek Colonisation: An Account of Greek Colonies and Other Settlements Overseas (Leiden: Brill, 2008).

63. Gocha Tsetskhladze, “Greek Migrations and Colonies: Ancient Era”, In Ness, The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration. DOI: 10.1002/9781444351071.wbeghm261.

64. Ibid.

65. Jean-Paul Descoeudres, “Greek Colonization Movement, 8th–6th centuries BCE”, In Ness, The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration. DOI: 10.1002/9781444351071.wbeghm260.

66. Ibid. See also Jean-Paul Descoeudres (ed.), Greek Colonists and Native Populations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

67. Descoeudres, “Greek Colonization Movement”.

68. See Woolf, “Diasporas and Colonization in Classical Antiquity”.

69. Descoeudres, “Greek Colonization Movement”.

70. See Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

71. See Mary E. White, “Greek Colonization”, The Journal of Economic History, XXI, no. 4 (1961), 443–454. Some settlements, however, may have resulted from external aggression. The Phocaeans displaced as a result of the Persian advance. They established a veritable diaspora in the west.

72. See ibid., 445.

73. See ibid., 448.

74. White also notes, however, that the Greeks expanded in more recognisably colonial ways as well: some Greek settlements remained colonies subjected to the motherland, then with Alexander’s conquests, many Greeks resettled as conquerors and moved to the new ‘Hellenistic monarchies’. See ibid, 453.

75. Ibid.

76. Ibid., 450.

77. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963).

78. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 198.

79. A. Dirk Moses, “Das Römische Gespräch in a New Key: Hannah Arendt, Genocide, and the Justification of Imperial Civilization”, The Journal of Modern History, 85, no. 4 (2013), 867–913. See also Onur Ulas Ince, “Bringing the Economy Back In: Hannah Arendt, Karl Marx, and the Politics of Capitalism”, The Journal of Politics, 78 (2016), 1–16, 31, especially 11–13.

80. And yet, as Elizabeth Strakosch has perceptively suggested, her politics can also produce a critique of settler colonialism. Strakosch recognises, however, that Arendt’s ‘overall body of work has a complex relationship to settler colonialism’. Elizabeth Strakosch, “Beyond Colonial Completion: Arendt, Settler Colonialism and the End of Politics”, In Sarah Maddison, Tom Clark, Ravi de Costa (eds), The Limits of Settler Colonial Reconciliation: Non-Indigenous People and the Responsibility to Engage (Singapore: Springer, 2017), 15–33, at 15.

81. Arendt, The Human Condition, 198.

82. See Moses, “Das Römische Gespräch”, 82–6.