On “colonialism versus empire” as frames for modern South Asian History.
“Colonialism” literally refers to an ideology or process of producing and maintaining colonies; it seems to be applied exclusively to European colonies, going back to Greek and Roman times, when ancient “empires” consisted of Greek and Roman settlements (colonies) scattered around the Mediterranean. Rome is the model (See Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference, Princeton University Press, 2010.)
Enforcing Roman law among peoples subjected to the military power of Roman rulers in and around Roman colonies produced Roman imperial subjects who were not Roman and were subjected to superior Roman authority and power; that subjugation became the basis of what we could call subaltern identities. Colonial subjects were ranked as imperial subjects; fighting colonial power meant fighting imperial power in or around a Roman colony; living with Roman power became practical and its influences suffused local societies. That colonial modeling of empire has been imported into modern world history.
The term colonialism has so far not been widely applied to the pre-modern Asian imperial territories that underlie national states in Aisia, which were formed by many centuries of colonial expansion. Subjugated peoples all around Asia came under ther power of ruling authorities travelling — notably from North India and North China –to conquer regions where dominant elites lived and settled among locals to form what came to be called “ancient civilizations.” Imperial status ranks sustained conquering elite authority in classical empires, which national elites portrayed as timeless traditions, bleached of violence.
By using Europeans to define colonialism, modern scholars implicitly endorsed the indigenous innocent valor of Asian civilizations, with which they adorned their imagined national communities. Colonial subjugation — Roman style — thus appears to arrive in Asia as alien domination by foreign outsiders, beginning with Europeans, but in Palestine, Yunnan, Tibet, Kashmir, Tamil Nadu, in many Asian mountains and islands — and in fact, in most localities, all across Eurasia — we can usefully extend the study of colonial expansion deep into the heart of civilization territory, very far back in time, and down to the present inside national territory. That longer view takes seriously the long, diverse, layering of imperial power relations, over many centuries that include a period of European ascendancy.
The survival and renovation of imperial ranks inside national politics is increasingly prominent today. In that light, we can say that Colonial Studies — focusing on interactions between dominant Europeans and subject Others — does help to unify the world history of European expansion, but does not capture the historical dynamics of imperial power relations in Asia, even during the age of European ascendancy, because those dynamics have a longer history. Colonialism is better understood when it is located inside processes of empire that reach far back into the Asian past and continue down to the present and into the future. [Ref: “Imperial Modernity: history and global inequity,” Third World Quarterly, 33:4, 2012, 581-601)