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Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview. By JURGEN OSTERHAMMEL. Translated by SHELLEY L. FRISCH. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1997. Pp. vi + 145. $3495 (cloth); $16.95 (paper).
Ours is reputedly a period of postcolonialism or, at least, of postcolonial literature, subaltern and otherwise. To judge, however, whether we are in a postcolonial epoch, and what that means, we need a firm grasp of what is meant by colonialism itself. In his short volume, Colonialism, originally published in German in I995 and now available in English, Jurgen Osterhammel of the University of Hagen and the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, attempts to give us a theoretical overview of the subject.
For Osterhammel, colonialism, a "system of domination," is a "fundamental phenomenon of world history"; it is also a "phenomenon of colossal vagueness" (p. 4). His book is a terse, systematic effort to dispel that vagueness. As he tells us, "colonialism" and its adjuncts "colonization" and "colony" embody processes of expansion; thus we can potentially consider them as constant features of human history. The author offers classifications (six major forms of colonial expansion), periodizations (six major epochs), typologies (three major types, suitably subdivided), and so forth to help us understand the phenomenon. Though colonialism can be thought of...