Imperial Europe became defined as the center in geography at least as metaphysical as physical. Everything that lay outside that center was by definition at the margins or the periphery of culture, power and civilization. The colonial mission, to bring the margin into the sphere of influence of the enlightened center, became the principal justification for the economic and political exploitation of colonialism, especially after the middle of the nineteenth century.

The term colonialism is important in defining the specific form of cultural exploitation that developed with the expansion of Europe over the last 400 years. Although many earlier civilizations had colonies, and although they perceived their relations with them to be one of a central imperium in relation to a periphery of provincial, marginal and barbarian cultures, a number of crucial factors entered into the construction of the post-Renaissance practices of imperialism.

Edward said (A leading postcolonial scholar) offers the following distinction: imperialism means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory; colonialism, which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory.

The fact that European post-Renaissance colonial expansion was coterminous with the development of a modern capitalist system of economic exchange meant that the perception of colonies as primarily established to provide raw materials for the burgeoning economies of the colonial powers was greatly strengthened and institutionalized. It also meant that the relation between the colonizer and the colonized was locked into rigid hierarchy of difference deeply resistant to fair and equitable exchanges, whether economic, cultural or social.

In colonies however the subject peoples were of a different race, or where minority indigenous people existed, the ideology of race was also a crucial part of the construction and naturalization of an unequal form of intercultural relations.

The present form of colonialism, considering the heavy dependency of the formerly colonized countries and their lack of economic freedom, is termed neocolonialism.

 Diaspora

In its most general sense, imperialism refers to a formation of an empire, and, as such, has been an aspect of all periods of history in which one nation extended its domination over one or several neighboring nations (see Edward Said’s definition above under Colonialism). There is a general agreement that the word imperialism, as a conscious and openly advocated policy of acquiring colonies for economic, strategic and political advantage, did not emerge until 1880. Before that date the term Empire (particularly the British variety) conjured up an apparently benevolent process of European expansion whereby colonies accrued rather than were acquired. Around the mid-nineteenth century, the term imperialism was used to describe the government and policies of Napoleon III, and by 1870 was used disparagingly in disputes between political parties in Britain. But from the 1880s imperialism became a dominant and more transparently aggressive policy among European states for a variety of political, cultural and economic reasons.

The expansionist policies pursued by the modern industrial powers from 1880 have been described as classical imperialism. The year 1885, when the Berlin Congo Conference ended and the “scramble for Africa” got underway, has been regarded as the beginning of classical imperialism.

The significant feature of imperialism is that, while its use for describing describe late nineteenth-century policies of European expansion is quite recent, its historical roots run deep, extending back to Roman times. Derived from the Latin word imperium to describe its sovereignty Mediterranean world, the term Imperium populi Romani was not merely rhetorical, it was definitive of the sovereignty invested in the people and bestowed by the people on its magistrates abroad. It was this republican use of the term that Cicero defended against the notion of a monarchical Imperium Romanum instituted by Caeser Augustus.

Imperialism, in its more recent sense or use, identifies the acquisition of an empire of overseas colonies associated with the Europeanization of the globe. This acquisition came in three major waves: the so called age of discovery in the fifteenth and sixteenth century; the age of mercantilism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the age of imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The term Third World was first used in 1952,during the so-called Cold War period, by politician and economist Alfred Sauvy to designate countries that were not allied with either the Soviet Union or the United States. The term First World was used widely at the time to designate the dominant economic powers of the west, while the term Second World was used to refer to the Soviet Union and its satellites. It is best to resist using the term Third World without qualifications because of its pejorative connotations (Developing countries is a better term to use instead). Recent postcolonial scholars also use the term Fourth World to designate indigenous people in many postcolonial nations (Tribals, low caste Hindus, minorities etc.) to indicate their marginalized positions within developing countries.

The term indicates the colonizer’s fear of contamination by absorption into native life and customs. The construction of native cultures as either primitive or degenerate in a binary discourse of colonizer/colonized led to a widespread fear of going native amongst the colonizers in many colonial societies. (The magistrate in Coetzee’s story in your text is one such example of a European “going native”).

The threat is particularly associated with the temptation posed by inter-racial sex, where sexual liaisons with the “native” peoples were supposed to result in contamination of the colonizer’s pure stock , contributing to their degeneracy and demise as a vigorous and “civilized” race. Going native could also encompass lapses from European behavior, the participation in “native” ceremonies, or the adoption and even enjoyment of local customs in terms of food, recreation and entertainment.

This is a much used word in contemporary theory and in postcolonial criticism is mostly employed in such terms as colonial discourse, which is specially derived from Foucualt’s use of the concept. Discourse was originally used from about the sixteenth century to describe any kind of speaking, talk or conversation, but became increasingly used to describe a more formal speech, a narration or treatment of any subject at length. More recently, discourse has been used in a technical sense by linguists to describe any unit of speech longer than a sentence.

However, the Foucauldian sense of the term has little to do with the act of speaking in its traditional sense. For Foucault, a discourse is a strongly bounded area of social knowledge, a system of statements within which the world can be known. The key feature of this is that the world is not simply there to be talked about: rather, it is through discourse itself that the world is brought to being. It is also in such a discourse that speakers and hearers, writers and readers come to an understanding about themselves, their relationship to each other and their place in the world.

There are certain unspoken rules controlling which statements can be made and these rules determine the nature of that discourse. Since virtually limitless number of statements can be made within the rules of the system, it is these rules that characterize the discourse. The questions that concern scholars like Foucault can be summed up as follows:

According to Foucault, Discourse is important because it joins power and knowledge. Those who have the power have control of what is known and the way it is known, and those who have such know- ledge have power over those who do not. This link between knowledge and power is particularly important in the relationship between colonizer and the colonized.

This pair of terms was brought to prominence by Edward Said, who suggested that patterns of filiation (heritage or descent) that had acted as a cohering force in traditional society were becoming increasingly difficult to maintain in the complexity of contemporary civilization and were becoming replaced by patterns of affiliation. While filiation refers to lines of descent in nature, affiliation refers to the process of identification through culture. Said promotes affiliation as a general critical principle because it frees the critic from a narrow view of the texts connected in a filiative relationship to other texts, with very little attention paid to the world in which they came into being. In practical terms an affiliative way of thinking would make it easier for a person to think beyond the filiative confines of his or her own primary culture.

Globalization is the process whereby individual lives and local communities are affected by economic and cultural forces that operate world-wide. In effect it is the process of the world becoming a single place. Globalism is the perception of the world as a function or result of the processes of globalization upon local communities.

Part of the complexity of globalism comes from the different ways in which globalization is approached. Some analysts it enthusiastically as a positive feature of a changing world in which access to technology, information, services and markets will be beneficial to local communities.

Others reject it as a form of domination by First World countries over Third World ones, in which individual distinctions of culture and society become erased by an increasingly homogenous global culture, and local economies are more firmly incorporated into a system of global capital. The chief argument against globalization is that global culture and global economy did not just spontaneously erupt: rather, they originated in and continue to be perpetuated from the centers of capitalist power.

The importance of globalization to postcolonial studies comes firstly from its demonstration of the structure of world power relations, which stands firm in the twentieth century as a legacy of Western imperialism. Secondly, the ways in which local communities engage the forces of globalization bear some resemblance to the ways in which colonized societies have historically engaged and appropriated the forces of imperial dominance.

The key to the link between classical imperialism and contemporary globalization in the twentieth century has been the role of the United States. Despite its resolute refusal to perceive itself as imperialistic, the United States has, in its international policies, eagerly espoused the political domination and economic and cultural control associated with imperialism. The most active area of globalization studies, however, is the reactions to the globalization processes by the local communities in various parts of the developing world.

See Edward SaidÆs Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993)

Note on the origin of the expression "the Third World" by Alfred Sauvy:

In 1951, I, in a Brazilian review, spoke about three worlds, without employing however the expression "the Third World".
This expression, I created it and employed for the first written time in the French weekly magazine "the Observer" of August 14, 1952. The article finished as follows: "bus finally, this ignored Third World, exploited, scorned like the State Third, also wants him, being something". I thus transposed the famous sentence of Sieyes on the State Third during the French revolution. I did not add (but I sometimes said, in joke) that one could compare the capitalist world to the nobility and the communist world with the clergy.
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For details see Spivak G. ôThe Rani of Simurö in Francis Baker et al. (eds). Europe and its Others Vol 1 Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature. (Colchester: University of Essex 1985)

Michel Foucault, a French Philosopher.