Colony

Puerto Rico, considered by some to be "the world's oldest colony".¹

In politics and history, a colony is a territory under the immediate political control of a state. For colonies in antiquity, city-states would often found their own colonies. Some colonies were historically countries, while others were territories without definite statehood from their inception. The metropolitan state is the state that owns the colony. In Ancient Greece, the city that founded a colony was called the metropolis. Mother country is a reference to the metropolitan state from the point of view of citizens who live in its colony. There is a United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories.

A colony is mostly ruled by another state or can be run independently. Unlike a puppet state or satellite state, a colony has no independent international representation, and its top-level administration is under direct control of the metropolitan state.

The term "informal colony" is used by some historians to describe a country which is under the de facto control of another state, although this description is often contentious.

Definitions

The word Colony comes from the Latin word colōnia. This in turn derives from the word colōnus, which means colonist but also implies a farmer. Cologne is an example of a settlement preserving this etymology. Other, less obvious settlements that began as Roman colonia include cities from Belgrade to York. A telltale sign of a settlement once being a Roman Colony is a city centre with a grid pattern.²

Roman colonies first appeared when the Romans conquered neighbouring italic peoples. These were small farming settlements that appeared when the Romans had subdued an enemy in war. A colony could take many forms, as a trade outpost or a military base in enemy territory, but its original definition as a settlement created by people migrating from a home territory became the modern definition.

Colonies in ancient civilizations (examples)

See Colonies in antiquity.

• Carthage was a Phoenician colony
• Cyrene was a colony of the Greeks of Thera
• Naples formed as a Greek colony
• Durrës formed as a Greek colony
• Alexandria formed as a Greek colony

Modern colonies (examples)

• Indonesia was a Dutch colony for 350 years, from 1600 to 1945/49, occupied by Japan from 1942 to 1945.
• Hong Kong was a British colony from 1841 to 1997, and Macau was a Portuguese colony from 1557 to 1999. Both are now Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China.
• Parts of India were under the direct control of the government of the United Kingdom between 1858 and 1947. See also Crown colony.
• Taiwan was originally inhabited by indigenous peoples closely related linguistically, culturally and genetically to the Filipino people and more distantly to the Polynesians. In the 13th century, people from Song Dynasty been migrating to Taiwan - however, the migration was small due to the island's harsh terrain and hostile local tribes. From 1895 to 1945 Taiwan was a colony of Japan. For a brief period prior to that, the Eastern half of Taiwan was a county and a province of the Ming Dynasty and later the Qing Dynasty, and previously part of the Fujian Province for two centuries from the 1680s. Before Chinese Republicans settled on Taiwan in 1947, Mao Tse Tung encouraged Taiwanese to seek independence in order to undermine the power of the government of Republic of China led by Chiang Kai Shek. In the 17th Century Taiwan was a Dutch colony for 37 years before the Southern Ming Dynasty assumed authority of rule by defeating the Dutch. Since 1945 Taiwan has been governed by the Republic of China.
• Australia: In 1770 some of the eastern coastline of Australia is claimed as British territory by the British explorer Lieutenant James Cook. The First Fleet was sent to Australia to start a penal colony in 1788. Eventually Australia became a Federation in 1901.
• The Philippines, previously a colony of Spain, was a colony of the United States from 1898 to 1946. During World War II between 1942 and 1945, it was occupied by the Japanese forces.
• The United States of America, originally thirteen distinct English (or British, if founded after the Acts of Union of 1707) colonies in British North America. The Colony of Virginia, later to become the US states of Virginia, Kentucky and West Virginia, was the first of the thirteen colonies and was under English and then British rule from 1607 until 1783, at least nominally.

Today, the colonizing European and North American powers hold few colonies in the traditional sense of the term, with exceptions in the case of the US (including Guam, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands), France and the UK (including the Falkland Islands and the British Virgin Islands). However, the Channel Islands are not colonies but a remnant of the Duchy of Normandy. Some of the former colonies have been integrated as dependent areas or have closer integration with the country.

Current colonies (examples)

• Western Sahara is considered the last colony in Africa.³

• Puerto Rico's subjection to US sovereignty is considered by many countries⁴ to constitute a colonial imposition because Puerto Ricans are subject to laws passed by the US Congress without their consent, due to constitutional exclusion from electoral participation in elections of the officials that hold ultimate sovereignty over their national government, and because its population does not enjoy the full citizenship rights of the United States Constitution.⁵ According to the US President's Task Force Report on the Political Status of Puerto Rico⁶ the US may dispose of Puerto Rico by transferring it to another sovereign country as a mere disposition of property.⁷⁸ In a recent letter addressed to then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the then-governor of Puerto Rico, Aníbal Acevedo Vilá, accused the US of having deceived the United Nations and the international community in 1953, when it succeeded in having the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico recognized as a provisional decolonized status subject to continued monitoring; Acevedo Vilá stated that it was ironic that this is the position taken by the Government of Iran and that the Governor of Puerto Rico will soon feel forced to support Iran's claims regarding the US government's alleged-hypocritical actions with regards to Puerto Rico's "colonial" status.⁹¹⁰ In 2006, The UN General Assembly Special Committee on decolonization approved a draft resolution that calls on the US to expedite the process to allow Puerto Ricans to exercise fully their inalienable right to self-determination and independence.⁸ H.R. 1230, The Puerto Rico Self-Determination Act of 2007, introduced in the US Congress on February 28, 2007, would recognize the right of the People of Puerto Rico to call a Constitutional Convention through which the people would exercise their natural right to self-determination, and it would establish a mechanism for congressional consideration of such decision.¹¹

• Similarly, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and the US Virgin Islands are also considered to have a colonial relationship with the US because their citizens are also subject to the laws of the US Congress passed without their consent. These territories, along with Puerto Rico, are known as unincorporated territories.

• The French Overseas Departments are called integral regions, and are considered by some as still modern-day colonies of France.

• Tokelau is a colony of New Zealand

• The British Overseas Territories former status was that of Crown Colonies. Many of the larger, populated territories, have their own political system, but are still under the sovereignty of the United Kingdom and have Governors.

• Easter Island is a special territory incorporated to Chile. Today, natives have full rights as Chilean citizens.

See also

• List of dominant sovereign states and their servient territories
• United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories
• Space colonization
• Settler colonialism
• Crown colony
• Proprietary colony
• Commonwealth
• Colony (song)

References

External links

• Non-Self-Governing Territories Listed by the United Nations General Assembly in 2002