ABSTRACT
The history and archaeology of European colonial expansion are important because they illuminate the processes leading to the modern global economy. Scholars such as Wolf, Wallerstein and Braudel have traced the origins of key political, economic and cultural formations of the twentieth century to the expansion of western civilization across the globe from the fifteenth century onwards and in the gradual development of what have been labelled the ‘modern world system’ and the ‘capitalist world economy’. Much has been written on this subject by historians who have particular interests in the interplay of politics, economics and sociology in the modern world. In recent years historical archaeologists have also become increasingly interested in the role of material evidence in writing the global history of colonialism and its aftermath. A number of archaeological research projects in former European colonies across the world have been undertaken with the explicit aim of using material evidence to gain insight into the nature of the colonial experience from the perspective of both the colonizers and the colonized. For example, Orser and Pagan (1995:221-35) summarize recent archaeological work on Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and British colonial settlements in places as far apart as Haiti, Mexico, Peru, Ghana, South Africa and Australia which, while separated geographically by thousands of miles, share much in common in their aims and approaches to the study of colonialism.
