ABSTRACT
Introduction The terms “imperialism” and “colonialism” are often used interchangeably without further reflection. This is perhaps not surprising given that many modern imperial projects entailed a colonial component and, conversely, colonial projects an imperial one. We need to look no further than the British Empire, the Spanish Empire, or – what is my concern here – the Japanese Empire to see the historical coincidence of imperialism and colonialism. However, Robert J. C. Young argues that the two are conceptually distinct phenomena. Whereas colonialism should be considered principally as a practice, imperialism should be considered principally as an ideology. “Unlike colonialism,” he claims, “imperialism is driven by ideology and a theory of sorts, in some instances even to the extent that it can operate as much against purely economic interests as for them.”1 Imperialism, in other words, is not just the spatial expansion of political power. It is the expansion of an idea. Though one should doubt if phenomena of imperialism and colonialism can ever be exhaustively distinguished in terms of their real-world instantiations, they should nevertheless be analytically distinguished in respect to their ideological foundations.
