Introduction

Colonialism has been an abiding concern of Western historiography since the Renaissance. During the colonial era, European authors who addressed the topic did so most frequently to chronicle and justify the exploits of their countrymen and their allies, to demonstrate the backwardness of those they subdued, or to detail the brutalities of their rivals. Anticolonial writers from Las Casas in the sixteenth century to the national liberation leaders of the twentieth tended to stress the greed, arrogance, and blind will to power of the colonizers while documenting the suffering, resistance, and endurance of the colonized. Following the dismantlement of the major colonial empires in the two decades after the Second World War, recent scholarship on the history of colonialism has pushed forward in a variety of new directions. The intention of this volume is to profile some of those initiatives and to illustrate how a diversity of new approaches can reilluminate understanding of a classical subject of historical inquiry.