ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by giving a general outline of the logical structure of colonial and centrist relationships. This is then used to cast light on several issues. Firstly, at this post-colonial remove, many of us are accustomed to seeing colonial relationships between peoples as oppressive, damaging and limiting for the colonized. Colonial centres, which during the 18th and 19th centuries were typically drawn from European and North American powers, thought of themselves as superior, bringing ‘civilization’ as an unalloyed benefit to the backward races and regions of the world. Usually, however, the colonial system plundered the wealth and lands of the colonized, whose peoples were either annihilated or left severely damaged – socially, culturally and politically. Colonizers made use of, and often accentuated, divisions between privileged and non-privileged groups in colonized societies, and, for the benefit of the centre, they created boundaries that divided colonized groups from one another and from their lands in ways that guaranteed a legacy of conflict and violence long after the colonial rulers departed.
