Early Colonialism in Africa and Asia: Liberation Movements and the Legacy

‘Colonialism’ has been perhaps one of the most discussed themes of academia since the time of its inception as an ideology due to its complex, diverse and multiple variants has been evolved in different stages in human history. Colonialism is arguably the most important force integrating different indigenous societies into the world systems of capitalism and the nation state particularly in Africa and Asia. Although large geographic portions of Africa and Asia achieved formal independence from European colonial powers between 1945 and 1999, the systems of nationalism and capitalism that colonialism set in motion continued to create power imbalances that favored the economies and militaries of historic colonial powers. For this reason, many anti-colonial activists in the twenty-first century consider decolonization to be an unfinished process blocked by neocolonial economic relations. The present paper is an attempt to understand the nuances of earliest colonial and imperial ventures in Africa and Asia, nature of the ‘colony’ and the process of socio-culturalpolitical penetration, resistance movements and liberation and the post-liberation developments leading to the Afro-Asian solidarity.