Reference

Glossary

The vocabulary the textbooks skip. 26 terms — plain-English definitions, cross-references, and standard scholarly framings.

Atlantic slave trade: The forced deportation of approximately 12.5 million Africans across the Atlantic between roughly 1500 and 1867, with an estimated 2 million dying at sea. The trade was conducted principally by Portuguese, British, French, Dutch, Spanish and (later) American merchants, under royal charter or state protection.
Bengal Famine (1943): Mass starvation in British-ruled Bengal during World War II. Best contemporary estimates put excess deaths at approximately 3 million. Economic historians including Amartya Sen and Madhusree Mukerjee have attributed the famine principally to wartime British policy — diversion of grain, denial of relief shipments, and inflationary procurement — rather than crop failure.
Berlin Conference: A meeting of European powers (1884–85) convened by Bismarck that established the procedural rules for partitioning Africa, including the doctrine of 'effective occupation' and the recognition of King Leopold II's personal claim to the Congo Free State. No African delegate was present.
CARICOM Ten-Point Plan: A 2014 reparations framework adopted by the Caribbean Community for claims against European colonial powers. Demands include a formal apology, repatriation of forcibly relocated people, an Indigenous peoples development programme, cultural-institution funding, a public-health crisis response, illiteracy eradication, an African knowledge programme, psychological rehabilitation, technology transfer, and debt cancellation.
CFA franc: A currency arrangement in which 14 African states — most former French colonies — keep a portion of their foreign-exchange reserves at the French Treasury and accept a fixed peg first to the franc and now to the euro. Established in 1945, partially reformed (eco) in 2019. Critics describe it as the longest-surviving formal monetary instrument of European colonialism in Africa.
Colonialism: The long-term takeover of one country, region or people by another for political control and economic extraction, typically enforced by settler populations, military occupation, or both. European colonialism — roughly 1492 to the late 20th century — was distinguished by its planetary scale, its race-based legal hierarchy, and its integration with industrial capital.
Coloniality of power: A framework developed by Aníbal Quijano (2000) describing the persistent racial, economic and epistemic hierarchies established by European colonialism — surviving formal independence and structuring contemporary global capitalism.
Congo Free State: The personal colony of King Leopold II of Belgium, 1885–1908. Run as a forced-labour rubber-extraction regime by the Force Publique; conservative scholarly estimates of excess deaths range from 5 to 15 million. Transferred to the Belgian state in 1908 after international outcry led by E. D. Morel, Roger Casement and the Congo Reform Association.
Decolonisation: Used in two distinct senses. (1) The formal political process — peaking 1945–1980 — by which colonised territories became independent states. (2) The ongoing intellectual and material project of dismantling the structures, institutions and knowledge-production patterns inherited from colonial rule, including in education, museums, science, language policy and economic relations.
Drain of wealth: A nineteenth-century Indian nationalist concept, developed by Dadabhai Naoroji and others, describing the unrequited transfer of resources from colonial India to Britain via taxation, trade surpluses retained in London, and Home Charges. Modern estimates by Utsa Patnaik put the total drain from India alone at around $45 trillion (current dollars) between 1765 and 1938.
Herero and Nama genocide: The German extermination campaign in present-day Namibia, 1904–1908, following the Vernichtungsbefehl ('extermination order') of General Lothar von Trotha. Roughly 80% of the Herero and 50% of the Nama populations were killed by direct violence, deliberate desert exposure, or in the first twentieth-century concentration camps. Formally recognised as genocide by Germany in 2021.
Indentured labour: A system of contract labour that succeeded slavery in the British, French and Dutch empires after abolition. Over 3.5 million people — predominantly Indian, Chinese and Pacific Islander — were transported under indenture between 1834 and 1920 to plantations in the Caribbean, Mauritius, Fiji, Natal, Suriname and elsewhere, often under conditions described by contemporaries as 'a new system of slavery'.
Indigenous: Peoples who descend from the populations that inhabited a territory prior to its conquest or settlement by an outside power, who retain distinct social, cultural, economic or political institutions, and who self-identify as Indigenous. Defined in ILO Convention 169 (1989) and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007).
Indigenous repatriation: The return of cultural objects, ancestral remains, sacred materials and land to Indigenous communities and former colonised nations. Notable cases include the Benin Bronzes, the Parthenon Marbles, the Maqdala treasures from Ethiopia, and the human remains held in European and American natural-history museums.
Mau Mau Uprising: An armed Kenyan resistance movement against British colonial rule, 1952–1960. The British response included a system of detention camps holding up to 1.5 million Kikuyu, documented in Caroline Elkins's Imperial Reckoning (2005); the UK government paid £19.9 million in 2013 to surviving victims of torture.
Middle Passage: The Atlantic crossing leg of the triangular slave trade, in which captive Africans were held in conditions designed for maximum cargo density. Documented mortality rates ranged from 10% to over 25% per voyage depending on route, duration and disease environment.
Nakba: Arabic for 'catastrophe.' The forced displacement of roughly 750,000 Palestinians during the 1947–49 war, accompanied by the depopulation and destruction of over 400 Palestinian villages. Documented in detail by Israeli historians Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé and Avi Shlaim from declassified state archives.
Neocolonialism: The continuation of colonial extraction through formally sovereign states. Mechanisms include unequal trade rules, IMF and World Bank conditionality, foreign military basing, debt-trap diplomacy, currency arrangements (the CFA franc) and the formal overseas territories still held by Europe and the US. Coined by Kwame Nkrumah in 1965.
Orientalism: The system of representations through which Western scholarship, art, journalism and policy constructed 'the East' (especially the Arab and Islamic worlds) as exotic, backward and in need of Western tutelage. Theorised by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978) as both an academic tradition and an instrument of colonial power.
Reparations: The partial return of wealth, land, recognition or rights extracted under slavery and colonial rule. Modern precedents include German reparations to Holocaust survivors and the State of Israel (over $90 billion since 1952) and US reparations to Japanese-Americans interned in WWII (1988). The CARICOM Ten-Point Plan (2014) is the most developed contemporary framework for Caribbean reparations from European states.
Scramble for Africa: The roughly 1881–1914 partition of the African continent by European powers — Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Italy and Spain — formalised by the Berlin Conference (1884–85). By 1914 only Ethiopia and Liberia remained outside European control.
Settler colonialism: A subtype of colonialism in which the colonising population aims to replace, not merely rule, the Indigenous population. Examples include the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Algeria (1830–1962) and Israel/Palestine. The defining logic, in Patrick Wolfe's formulation, is 'elimination, not exploitation.'
Structural adjustment: Conditions attached to IMF and World Bank loans from the late 1970s onward — currency devaluation, public-sector cuts, privatisation, removal of price controls, trade liberalisation. UN, UNICEF and academic evaluations have repeatedly linked structural-adjustment programmes to declines in life expectancy, school enrolment and food security in the affected countries.
Subaltern: A term taken from Gramsci by the Subaltern Studies Group (Ranajit Guha and colleagues, from the 1980s) to describe the colonised classes — peasants, workers, women, tribal peoples — whose voices were largely excluded from official colonial archives and from elite nationalist histories alike.
Unequal exchange: An accounting framework, formalised by Arghiri Emmanuel (1972) and updated by Jason Hickel and colleagues (New Political Economy, 2022), showing that the same labour-hour and resource-unit are priced systematically lower in the Global South than in the Global North. Hickel et al. estimate the North drains roughly $10 trillion per year in value from the South through this mechanism alone.
Washington Consensus: A set of ten policy prescriptions catalogued by John Williamson in 1989 — fiscal discipline, tax reform, trade liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, secure property rights — that became the de facto template imposed on indebted Global South states by the IMF, the World Bank and the US Treasury.