Reference

Glossary

The vocabulary the textbooks skip. 28 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.

See also — Middle Passage

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

An international conference convened by Bismarck in 1884–1885 that set rules for European colonial claims, trade and navigation in Africa, including effective occupation. No African representatives participated. It accelerated the partition of Africa but did not draw all of the continent’s later colonial borders at one meeting.

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.

See also — Reparations

CFA franc

Two separate currencies used by 14 African states: the West African CFA franc (XOF), issued by BCEAO, and the Central African CFA franc (XAF), issued by BEAC. Both are pegged to the euro and benefit from a French convertibility guarantee. The West African reform agreed in 2019 removed the requirement to deposit reserves at the French Treasury; the Central African arrangement differs. The proposed eco should not be confused with an already completed currency replacement.

See also — Neocolonialism

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

Leopold II’s personal colonial state, 1885–1908, whose rubber extraction relied on coercion, hostage-taking and violence by the Force Publique. Demographic reconstructions suggest a catastrophic population decline, often summarised as roughly ten million people. That estimate is not a documented count of killings: deaths, reduced births and displacement must be distinguished. Belgium annexed the territory in 1908.

See also — Force Publique

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.

See also — Indigenous repatriation, Reparations

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.

Force Publique

The armed force of the Congo Free State and later the Belgian Congo, commanded largely by European officers with African soldiers. It enforced colonial authority and rubber quotas, including through hostage-taking and violence.

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.

Imperialism

The extension of power beyond a state’s own territory through political, military or economic domination. Colonialism is one form of imperialism; influence or intervention is not automatically formal colonial rule.

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 with historical continuity with societies predating conquest or colonisation, distinct institutions and identities, and a relationship with their ancestral territories. Self-identification is a fundamental criterion in ILO Convention 169 (1989). The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) recognises their rights but does not impose a single universal definition.

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.

See also — Reparations

Mau Mau Uprising

Kenyan anticolonial insurgency during the Emergency, 1952–1960. British repression combined detention camps with forced resettlement in fortified villages. The roughly 1.5 million Kikuyu affected by villagisation should not be described as 1.5 million camp inmates. Caroline Elkins’s Imperial Reckoning (2005) examines this system; the UK announced a £19.9 million settlement for 5,228 claimants in 2013.

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.

See also — Atlantic slave trade

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.

See also — CFA franc, Structural adjustment, Unequal exchange

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.

See also — CARICOM Ten-Point Plan

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.

See also — Berlin Conference

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.

See also — Neocolonialism, Washington Consensus

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 (Global Environmental Change, 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.