UNIT II: WHITENESS AND POWER

This racial segregation sign from twentieth-century South Africa illustrates European world hegemony through colonialism.[1] In English and Afrikaans, the smaller text reads: “THESE PUBLIC PREMISES AND THE AMENITIES THEREOF HAVE BEEN RESERVED FOR THE EXCLUSIVE USE OF WHITE PERSONS. By Order [of the] Provincial Secretary.” The sign illustrates how, for over 450 years, western Eurasia dominated the globe, creating enduring legacies that continue to shape our societies, our mentalities, and our bodies today.

One such legacy was racial segregation, known in twentieth-century South Africa as apartheid (literally, “apartness” or “separation”). Racially separating people of mainly white European from mainly black African descent had roots in the colonial and slavery periods. However, strict enforcement of segregation became a large-scale social institution only after slavery’s abolition, which occurred in South Africa in 1838 (as Britain’s Cape Colony) and in America in 1863 (see Chapter 8). The U.S.—which originated as British colonies, whereas the Cape Colony was Dutch—ended legal apartheid gradually, between 1954 and 1968, especially under President Johnson. South Africa began a similar process under President de Klerk in 1990 (APAN:II:838), leading to the election of President Mandela in 1994, an anti-apartheid black revolutionary who famously described his nation’s transformation as “a small miracle” (ibid:858). Although post-emancipation official racism (of various forms) lasted longer in South Africa (152 years from 1838 to 1990) than in America (105 years from 1863 to 1968), both periods were excruciatingly long and damaging. The respective histories of the two systems are distinctive and complex (Fredrickson 1981; Marx 1997).

Post-apartheid America and South Africa have yet to fully overcome the profound consequences of centuries of colonialism, slavery, and legalized racial segregation (see Chapters 9-11). Following generations of enslavement, racism—enforced by custom, law, state violence, and extralegal white terrorism—victimized new generations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Americans and South Africans. How did fifteenth-century European relations with Africans first create modern slavery? What explains Europe’s domination of so much of the world for so long? Why did European power diminish by 1945, leading to a wave of “Third World” decolonization: from the Caribbean, to Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, and the Pacific? What are the legacies of colonialism today?

Chapter 4 Learning Objectives

4.1 The Rise of the West

• Understand the rise of the West
• Describe the colonial binary system

4.2 Stages of European Colonization

• Describe four stages of European global colonization

4.3 Comparative Colonialism

• Explain the relationship between Eurocentrism and civilization
• Define mestizaje
• Name the basic feature of colonial education

4.4 Decolonization and the Third World

• Understand the time frame of decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean
• Name the principal European ex-colonial powers

Chapter 4 Key Terms (in order of appearance in chapter)

hegemony: political domination, mastery, leadership

colonialism: a nation’s geographical expansion by planting colonies: settlements of the home country’s people, achieved by conquering the people already there

apartheid: (literally, “apartness”). Racially segregating (especially in 1900s South Africa) people of white European from black African descent. By extension, any system of racial segregation.

abolition: emancipation: legally ending slavery and freeing slaves

creole: someone (usually white) born in the colony rather than in Europe, often treated as inferior by the European-born. George Washington was a Virginia creole.

ethnocentrism: treating one human group as the standard by which all other groups are measured

mestizaje: race mixture by interracial sex (“miscegenation”) between groups of mainly European versus mainly non-European ancestry

metropole: a European center of empire (literally, “mother city/country”). Britain was the metropole of colonial Massachusetts.

colonial education: teaching colonial children of color to see the metropole as their source of identity. Such education replaced native languages, religions, and values with those of the colonizers, claiming to offer children full membership in colonial society.

Indian boarding schools: North American colonial education. Reservation children were forcibly removed from their families’ indigenous values and cultures, to be indoctrinated in white language, religion, values, customs, manners, and dress.

polity: a political community (e.g., a national state like France, the U.S., or Mexico)

4.1 The Rise of the West

The historical backdrop of this entire textbook is 450 years of European global domination through colonies. Colonialism started in the 1400s and largely ended by the late 1900s, with many exceptions. For instance, whereas Martinique and French Guiana are today overseas departments of France, and Hawai’i and Alaska are U.S. states, Puerto Rico and American Samoa remain unincorporated U.S. territories (see Chapter 12). There are many legacies of European colonization: some are relatively good and others bad. Rather than thinking of this history as either all good or all bad, we should see it as a complex mixture of both. This period’s time frame and geographical scope are so huge that generalizations are difficult. What’s undeniable, however, is that for centuries Europeans colonized the world, reshaping it along the way in their own image.

Between 1492 (Columbus’ first voyage) to 1945 (end of World War II), Europe came to dominate nearly every region of the non-European world. Some peoples were directly colonized through enslavement or white partnership with existing native elites; others were dominated less directly. Sociologists call this hegemony “the rise of the West” (Weber 1978; Whimster 2007). Today, we see vestiges of Western colonialism all around the world: Protestant Christianity in Nigeria, Catholic Christianity in Bolivia, capitalism in Japan, Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, …) in Australia, geography named for European royalty (Philippines) in the Pacific, French architecture in Vietnam, Old World animals (horses, sheep, goats) in the Western Hemisphere, trains in India, and much more.

Today we often refer to an entity called “the West.” We use phrases such as “the Western world,” “Western culture,” “Western civilization,” and “Western history.” The title of a classic musicology textbook is “A History of Western Music” (Grout & Palisca 1996). But just what is the West? For thousands of years, distinctions between a Western and Eastern world have been made in terms of geography, culture, religion, and ethnicity (Moore 1989; Said 1979). Examples include Greece versus Persia; the Western versus Eastern Roman Empire; Christian Western Europe versus Islamic Ottoman Empire and North Africa; and capitalist, Christian United States and Western Europe versus communist, atheist Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. Notions of West and East have changed meaning in many ways across time and place. The early modern (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) West was a self-understanding deriving from both (1) Christian Europe’s local struggles against Islamic Spain and Ottoman Turks; and (2) its non-local discovery (encounter) expeditions in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific.

Given that the United States has traditionally imagined itself as a Western nation (Anderson 1983), the notion of the West is crucial for understanding American racial and ethnic diversity. Western identity extends far beyond mere geographical regions (e.g., Western Europe, or the ancient Western Roman Empire, or Western Mediterranean) to include essential facets of group identity such as culture, politics, and religion. Accordingly, we can understand why some nations geographically distant from Europe—such as Canada, the U.S., or Australia—have long described themselves as “Western.” For example, Australia was colonized by Western Europeans (Britons), following Cook’s “discovery” (encounter) voyage of 1770. British race (white Anglo-Saxon), religion (Protestant Christianity), economy (mercantilist capitalism, then industrial capitalism), and politics (world empire) all strongly contrasted with Australian, Pacific, and Southeast Asian indigenous peoples. Thus, the notion of the West had as much to do with social institutions (especially race and religion) as with geography. Europeans saw basic values—goodness (virtue), beauty, truth—as inhering in themselves and being carried to distant peoples (Cabeza de Vaca 2007; Pané 2004; Todorov 1982).

Table 4.1. The colonial binary system

The modern West—founded in older West-East oppositions (e.g., Greece vs. Persia, Rome vs. Greece, Rome vs. Constantinople)—was a binary concept, at first (1400s) mainly opposing Islam. As Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain, and France encountered more and more of the world, an overall “civilized-barbarian” distinction crystalized, contrasting Europeans with everyone else. Non-Western peoples appeared as a world subject to colonization. By imposing European value systems, early colonization created or intensified fundamental binary oppositions between Europeans and the non-European world, privileging the former and devaluing the latter. The “West” is a relational concept: defining the West simultaneously defined, by opposition and negation, the non-West.

Today, despite many important breaks with the colonial past, this privileging of European-ness continues, albeit much less starkly. For example, both scholarly and vernacular racial categories today contrast “whites” (people of mainly European descent) with “people of color” and “nonwhites” (everyone else). Such binary distinctions today remain deeply rooted in old colonial binary systems: white-nonwhite, English-non-English (language), Christian-non-Christian (Protestant-non-Protestant), capitalism-non-capitalism. Understanding such connections with the past offers many insights into contemporary American racial-ethnic diversity.

4.2 Stages of European Colonization

Prior to its rise in the fifteenth century, Western Europe for centuries was an economic and cultural backwater, as compared to the Islamic world and China. What explains the West’s ascent to global preeminence in the subsequent five centuries? Not the natural or inherent superiority of this part of humanity (Weber 1978)—although innate “white” supremacy is how Europeans long explained their dominance (Gould 1996). Rather, following conflict sociologist Max Weber (1905), sociologists have long argued that it was a complex array of interconnected historical developments: especially economic and religious factors, but also technological, military, political, and cultural ones. Table 4.2 shows four stages of European world colonization:

Table 4.2. Four stages of European colonization

(1) Creation of overseas empires. 1400s-1500s. Global expansion via “discovery” expeditions: e.g., Vasco da Gama, Columbus (Colón 2000), Magellan, Cortés. Colonization of Latin America, Caribbean, Pacific. Colonization precedents within Europe included sugar plantations in the Mediterranean, Spanish conquest of the Canary Islands (Dunn 2000), and English warfare in Ireland (Ignatiev 2009). Portuguese and Spanish Catholic missions in overseas colonies created newly Catholic populations. Development of European enslavement of Africans and Native Americans in Caribbean and Latin America. Most new empires were European Christian, but exceptions included Ottoman Empire in Turkey, and Mughal Empire in India.

(2) Development of empires. 1600s-1700s. Wars among European powers continued, with some colonies changing hands (e.g., Canada from France to England). Further growth of Western Hemisphere slavery. New expeditions (Hudson, Cook, Bering) led to new colonies in Pacific (Australia, Indonesia) and Asia (India by Britain; Siberia and Alaska by Russia).

(3) Loss of empires, national independences. 1770s-1820s. The Atlantic revolutions created independent nations in which white creoles (in Spanish, “criollos”) ruled. A creole was a person (especially a white) born in the colony rather than in Europe, treated as inferior by the European-born. Prominent examples are George Washington (U.S.), Simón Bolívar (Gran Colombia in South America), Agustín Iturbide (México). Most such Creole patriots were white supremacists, both in Latin America and North America, seeing whites as the “natural” leaders of the newly independent nations (Chasteen 2001:105). Geographical expansion of new countries continued the white (European descendants), slave-based, empire-building pattern (Brazil, U.S., Mexico, etc.).

(4) Second wave of empire-building, loss of empires, national independences. 1800s-1990s. Many European colonies remained dependent colonies in the 1800s. Also, Europeans expanded their existing empires in a “scramble” to acquire new colonies: virtually all of Africa (e.g., French Algeria, 1850s), Southeast Asia (French Indochina), the Middle East (French Lebanon, Syria; British Egypt, Trans-Jordan, Iraq). Japan, seeking to modernize by imitating Europe, likewise conquered colonies in Korea, China, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific (Moore 1989). The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were decades of ascendant, not declining, racism (Ferrer 1999; Holt 1992). By the 1990s, most European colonies had achieved independence. But the previous centuries of European domination had transformed the world in fundamental and exceedingly complex ways.

4.3 Comparative Colonialism

Five overall themes of European global colonization are (1) Eurocentrism, (2) civilization, (3) settlement, (4) mestizaje, and (5) colonial education. Together, these concepts offer a comparative understanding across a variety of modern European empires, as well as similarities with U.S. practices.

(1) Eurocentrism. Five centuries of Western rule created Eurocentrism: a powerful and enduring form of ethnocentrism (seeing a particular human group as the standard by which all other groups are measured). For centuries, Europeans justified their power by claiming their own inherent superiority. They defined their own physical characteristics as the standard of human beauty (white skin and hair), their religion as the best (Christianity), their economic system as the best (mercantilist capitalism based on agricultural slavery, then industrial capitalism based on free labor). Anything not European was inferior: bad, ugly, and false. European values were the “norm” by which the world was measured and found wanting (Fanon 1952).

Eurocentric proto-capitalist agriculture created a binary relationship and opposition between a center or core—the European colonizer—and a periphery—the colony (Wallerstein 1974). Modern colonialism derived from ancient and medieval European history. Ancient Greek city-state metropoli (metropoles; “mother cities”) planted colonies on the shores of the Black, Aegean, and Mediterranean Seas (Moore 1989). The metropole was the conceptual and often geographical center of the world, as the bellybutton (navel, ombligo) is the center of the body. In the Roman Empire, a “colonus” was a peasant (a “pagan”). Such peasants were natives of Roman provinces connected by extensive road networks, where “all roads led to Rome.” Colonialism in world history was not limited to Europe: for example, as in Greek and Roman societies, the Aztec (Velázquez 2010) and Incan (La Vega 2006) empires displayed distinctive versions of colonialism or hegemony in which they dominated neighboring groups.

(2) Civilization. A key concept for understanding Eurocentrism is civilization (“civilización” in Spanish). Derived from the Latin civitas, meaning political community (city-state, nation), it means advanced culture, refinement, or sophistication. In many ways, modern European empires measured themselves against the ancient Roman Empire, and, in turn, measured colonized peoples against themselves. Just as the Romans had conquered distant peoples with “strange” customs (such as the Celtic tribes of Britain, France, or Spain), so the Europeans conquered distant and strange peoples. The Romans saw themselves as the center of the world, the ideal of “civilization,” and claimed superiority over conquered “savages” and “barbarians” at the fringes of their world (Gibbon 1909). So too Europeans saw themselves as bearers of civilization with a need to impose it on the non-European, “uncivilized” world (Glissant 1990:13).

Using the modern notion of race, Europeans (1400s-1500s) equated civilization with whiteness, and savagery with non-whiteness. For instance, Afro-Barbadian novelist George Lamming (1953) has a school administrator describe the ideology of the British Empire’s “civilizing mission” (xviii) in the context of 1940s Barbados: “The British Empire…has always worked for the peace of the world. This was the job assigned it by God…” (38). The U.S., like many other former European colonies dominated by whites, inherited and developed this linkage between civilization and race: to be civilized was to be white (Ferrer 1999:190).

Moreover, “civilization” was a standard means of legitimating (rationalizing, justifying) imperial conquest in the conqueror’s self-interest. In addition to European empires, the expanding U.S. empire of the late nineteenth century furnishes examples (see Chapter 12). Consider Ohio-born President McKinley’s rationale for denying self-government to the newly won (in 1898) Spanish colony of the Philippines. He described American rule as “uplift[ing] and civiliz[ing]” Filipinos (APAN:II:579). Following a brutal war (1899-1902) in which the Americans defeated Philippine nationalists led by Emilio Aguinaldo, the U.S. ruled there until 1946. McKinley’s rhetoric—based on white supremacy—is the same as the U.S. had previously used for generations to legitimate conquest of Native Americans, and derives from European colonialism.

(3) Settlement. A central concept in the relationship between Europeans and the indigenous peoples they colonized worldwide is “settlement” (Sakai 2014). In the Americas, the image of European “pioneers” performing “settlement” has traditionally been the white commonsensical understanding of European activities starting with Columbus (Feagin 2020:39-40). Just as the English began settlement of Virginia at Roanoke and Jamestown, so Spain began settlement of New Spain (Mexico) at Veracruz, Mexico City (Tenochtitlan), and Puebla de Los Angeles (Rubial 2010; Velázquez 2010).

But what exactly is “settlement”? As with “civilization,” modern Europeans often saw themselves as the inheritors of the ancient Romans, expanding and conquering “uncivilized” peoples and “settling” their lands. Settlement, then, like civilizing, presumes the illegitimacy, in multiple senses, of aboriginal peoples. From archaeological and other research of recent decades, we now know important facts about non-literate, Iron Age, Celtic civilizations of Western Europe (in modern-day Spain, France, Britain) predating Roman conquest (c. 200 BCE-0 CE). First, they were largely settled (sedentary) farmers rather than nomads: agriculturists making extensive use of farmed fields and domesticated livestock, with towns as centers of political domination and trade. Second, they themselves had a long history of immigration and conquest, processes dating back thousands of years and involving the carrying of agricultural (farming) techniques and technologies from the Near East and Anatolia to Europe, processes that involved large-scale clearing of forest and incorporation, displacement, or replacement of previous nomadic inhabitants (hunter-gatherers). Seemingly neutral descriptions, then, of Roman conquerors “settling” and “civilizing” other societies (e.g., Celtic) is one way in which we today reproduce the original Roman political propaganda and ideology of their superiority over these other societies.

As with the Western European Celts and Romans, indigenous Americans have a similar relationship with modern (1500s-1600s) European powers such as Spain, Portugal, France, England, and the Netherlands. The Americas in 1492 featured an enormous variety of societies, ranging from sedentary agricultural civilizations centered in cities, to semi-sedentary agricultural societies, to nomadic hunter-gatherer societies. Cities such as Tenochtitlan (the Aztec, or Mexica, Empire) and Cuzco (the Incan Empire) were world cities in 1492 in terms of population, social organization, division of labor, architecture, and engineering. Cities in the Western Hemisphere were not recent developments, but rather followed earlier urban sites in Central Mexico (e.g., Teotihuacan), Central America (e.g., Maya civilization’s Tikal and Copan), and South America (e.g., Peruvian coastal cities). North America also contained urban sites. As with the Romans, when we describe modern Europeans as “settling” and “civilizing” Native Americans, we uncritically reproduce the conqueror’s own political ideology and propaganda (Trouillot 1995).

There are two sides (at least) to every story. Given the longstanding privileging of European versions of events, it’s necessary to highlight indigenous perspectives. Only then can we hope to attain less one-sided understandings of the origins of modern colonialism and slavery in the Western Hemisphere (La Vega 2006; León-Portilla 1972).

(4) Mestizaje. This Spanish word (“mess-tee-ZAH-hay”) means race mixture by interracial sex (aka miscegenation) between groups of mainly European versus mainly non-European descent (Telles 2004:4). Centuries of European colonialism created new “races” in many world regions. In Latin America, this racial group is called mestizo (“mixed”)—children or descendants of European fathers, and indigenous American or African mothers. Many of these sexual unions were what we’d understand today as sexual violence and rape: unwanted sex in which one partner is more powerful (Feinstein 2018; Telles 2004:25). Across Latin America and the Caribbean, mestizos often form the majority of national populations. Indeed, Mexican mestizos have long celebrated themselves as “la raza” (the Mexican people: see Vasconcelos 1966)—the largest Mexican racial-ethnic group as compared to indigenous peoples, whites, Asians, and blacks.

But in some regions, mestizaje, though prevalent, was demographically and politically minimized. Argentina and the U.S. are similar in this respect. As with the U.S. “Indian Wars” (1600s-1890), Argentina built its national sense of racial identity and geography through military expeditions that succeeded in controlling and often exterminating indigenous peoples in frontier areas. Thus, Argentine national identity was largely white, rather than mestizo, even before mass European immigration from 1870 to 1930 (Chasteen 2001:207-08; Lavrin 2005). Likewise, by 1900 relatively few non-Hispanic white Americans had significant indigenous native ancestry. To be “white” in the U.S. has always meant to have almost no non-European ancestry. As in Argentina, white Americans are not mestizos. Thus, a core part of (white) American and (white) Argentine national identity has been racial. As in many other countries, race and nation are linked in imagining who “we” are (Anderson 1983; Loveman 2014; Mallon 1995).

(5) Colonial education. Given the identification of whiteness and civilization, a modern form of education was born: colonial education. This new form of schooling had long continuities, for example, with the European Middle Ages and Antiquity (e.g., sending royal barbarian sons to Rome for socialization, then back to the province to rule in Rome’s name: Gibbon 1909). The basic feature of colonial education was teaching colonial children of color to see the metropole (European mother country) as their source of identity: their cultural home, origin, and center. Such education replaced native languages, religions, and values with those of the colonizers, and claimed to offer children full membership in colonial society. Yet when such people migrated from the colony to the metropole (e.g., for work or education), they realized that the metropole Europeans had deeply conflicting views of them, often rejecting them as not full members of society or “second-class” citizens (e.g., Afro-Barbadians as not “real” Britons: Lamming 1991:xxxviii). Widespread anti-immigrant rejection of people of color led to the pro-immigrant slogan, “We’re here because you were there.” That is, “we nonwhite immigrants are here today in the metropole (London) because you British came to us yesterday, enslaving or colonizing us in your empire.”

Modern colonial education for relatively privileged nonwhites involved attending private boarding schools in the colonial metropole, then returning to the colony for relatively prestigious careers as civil servants with internalized European values, tastes, and language (for British Barbados, see Lamming 1991; for French Martinique, see Chamoiseau’s [1999] character Pilon). By contrast, many less privileged nonwhites attended nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Indian boarding schools in North America, where reservation children were forcibly removed from their families’ indigenous values and cultures, to be indoctrinated (brainwashed) with white language, religion, values, customs, manners, and dress (APAN:II:455, 457; Dunbar-Ortiz 2014).

Similarly, Australia ran indigenous schools performing colonial education (APAN:II:459). (Nineteenth-century Australia comprised several British colonies.) Such schools, whether in Canada, the U.S., or Australia, exemplified white colonial education: re-socializing children of color to assimilate them into the colonizer’s ideology.

4.4 Decolonization and the Third World

The First World War (1914-1918) had global impacts, with one consequence being widespread questioning of European colonialism. In stark contrast with confident, pre-war claims of European moral and civilizational superiority, the Great War featured European empires using modern technology to kill, in horrific and amoral ways, unimaginably large numbers of each other’s soldiers. Although U.S. President Wilson’s Fourteen Points proposed the League of Nations, the end of imperialism, and self-determination of colonized peoples, these goals were largely deferred until after the Second World War (1939-1945) (APAN:II:611).

However, nationalist leaders coming of age during WWI—e.g., Ho Chi Minh (Indochina, Vietnam), Mohandas K. Gandhi (India)—took self-determination and independence seriously (APAN:II:615; Chasteen 2001:260). The years between the world wars were ones in which Europe, America, and Japan maintained or expanded their overseas empires. Following WWII, the United States’ global power and interest in shoring up the stability of the status quo supported only gradual decolonization—or at times continued imperialism, as in the case of France’s weakening grip on Vietnam. Gradualism led to independence only coming, for many colonized peoples, years or even decades after 1945. This “Third World” during the Cold War navigated between the “First World” powers of the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan, and the “Second World” powers of the USSR, Eastern Europe, and China.

African decolonization was gradual indeed, taking place across the entire second half of the century:

Table 4.3. African decolonization, 1951-1990

Sources: Adapted from APAN:II:735; Moore 1989:139

Table 4.3 shows that, since the mid- to late-nineteenth century second wave of European colonialization (Stage 4), almost the entire continent of Africa had been ruled for decades by a handful of European nations, principally Britain, France, and Germany. Africa became independent in the postwar decades, mostly the 1950s-1970s. Third World nations achieved decolonization in varied ways, some peaceably and others through revolution. For some African nations, independence came mostly in peaceful diplomatic terms; for others, only after long and bloody wars of independence from their European colonizers (e.g., Algeria from France).

Likewise, Caribbean decolonization, principally from Britain, did not occur until the second half of the century, long after 1945:

Table 4.4. Caribbean decolonization, 1962-1983

Source: Adapted from APAN:II:848

Some Caribbean polities in 1945 were already formally independent (e.g., Haiti, Dominican Republic, Cuba). Others remain today territories or overseas departments of the old colonizers: e.g., Puerto Rico (U.S.), Martinique (France).

In conclusion, the impacts of two world wars weakened the ability of the European imperial powers to resist the push of many colonies for freedom. Japan’s East Asian empire likewise changed following WWII with Japan’s subjugation to the American victors, with independence for Vietnam (1945) and Korea (1948). Likewise, the Philippines achieved independence from the U.S. (1946: see Chapter 12). The “Third World” nations newly independent of Europe, Japan, or the U.S. were located worldwide, and geographically concentrated in the regions of densest former colonial control: Africa, the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, Oceania (the Pacific Ocean islands), and the Caribbean.

Chapter 4 Summary

Chapter 4 introduced Unit II (Whiteness and Power) by reviewing the history of European global colonization. Section 4.1 explained the rise of the West, the fact of Europe’s world domination between 1492 and 1945. The table presented the colonial binary system, a set of contrasts between European and non-European institutions.

Section 4.2 presented the history of European colonization in four stages. The stages provide international context for understanding specifically American colonial and national history, as discussed in later chapters.

Section 4.3 introduced several themes from global colonial history. It explained the relationship between Eurocentrism and civilization, and discussed settlement, mestizaje, and colonial education.

Section 4.4 discussed decolonization and the emergence of the Third World. The tables offered a time frame for understanding decolonization, specifically in Africa and the Caribbean. The principal European ex-colonial powers also appear listed in the tables.