Colonization

The European colonization of Australia, New Zealand, and other places in Oceania was fueled by explorers, and colonists often regarding the encountered landmasses as terra nullius ("empty land" in Latin).

The term colonization is derived from the Latin words colere ("to cultivate, to till"),[8] colonia ("a landed estate", "a farm") and colonus ("a tiller of the soil", "a farmer"),[9] then by extension "to inhabit".

The decline and collapse of the Roman Empire saw (and was partly caused by) the large-scale movement of people in Eastern Europe and Asia.

This is largely seen as beginning with nomadic horsemen from Asia (specifically the Huns) moving into the richer pasture land to the west, thus forcing the local people there to move further west and so on until eventually the Goths were forced to cross into the Roman Empire, resulting in continuous war with Rome which played a major role in the fall of the Roman Empire.

The Vikings launched an unsuccessful attempt at colonizing an area they called Vinland, which is probably at a site now known as L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland and Labrador, on the eastern coastline of Canada.

While some European colonization focused on shorter-term exploitation of economic opportunities (Newfoundland, for example, or Siberia) or addressed specific goals such as settlers seeking religious freedom (Massachusetts), at other times long-term social and economic planning was involved for both parties, but more on the colonizing countries themselves, based on elaborate theory-building (note James Oglethorpe's Colony of Georgia in the 1730s and Edward Gibbon Wakefield's New Zealand Company in the 1840s).

[19] In the 1920s, the Soviet regime implemented the so-called korenization policy in an attempt to win the trust of non-Russians by promoting their ethnic cultures and establishing for them many of the characteristic institutional forms of the nation-state.

During both Soviet occupations (1940–1941; 1944–1991) a combined 605,000 inhabitants of the three countries were either killed or deported (135,000 Estonians, 170,000 Latvians and 320,000 Lithuanians), while their properties and personal belongings, along with ones who fled the country, were confiscated and given to the arriving colonists – Soviet military and NKVD personnel, as well as functionaries of the Communist Party and economic migrants from kolkhozes.

And of the money transferred back, a disproportionate amount was spent on the region's militarization and funding of repressive institutions, especially in the early years of the occupation.

[34] It has been calculated by a Latvian state-funded commission that the Soviet occupation cost the economy of Latvia a total of 185 billion euros.

[35][36] Conversely, Marxian economist and world-systems analyst Samir Amin asserts that, in contrast to colonialism, capital transfer in the USSR was used to develop poorer regions in the South and East with the wealthiest regions like Western Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic Republics being the main source of capital.

[39] To make settlement of the inhospitable and undeveloped region more enticing, the Soviet government allowed private ownership of land.

In one instance, a government-produced Yiddish film called Seekers of Happiness told the story of a Jewish family that fled the Great Depression in the United States to make a new life for itself in Birobidzhan.

[44] In the First Aliyah, much of the Zionist settlement consisted of legal land purchases for agricultural colonies, or moshavot, for wine and citrus production.

[45] According to Elia Zuriek in his book "Israel's Colonial Project in Palestine: Brutal Pursuit", Israeli settlements in the West Bank is an additional form of colonization.

Law professors Steven Lubet and Jonathan Zasloff describe the "Zionism as settler colonialism" theory as politically motivated, derogatory and highly controversial.

Both professors also point out that the academic journal where Wolfe published his essay fails to mention the Islamic military campaign that captured the region in the 7th and 8th centuries.

[49] Due to marginalisation produced by continuous Resettlement Policy, by 1969, political tensions and open hostilities developed between the Government of the Philippines and Moro Muslim rebel groups in Mindanao.