Worldbuilding 201: Colonization
Greetings and spealan! … Okay, maybe the bears are spealan these times of the year, but today, we will colonise those wretched caves and claim them as our own! I, your favourite alien Limax Vivian, will be sure to colonise everything, including a few stray comments by Lady Verbosa, Anne Winchell! But first, the obligatory disclaimer.
Disclaimer: Colonisation and its history on Earth is fraught with horrible deeds and outright genocidal attempts. I, of course, do not endorse such horrendous violations of cultural and human rights. Everything said within this post axis for worldbuilding and storytelling purposes and is in no way claiming that colonisation practices of already inhabited lands are justified even if supposed justifications are presented. Justifications do not equate to being justified.
What is colonisation?
The exact nature of colonisation and colonialism can be discussed and bickered about endlessly in the historical sense, and it is something every culture has engaged in. Population growths inevitably results in movements of people, and with expansion outward, ends in colonisations, but for the sake of worldbuilding, I will define it as following:
Colonisation is a systematic and intentional process of moving people to new lands and setting up settlements there in order to expand, exploit, and extract resources of lands.
Pay attention here that in this definition, the presence or absence of local natives is a non-factor. Another thing to pay attention to is that this excludes natural immigration due to population increases I spoke about a bit earlier.
Why colonise?
Given our definition and the reason for colonisation, it seems obvious why one would be colonising. To get more resources! But the question then becomes, why is it that the intentional act of colonisation has not been more prominent historically? The reason is actually quite simple. For most of human history, well over 90% of all people have had to work in agriculture in order to make enough food for everyone on the farm plus a little extra for the few cities that could be sustained.
With such a skewed amount of people stuck barely scraping by just to sustain a rare few not doing farming, sending people off to make settlements elsewhere means you were crippling your own country’s ability to maintain an upper class and sustain your armies and even those who make up your army. So colonisation is not even on the radar for those civilisations.
It is only through more efficient farming, selective breeding of crops and animals, and development of agricultural technologies, which may include fertiliser, that more people are freed up to not need to be in agriculture. When more people are freed up from having to work in agriculture, you can send them off to new lands to set up settlements instead of working at home! Almost like humans are cattle… Eh, who cares, it is the plebs!
This of course assumes that ship building, navigation, and food preservation have matched similarly in technological development. To colonise, you need new lands to start to settle! Your neighbours are likely to get seriously miffed and able to punch you away! But we’ll return to who colonises and who is colonised soon. The big thing to notice is that in the early times, economies–see my post on economies!– were tied to land for farming and for resources and for people. This meant that your nation's richness was inherently tied to the amount of land you controlled, so colonising was a way to increase the amount of land to control, and thus the riches, without having to have costly war with neighbours who can and will fight back hard.
Who colonises who?
I have hinted at it already, but let’s make it blatannetly obvious (Anne: …I see what you did there, but I’ll allow it!). To start colonisation as an organised act, there needs to be all the aforementioned forms of technologies. We need enough technology to be able to explore new lands, ways to preserve food for said journeys, and enough food production to sustain a larger population that doesn’t need to farm. With these developments, there will be military developments. Technologies rarely develop alone, and we all know that if people figure out a way to make a bigger stick to hit each other with, they will start making those sticks and go for it.
Sure, you can have your people peaceful and all kind and nice, but then again, why would they really colonise then? Anyway, if they don’t develop the bigger stick, someone else will, and then conquer them and be gone! It is like the old saying about neutrality: “Neutrality only lasts if you can make a nose bleed enough.” Paraphrased.
So the colonisers are technologically advanced enough to do it, but where do they go? The place with least resistance, of course! This means if there are areas that have no inhabitants but also resources, they are prime real estate! Though intelligent species have a propensity of getting everywhere that is survivable in only a few thousand years, some exceptions obviously exist.
The second class of targets for colonisation are lands that have a native population incapable of putting up any form of resistance, so it doesn’t turn into a huge slaughter that a war between equally advanced peoples would have. This means the colonised are often technologically less developed. They might be able to buy weapons from other colonisers, but since they’re unable to produce the advanced technology themselves, any resistance formed from this is often, early on at least, very temporary and only delays the inevitable.
A thing to pay attention to here is that for the people being potentially or actively colonised, this dealing for advanced technology and weapons to fight means the other wars you are fighting in other areas can turn into a long term drain of your own resources. This is because once the colonisers decide you the native people are not worth the trouble for now and leave, what are you going to do with your new fancy weapons? Of course you do the sensible: CONQUER YOUR OWN NEIGHBOURS! Which then means those neighbours will start looking for the same weapons from other colonisers, and over time–and this can be centuries–the region gets weaker and weaker due to the native population depopulating themselves and destroying what economies they have. Oh look… Colonisers are back for a rematch… Are those CANNONS NOW!?
Justifications for colonisation
One thing to remember when it comes to the justifications of most horrendous things, including racism and general bigotry, is that the hate and actions come first, and then people work backward to find reasons that justify what they already want to do and feel. If you colonise terra incognita, unknown land, by which I mean unknown to anyone of any civilization period, and there is no one there already, then it is just finders keepers because there is no one to deal with.
The reason for colonisation is purely and simply to increase in wealth by controlling more land that can farm more crops and from which you can extract more resources, but how do you make up justifications for it? If no one is there, then clearly it’s your right to take the land for yourselves! After all, there’s no one to stop you! If there are people already there, then you need slightly more justification, but only slightly.
As I already stated, technological superiority is the main reason colonisation can happen even in areas where people already exist. This lends itself easily to viewing the other people as inferior, and then the thoughts quickly go to how there must be some inherent inferiority. After all, why else would the natives not have developed sophisticated technology just like we did? Of course, there are many reasons why technology doesn't develop; one big one is the lack of necessity. But that doesn’t excuse anyone in the eyes of a coloniser.
For you humans who are so visually oriented, the easiest justification for colonisation has to be the visual cues you get from the natives… They look different, so there must be some connection between appearance and technological inferiority, and with that, connection to intellectual inferiority! Of course, if you want something else, you can go for other visual cues if they are like humans and visually oriented. Maybe it is eye colours? Fur colour? Hair colour? Or go Rick and Morty and have it be the nipple shape. (Anne: Clearly nipple shape determines intellectual superiority).
Or, if you chose other senses to be primary (read my post on alien senses for some examples), you can go really wild! How they smell, how their electric fields are different, whatever sense you make up, any difference that can be most of the time easily identified is a justification!
The reason these pop up is because humans generally do not like to be atrocious to others. Sure, it is fine to be a dick, but most people draw the line at bodily harm! So you have to justify things in order to not have the brain go mad from what it is doing. You can throw on top of this that you are “helping” them to “progress” technologically, so now you are not only justified because of their inherent inferiority, now you are helping those inferiors to get as good as they can! It is, after all, not your fault that they are incapable of resisting you!
Colonisation’s inevitability
This one will be relatively short but this one I cannot justify factually as in I have never seen a scholar make this argument, but I will argue from my knowledge. I think the phenomena of colonisation of other people is a societal inevitability. While I have argued that technology and knowledge spreads, and it cannot ever be stopped, there are always pockets where spurts of technological development speeds along much faster than everyone else. Most technology tends to settle afterward, then spread out again, and soon enough, most people have the same technology as everyone else once more.
However, when it comes to a certain technological state, it changes. This is because at a certain point of agriculture development, you have that larger class of free people doing a lot of different work, which includes inventing and studying science. When you start getting a class of people who are capable of devoting all their energy, time, and brains to study and create things, the game has changed. That means they are capable of developing more, growing faster in technology, and the rest of the world gets left behind. This region of your world has adapted their agriculture and society to this, the rest of the world has not, and it takes a lot of work to catch up.
So the technological disparity arises eventually, and when the technologically superior region has the ability to travel the stretches needed to colonise, the rest are unable to defend themselves, which then enriches said region even more, and they can keep being ahead. There is a region of time between “advanced enough to colonise” and “advanced enough economically to not be dependent on land” where colonisation is so lucrative and obvious to enhance your own nation's power that colonisation will almost inevitably happen.
Three stages of Colonisation
Colonisation is a complicated process, and it happens in generally 3 stages.
Stage 1: Find the land and visit
The first stage is to find the land, and then visit. How can you colonise a palace you don’t know about? This is usually done by large agencies, typically governments. That is because they were the only ones able to afford it back then–keep in mind, banking is either non-existent or very young, so large amounts of capital for private individuals is close to non-existent.
Sending ships to explore new lands either through the oceans or through space is not a cheap endeavour! Albeit in the space case, you will have banks and lots of capital since your society is almost by necessity more advanced. Anyway, the point is that it costs a lot, so the most likely ones sending explorers are states, as ships are lost and never heard from again easily. The ships come to lands, claim them, and then fuck off because they cannot stay on the land anymore.
Stage 2: The brave and bold arrive
At this stage, large companies or states are sending the few and the brave to the new land. These early colonies are very fragile. A lot of them fail, and colonisers die. Some become successful and survive. Despite the many failures at this stage, it is a very important stage.
See it as a “proof of concept” kind of stage. It shows that while many can and will die, people CAN flourish there. So that means you can keep at it until you get enough colonies that can survive! Another important aspect with this stage is that the colonies are still heavily dependent on their home countries. They are not self-sufficient yet.
Stage 3: Self-sufficiency
The last and final stage! The colony or colonies are capable of producing virtually everything they need. Food, clothes, tools, weapons, everything they need is close by and immediate, and anything that is not really worth trading is produced locally. This is when the influx of people generally starts picking up.
This is because the infrastructure exists to sustain a larger amount of people and deal with the influx, and, of course, there is a lot of free land for people to live on! Just scoot over the natives a bit and concentrate them into a region that is definitely theirs (at gunpoint)! Well, until you change your mind and push them elsewhere. Not too bad of a deal for them, after all! They live!
Stage 4: Independence
Did I say last and final stage before? Well, for some, maybe. This is generally not considered a stage in colony development, but I add it because it happens. When a colony is so self-sufficient that the home country becomes less relevant and incapable of responding quickly due to the distance, a colony tends to develop their own identity and feeling of self that does not depend on their home country. Eventually, if the home country’s gain in remaining is not large enough… independence becomes real. (Anne, an American: Take that, redcoats! 🇺🇸💣💥)
Colonial issues
Colonies sure seem like quite the good thing! Lots of resources, more people to do work for you to extract it all! You can become a global superpower if you have enough colonies so that no one can contest your supremacy of the oceans or space! Except there are some itty bitty teensy tiny hugely humongously bigly enormous issues when it comes to colonies.
Colonies require a lot of (checks a thesaurus) bucks, quids, cash, moolah, dough, green, shekels, credits! They are extremely expensive. You need a lot of people to maintain a colony, both from the colonists but also the natives, and on top of that, you also have other nations colonising that might want to try to take a colony from you! So you need a navy, or star fleet, and you need soldiers to keep it all in check!
Now, at the start of colonising, beyond military cost, it can be cheap because you trade with those further inland, but eventually, the home country’s needs will increase, meaning you need to go even further inland and use your more advanced technology to extract more crops and more resources. But to get those things to the ocean, you need infrastructure! Trains, roads, ports, all of that costs even more! This is why in countries that were colonies, the oldest modern infrastructure are those that took resources to the ports to be transported to the home country of the colonisers.
Eventually it pays off, right? Believe it or not, but historically… Most colonies are resource sinks that ultimately never pay for the amount of resources you have to invest into them to make any profit realistic. Some colonies and trading with them were highly profitable, but if you look at it all throughout history, in total, colonialism was a net loss in terms of money. Resources, well, the jury is out on that one. Human cost… complete and total loss.
Integrating colonies
Do colonies, the “good ones” and the “bad ones,” have to get independence eventually? Is that an inevitability? Well, no, I don’t believe it is. I have always had the philosophy that you can maintain huge nations and diverse ones as long as you are ready to make compromises as a government to the people. This is something I often do in my Concert Core star nations in order to have them very diverse in terms of aliens; I find them more enjoyable then, okay?
My philosophy indicates the main issue as to why colonies leave: namely, the central governments are so used to having control and making every decision that any real compromise that would be acceptable to the colonies is not even considered. All the home countries do is give platitudes that do nothing that the colonised people want. So if you want your nation to have former colonies staying–I say former now because by being able to integrate said colonies, they become part of the main nation, and both parts come to look at each other as one united entity–the colonising home countries need to do the number one rule for keeping any people together. Also, Anne, add this to the idea list, “Rules of integration/keeping people” or the likes! (Anne: Consider it added! Goodness, we’re going to need a long time to get through all of these. But sorry, you were saying the number one rule of keeping people together?) Thank you, my treacherous slave! (Anne, still an American: It’s only treachery if you lose!)
Back to my rule!
Always heed the needs of all the people.
And by all, I mean the vast majority in every region within your nation, empire, whatever you have. If you can do that, and people feel heard, they are less inclined to leave. To make certain they stay when they see no immediate reason to leave, give them a reason to stay. Trade is a great way to do this, but also reforming and improving infrastructure that helps the people has its own value in the long term. So if you give them infrastructure, mail systems, and all that, and those are not contingent on their ability to spew out resources for you, then they start to see you are more benevolent, despite your maybe-cruel past!
So in short, don’t antagonise people or stop doing so, make people feel heard, build their land for their sake, and trade with them favourably.
Summa Summarum
We are now at the end, but to Anne’s great sorrow, no revolution! (Anne: Excuse me, I believe the American Revolution had a bit to do with colonisation 😜) Colonialism has obvious benefits to people that are in the mercantilism mindset of economy where to win, another person must lose, which makes sense when land equals economy. So colonisation taking off for anyone capable of advanced technology and having sufficient technological superiority is not surprising.
I am personally of the opinion that a good world that is in the 1850’s or later in terms of technology and development will almost certainly either have had colonialism, or it is still in full force! The scramble for Africa reignited colonialism, after all! You don’t need to go into the full range of horrors in your world, even if it is likely to be that bad, but it doesn’t need to go all the way to the bottom. After all, when the Belgians dealt with Congo and what happened came out, most colonisers went, “What is wrong with you Belgium!?” So you can have varying views on how “proper colonialism” is done.
I will end this with one last thing: colonialism does not necessarily lead to slave trade (find out some of the reasons for slavery at my post on the issue). I know a lot of Americans might think it is inevitable, but it isn’t. Slavery is highly likely if a region is depopulated, like the Americas were due to plagues, but if enough people remain, there might be enough of a workforce that slavery is not necessary, or, if technology is advanced enough, that technology might remove slavery as an alternative.
So happy colonising for all the worldbuilders!
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