Informal Imperialism beyond Europe

This chapter examines two very different examples of informal imperialism. The first takes place in Latin America, an area colonized by the Europeans for three centuries and politically independent from the 1810s and 1820s (see map 1). There the ancient Great Civilizations were mainly concentrated in Mexico and Peru, extending to a limited extent to other countries such as Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, and Ecuador. These countries provide the focus for the following pages, whereas a description of developments in the others is reserved for the discussion of internal colonialism in Chapter 10. As mentioned in Chapter 4, after an initial use of monumental archaeology at the time of the Latin-American independence, the emergence of racism led to a process of disengagement: elites only extended their interest in the origins of the nation back to the period of the arrival of the Europeans in the area. The local scholarly pride for the pre-Hispanic past re-emerged, mainly from the 1870s, timidly at first but soon gained sufficient strength to allow indigenous elites a novel rapprochement with their native monuments. Only when this happened would the tension between the national past and the discourse of inferiority advocated by the informal colonial powers be felt. The latter had been formed by explorers, collectors and scholars from the Western world. These were, to start with, mainly French and British, and later also scholars from the US and Germany. A few of them would diverge from the line taken by the majority, and Mexico City was chosen, in the early twentieth century, to undertake a unique experiment: the creation of an international school to overcome the effects of imperialism. The political circumstances, however, unfortunately led to the failure of this trial. The other case discussed in this chapter is located in East and Central Asia, in China and Japan and, by extension, in Korea. These countries had been able to maintain their independence in the early modern era mainly through the closure of their frontiers. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, they were politically compelled to open up to the Western world.

Archaeology · China · Colonialism · Economic history · Ethnology · Geography · Hegemony · Independence (probability theory) · Indigenous · Latin Americans · Political science · Politics · Pride · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · History · Latin American history and culture · Law