Colonialism, Hegemony, and the Environment

By Megan Light
July 2020

Colonial legacies continue to embody, dictate, and shape governance of ‘the environment’ today. The links between colonialism, hegemony, and the environment are inextricable, from the current extractive industries being modelled upon colonialism, to the very way in which we view ourselves in the world around us. The colonial
desire for accumulation of wealth and power has been embedded in policies throughout history, at the direct expense of the wellbeing of people and planet. People, communities, and nature have been framed as resources to be exploited, extracted, and plundered in the name of economic growth.

Yet, the colonial influence is not just a problem of governance. It seeps deeper than that. It permeates into our individual worldviews, how we reflect on nature and environmental issues, and how we relate to one another.

This article does not seek to address all the complexities and nuances in the relationship between colonialism and the environment, nor their perpetuation in neo-colonial transnational practice. Instead, this piece examines elements within the nature-society relationship that are so inherently connected to the way we see the planet, but that have been greatly shaped by racist, discriminatory, and exploitative policy and practice.

Colonialism & the Environment

Extraction and exploitation were the common themes of colonialism. Extraction and exploitation of people, of communities, of land, and natural resources. Indigenous communities and their knowledge were plundered alongside nature, and often, commodity-dependent economies amassing vast wealth for the colonial powers replaced them.

In India, the British focused on the establishment of tea plantations and jute production; in Malaysia, they focused on rubber and tin; the Japanese in Taiwan made massive investments in the construction of large-scale sugar processing plants; and across Africa, colonisers established labour conscription programmes targeted at agricultural exports and processing enterprise. Colonial interests were based on the principle of maximising
profits from natural resources, no matter the social, cultural, or environmental cost.

Communities were also systematically excluded from any development or cultivation. In Malaysia, the manipulation of land policy directly discriminated against the local population, and in 1915, 1916, and 1917 went so far as to refuse selling land at all to Malays for the purpose of rubber planting. This was replicated in most other colonies.

The Fundamental Nature-Society Relationship

At the core of our relationship with ‘the environment’ is the way that we see nature; the way that we interact with the world around us. This has been shaped extensively by colonial influences. Colonialism was premised upon exploitative practices that enriched a powerful few whilst degrading and commodifying people and their land across the planet. The legacies from these practices still permeate into policies and practice surrounding environmental governance, and the fundamental nature-society relationship.

The idea of an ‘imaginative hegemony’ was formed in the 1990s. This is the idea that our view of the environment today is framed through a dichotomous lens in which we are separate from and superior to nature. Researchers have argued that the essential concept of ‘the environment’ was non-existent in most parts of the world before colonialism and was formed as a response to the interactions between the colonizer, the colonized, and nature.
With the acquisition of resources being paramount to maintaining colonial hegemony and wealth, norms began to form that paired success with resource extraction, mass deforestation, the degazetting of land, and atrocities against their rightful owners. In order to maintain power, the environment was depicted as something to be
commodified, that we can assign economic value to, and that is there to be exploited. Preservation and protection were framed as antithetical to development and growth.

Colonial legacies have influences global environmental governance directly. Models of extraction, policies of exclusion, and attempts to calculate value through economic means have all been transplanted from colonialism. On the personal level, it is more nuanced and less identifiable. Colonialism set people apart from ‘the environment’ , it created a framework in which we are not reliant or intertwined with nature, but disconnected. By systematically excluding people to their own land, significant ties were severed, and the environment became a tool of discrimination and abuse. To the colonisers, seeing themselves as superior to nature allowed for the creation of norms that facilitated disconnection and exploitation. So much harm has come from the thought that we are separate from the natural world. By not accounting for our interdependence, we have allowed vast fossil fuel extraction, the pollution of water, air, and light, and rampant deforestation and ocean acification. We have not realised this harms harm us too.

More articles on the links between colonialism and the environment will be coming out over the next couple of months. If you have any recommendations, or would like to be involved in these, please do let us know!

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References:
Grove‐White, R. (1995). Environment and society: Some reflections.
Jackson, J. C. (1968). Planters and speculators: Chinese and European agricultural enterprise in Malaya, 1786-1921.
Randeria, S. (2006). Entangled histories: civil society, caste solidarities and legal pluralism in post-colonial India.