Colonialism is the domination and dispossession of one people by another — the seizure of their land, the destruction of their governance systems, the extraction of their resources and labor, and the imposition of the colonizer’s authority over every aspect of life. It is not an event that happened in the past. For Indigenous peoples living under settler states — the United States, Canada, Australia, Israel, and others — colonialism is an ongoing structure: the land is still taken, the governance systems are still suppressed, the resources are still extracted, and the colonizer’s state still claims authority over Indigenous nations.
Settler colonialism, specifically, is the form of colonialism in which the colonizers come to stay. They do not just extract resources and leave — they replace the existing population on the land, building a new society on top of the one they are destroying. This means settler colonialism does not end when a colony gains “independence” — the settlers are still there, still occupying the land, still governing through the institutions they built. The United States is not a post-colonial society; it is an active colonial project.
Anarchism opposes colonialism as a form of domination — but the relationship goes deeper than that. Colonialism relied on the state (colonial governments, military force, legal systems designed to dispossess), capitalism (the extraction of wealth for metropolitan economies, the creation of dependent labor forces), and property law (the conversion of collectively governed Indigenous lands into privately owned colonial parcels). It also imposed hierarchies that did not previously exist in many of the societies it conquered: wage labor, industrial time-discipline, patriarchal family structures, and the replacement of consensus governance with centralized authority.
Many Indigenous governance systems — consensus decision-making, distributed authority, collective land stewardship, governance through kinship and seasonal cycles — embody what anarchist analysis describes as non-hierarchical organization. They did not derive these practices from European anarchism; they practiced them for millennia before Europeans arrived. This recognition is the basis of Indigenous anarchism: not the application of a European framework to Indigenous peoples, but the acknowledgment that Indigenous governance already operates on principles that European anarchism only theorized.
Colonialism also structured class and labor relations globally. The Atlantic slave trade, plantation economies, colonial resource extraction, and the forced proletarianization of Indigenous peoples created the wealth that funded European industrialization. Capitalism did not develop separately from colonialism — it developed through it.
Related terms
- Domination — the condition colonialism produces
- The state — the instrument of colonial governance
- Capitalism — the economic system colonialism served
- Property — the legal framework colonialism imposed
- Hierarchy — the structures colonialism created in societies that had operated without them
- Authority — the colonial claim to govern Indigenous peoples
- Autonomy — what colonialism destroys
- Freedom — what decolonization works toward