Empires, Colonialism, and Resistance

Comprehensive practice flashcards reviewing the concepts of empires, imperialism, colonial systems, resistance movements, and colonial legacies across the British, Portuguese, and Belgian empires.

Empire

A large political unit or group of nations, territories, and diverse peoples ruled by a single supreme authority, such as an emperor, empress, oligarchy, or dominant central government.

Colony

A country, territory, or area that is politically controlled by a more powerful, distant nation, which is referred to as the 'mother country' or metropole.

Imperialism

A state policy, practice, or set of ideas through which a powerful nation extends its rule, control, and authority over other lands and people, often through military force, economic dominance, or political and cultural pressure.

Colonialism

A system in which a country takes over control of another land and its people to exploit it for wealth and power, imposing its own laws, language, and culture upon the dependent population.

Colonial Subjects

Inhabitants of colonized territories who were denied the status and rights of citizens, possessing few or no political rights while their resources and labor were extracted for the imperial power.

Doctrine of Discovery

Fifteenth-century papal bulls issued by Catholic popes declaring that colonizing foreign lands was legally and religiously justified in order to convert non-European populations to Christianity.

Ceuta

A coastal town in North Africa conquered by Portuguese explorers in 1415 to inaugurate European global expansion; today an autonomous Spanish city bordering Morocco that serves as a major entry point for migrants seeking to enter Europe.

Myth of the "Good Colonizer"

A distorted historical narrative portraying Portuguese colonialism as relatively harmonious, benevolent, and non-racist compared to British and French rule, obscuring Portugal's extensive use of segregation, oppression, and cultural violence.

Assimilation (Portuguese Colonialism)

A colonial policy requiring colonized Africans to abandon their native languages, customs, and African names and adopt Portuguese culture, European attire, and Christianity to climb a racialized hierarchy and gain limited second-class citizenship.

Decolonization of the Mind

The process of freeing individual and collective consciousness from the lingering cultural, psychological, and intellectual dominance and Eurocentric standards imposed by former colonial powers.

Colonial Alienation

A concept popularized by Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o in his 1986 book 'Decolonising the Mind', describing how the enforcement of a colonizer's language in education alienates students from their native heritage, community, and conceptual world.

Musseques

Peripheral, impoverished shanty towns surrounding Luanda, Angola, where Black populations were segregated during Portuguese rule and where many continue to live without running water, electricity, or gas.

"Special Blacks" Narrative

The Salazar regime's ideological portrayal of Cape Verdeans as more literate, European-like, and distinct from continental Africans, used as an administrative buffer in other colonies like Guinea-Bissau to manufacture the illusion of racial harmony.

Reclaiming Epistemologies

An aspect of decolonizing the mind that focuses on restoring, validating, and prioritizing Indigenous knowledge systems, local languages, non-Western histories, and alternative worldviews over Western universalism.

The Pale

A territory around Dublin, Ireland, that was firmly held under English royal administrative control by the late fifteenth century during the reign of Henry VII.

Act of Union (1707)

The parliamentary agreement that united England and Scotland into Great Britain, motivated heavily by England agreeing to absorb Scottish debts resulting from the failed Caledonia colony in the Darien Scheme.

The Armada Portrait (1588)

A commemorative painting of Queen Elizabeth I created as political propaganda after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, rich with symbols of monarchy (crown), global conquest (globe), and purity (pearls and white dress).

Dominion

A semi-independent, self-governing nation within the British Empire that ran its own domestic affairs while remaining allegiant to the British Crown (e.g., Canada in 1867, Australia in 1901, and South Africa in 1910).

Scramble for Africa

The late nineteenth-century surge of European imperial partition and conquest across the African continent, through which Great Britain secured control over approximately 30 percent of the African population.

British East India Company

A joint-stock company chartered in 1600 to trade in the Indian Ocean region that eventually established political, military, and commercial rule across much of the Indian subcontinent from 1757 onward.

Jamestown

The first permanent English settlement established in North America, founded in 1607 under the reign of King James I.

Zenith of the British Empire

The period following World War I around 1918 when the British Empire reached its greatest territorial extent, covering roughly 13.71 million square miles and about one-quarter of the world's landmass.

Satyagraha (Non-Violence)

Mahatma Gandhi's strategic philosophy of determined non-violent resistance, premised on the belief that non-violence is the weapon of the strong and purposefully exposes the inherent brutality of colonial rule.

Spinning Wheel (Charkha)

A symbolic instrument utilized by Mahatma Gandhi to promote self-sufficiency, solidarity with the rural working class, and the boycott of British manufactured cloth in favor of homespun Indian khadi.

The Salt March

A prominent 1930 non-violent protest march led by Mahatma Gandhi across India to resist the British colonial monopoly and tax on salt extraction.

Divide and Rule (Divide et impera)

A colonial governance strategy of fomenting and exploiting religious, ethnic, or social divisions among local populations to prevent unified opposition against imperial control.

Partition of India (1947)

The division of British India into the independent states of India and Pakistan along religious lines, which triggered widespread inter-communal violence, mass migrations, and bloodshed in regions like Punjab and Bengal.

Nathuram Godse

A right-wing Hindu nationalist and member of the Hindu Mahasabha who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi on January 30, 1948, claiming Gandhi was overly accommodating to Muslims and responsible for the division of India.

Pre-Colonial Rwandan Social Structure

A flexible, shared-culture system among the Twa (indigenous hunters/potters), Hutu (cultivators), and Tutsi (pastoralists/aristocrats) defined primarily by occupation and wealth rather than rigid racial categories.

Ethnic Identity Cards (Rwanda, 1933)

Identification cards introduced by Belgian administrators that permanently classified Rwandans by ethnicity (roughly 85% Hutu and 15% Tutsi), institutionalizing a rigid racial hierarchy based on pseudo-scientific physical measurements.

1959 Rwandan Revolution

A violent political uprising in which the Hutu majority overthrew the centuries-old Tutsi monarchy three years prior to Rwandan independence in 1962, forcing approximately 150,000 Tutsis into exile.

Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)

A Tutsi-led rebel army formed in 1990 by descendants of Rwandan Tutsi exiles living in Uganda, which launched an armed campaign against the Rwandan government and eventually halted the 1994 genocide.

Interahamwe

A civilian Hutu extremist paramilitary militia trained and mobilized to execute mass killings against Tutsis and moderate Hutus, primarily utilizing machetes during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

Forces Armées Rwandaises (FAR)

The official national armed forces of Rwanda's Hutu-led government that actively participated in, directed, and facilitated the 1994 genocide.

Hôtel des Mille Collines

A luxury hotel in Kigali managed by Paul Rusesabagina that became a sanctuary sheltering more than a thousand Tutsi and moderate Hutu refugees from militia violence during the 1994 genocide.

Inyenzi ("Cockroaches")

A dehumanizing slur broadcast by Hutu extremist media and radio stations during the 1994 genocide to depict Tutsis as pests that needed to be exterminated.