Empire and Colonialism

Riga Shakya
Postdoctoral Research Scholar at the Heyman Center for the Humanities and Lecturer in East Asian Languages and Cultures
Columbia University

The violent and transformative processes of empire-building and colonialism have irreparably shaped the cultures, languages, politics, landscape and environment, intellectual traditions, and knowledge–making practices of the Himalayan, Tibetan, and Inner Asian regions and their inhabitants.

While there is no singular model of imperial or colonial domination, empires across world history can be broadly understood as expansionist polities that sought to exercise varying degrees of cultural, economic, political, and social control over territories acquired through conquest from a metropolitan center. The term imperialism, therefore, sheds light on the diverse methods by which an empire exercised this domination over its territories, whether through settlement, sovereignty, or indirect mechanisms of control. Often overlapping with imperialism, the practice of colonialism saw empires settling their populations on newly conquered territory for economic exploitation, the extension of political authority, and the reinforcement of territorial claims, among other goals.

The long history of imperial expansion by regional conquest empires—such as the Tibetan Empire, the Mongols, and successive China-based dynastic empires (the Ming and Qing dynasties)—contributed to the forging of structures of political authority and territory, cross-cultural ties, cosmopolitan religious and trade networks, and increased mobility and interconnection across Tibetan, Himalayan, and Inner Asian regions. (For more information on overlapping expanses of successive regional kingdoms and empires in the greater Himalayan region, view the map narrative Kingdoms and Empires.) Galvanized by political, economic, technological, and intellectual developments, the advent of modern European colonialism in Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the introduction of pernicious and sophisticated forms of material, structural, and epistemic domination over these regions, the effects of which last to the present day.

Tibet was never formally colonized by a European power, but experienced both direct and indirect imperial encounters with the Qing dynasty, and the British and Russian Empires. The Great Game, the rivalry between British and Russian Empires over influence in Central Asia, primarily in Afghanistan, Persia, and Tibet during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contributed to tense inter-imperial diplomatic, military, and intelligence conflicts and encounters in Tibetan, Himalayan, and Inner Asian regions. British colonial rule over the Indian subcontinent precipitated the importance of these regions as sites of strategic geopolitical contestation and also as terra incognita in the West, attracting the attention of scholars, soldiers, spies, and explorers alike.

The mobilization of knowledge was essential to imperial projects worldwide. Amidst these imperial contestations, colonial knowledge-making practices about Tibet and the Himalayas, such as anthropology, disciplinary history, image making and photography, and cartography, both produced and were underpinned by the ‘rule of colonial difference,’ a term posed by the postcolonial theorist Partha Chatterjee to bring attention to the insidious hierarchies drawn between ‘civilized’ colonizers and ‘uncivilized’ colonized populations. The production of ‘useful’ information—about local customs and tradition, indigenous structures of power, social practices that could be ‘improved,’ and resources that could be exploited—facilitated governance, whether by engaging local elites in the colonial project, displacing traditional structures of political authority, extending systems of surveillance and control, or otherwise expanding the reach of imperial rule.

While each of these imperial relationships have their unique histories, the anthropologist and historian Carole McGranahan argues that each imperial polity sought “to put their imprint on Tibetans through an educating of sensibilities, a cultivating of political affiliation, a delineating of favorable borders, and/or a disciplining of the population.” The imperial legacies of Tibet’s past continue to reverberate even after the decolonization of Asia in the mid-twentieth century, with China employing the logic of empire in advancing its contemporary colonial project in Tibetan regions, and the durable influence of colonial knowledge over colonized populations and their representations and self-representations both inside and outside the region in the contemporary.

The history of museum institutions and the practice of object collection are intimately linked to the history of empires and the era of European colonialism. The wealth generated from imperial expansion and the exploitation of resources and people enabled the growth of private and institutional museum collections around the world. Sophisticated colonial knowledge-making practices, such as anthropological research and image making, as well as more overt practices such as looting, theft, and other forms of unfair object acquisitions contributed and continue to contribute directly to the circulation of Himalayan, Tibetan, and Inner Asian visual and material culture across the world.

Below are examples of objects paired with the colonial actions/expeditions during which they were acquired.

The Boxer Rebellion (1860)

British Younghusband invasion/expedition into Tibet (1903-04)

Pyotr Kuzmich Kozlov’s expedition/excavation at Khara-khoto (1907-09)

Aurel Stein’s field mission to Dunhuang (1907)

Sven Hedin’s expeditions to Central Asia (1893-1935)

Extracting these objects from their original contexts and presenting them in the visual order of museums led to the erasure of indigenous aesthetic sensibilities and knowledge practices, which were supplanted by aesthetic lenses produced by colonial hierarchies of knowledge, upholding the dominant narratives of empires and nation-building projects. However, even under such conditions of domination, Tibetan, Himalayan, and Inner Asian communities have articulated powerful aesthetic visions of negotiation, resistance, and subversion (see examples in images below) that contest the asymmetrical power relations engendered by empire and colonialism.

For more on empires, visit Project Himalayan Art’s Kingdoms and Empires map narrative.