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SEE ALSO Accountability, Data Auditing; Cicero's Creed;Engineering Ethics: Overview; Profession and Profes-sionalism; Sociological Ethics.

BIBL IOGRAPHY

Anderson, Ronald E. 1994. “The ACM Code of Ethics: History,Process, and Implications.” In Social Issues in Computing:Putting Computing in Its Place, edited by Chuck Huff andThomas Finholt, 48–71. New York: McGraw-Hill.An excellent (and rare) description of the writing of a code of ethics in amajor technological organization (with lots of details about the give-and-take involved).

Baker, Robert B., Arthur L. Caplan, Linda L. Emanuel, andStephen R. Latham, eds. 1999. The American Medical EthicsRevolution: How the AMA’s Code of Ethics Has TransformedPhysicians’ Relationship to Patients, Professionals, and Society.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.An excellent resource for understanding the writing of what is (arguably)the first code of ethics governing a technological profession.

Berleur, Jacques, and Marie d’Udekem-Gevers. 2001. “Codes ofEthics: Conduct for Computer Societies: The Experience ofIFIP.” In Technology and Ethics: A European Quest forResponsible Engineering, edited by Philippe Goujon andBertrand Hériard Dubreuil, 327–350. Leuven, Belgium:Peeters.Describes the failure of a major international organization to adopt a codeof ethics, apparently because of worries about enforceability (a goodexample of how theoretical misunderstanding of ethics can undermineattempts to improve a profession’s ethics).

Coady, Margaret, and Sidney Bloch, eds. 1996. Codes of Ethics andthe Professions. Victoria, Australia: Melbourne University Press.A good collection of essays providing a benchmark for current philosophicalunderstanding of codes of ethics in professions.

Davis, Michael. 2002. Profession, Code, and Ethics. Aldershot, UK:Ashgate.A major challenge to the current philosophical (and sociological)understanding of professions, with engineering (along with law and police)as one of the three major professions studied.

Davis, Michael. 2007. “Eighteen Rules for Writing a Code ofProfessional Ethics.” Science and Engineering Ethics 13 (2):171–189.A practical guide for writing a code of ethics.

Illinois Institute of Technology. Center for the Study of Ethics inthe Professions. 2013. “Codes of Ethics Collections.” AccessedJuly 10, 2013. Available from http://ethics.iit.edu/research/codes-ethics-collectionAn enormous collection of codes of ethics, by far the largest available online.All codes cited in this entry can be found at this site.

Ladd, John. 1980. “The Quest for a Code of ProfessionalEthics: An Intellectual and Moral Confusion.” In AAASProfessional Ethics Project: Professional Ethics Activities in theScientific and Engineering Societies, edited by Rosemary Chalk,Mark S. Frankel, and Sallie Birket Chafer, 154–159.Washington, DC: American Association for the Advancementof Science.A classic challenge to the very idea of a code of ethics.

Luegenbiehl, Heinz C. 1983. “Codes of Ethics and the MoralEducation of Engineers.” Business and Professional EthicsJournal 2 (4): 41–61, 63–66.An important work on the educational uses of codes of ethics, as well as theclassic statement of the distinction between rules and guidelines.

National Society of Professional Engineers. 2007. “Code of Ethicsfor Engineers.” Available from http://www.nspe.org/resources/pdfs/Ethics/CodeofEthics/Code-2007-July.pdf

Michael DavisRevised by Davis

COLONIALISM ANDPOSTCOLONIALISMColonialism, understood provisionally as the Europeanannexation and administration of lands and populationsin the Americas, Africa, and Asia, has been intertwinedwith science, technology, and ethics since the Renaissance.Certainly one prelude to colonial expansion was theEuropean acquisition of military and navigational tech-nologies superior to those found on other continents. Butthe colonial experience also had a formative impact on thenascent European science, because it permitted theregion’s scholars to come into contact with newenvironments and data and provided access to alternativesystems of knowledge developed by other cultures. In fact,the requirement of controlling and cataloging colonialpopulations and resources led to the creation of newdisciplines in the social sciences, such as ethnography,linguistics, and archaeology. Moreover, this impact hascontinued into the early twenty-first century, as a newscientific discipline, ecology, has found inspiration in thepractices of non-Western precolonial cultures and in thenineteenth-century British and French “colonial conser-vationism” that attempted to deal with the degradationcaused by the exploitation of recently acquired environ-ments and was “able to foresee, with remarkable precision,the apparently unmanageable environmental problems oftoday” (Grove 1995, 12).

Indeed, colonialism had an indirect, though pro-found, impact on European culture. In reaction to thefrequently genocidal military tactics used by Europeansand the exploitation of indigenous populations thatcharacterized the administration of colonies, few, if any,other historical events did more to promote the extensionof ethics into the political, social, and legal spheres. Inpolitics, such central contemporary concepts as humanrights, representative democracy, and socialism developed,at least in part, as reactions to the brutality of the processof colonization and to the contact with non-Europeancultures and their political systems. Moreover,

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colonialism, by transferring enormous amounts of goldand silver from the Americas to Europe during thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries, thereby permittingthe development of a money economy, may be seen as afactor that contributed to the development of bothcapitalism and the science that studies it, economics. TheEuropean colonization of Africa, the Americas, and Asia isthus one of the founding experiences of modernity, itsimpact felt on every aspect of contemporary life, even incountries that did not embark on colonial adventures.

CONCEPTUAL ISSUES

Despite its importance, however, any attempt to definecolonialism in a manner that goes beyond the mererecounting of a set of historical facts runs into a seriesof conceptual problems. The difficulty in definingcolonialism and related concepts—such as imperialism,anticolonialism, neocolonialism, or even postcolonialism—is that they can be interpreted as linked to socialphenomena existing since antiquity throughout theworld. Yet it is customary to see colonialism as bounded,on the one hand, by a European expansion that began inthe fifteenth century with the Portuguese and Spanishforays into Africa and the Americas and, on the other, bythe decolonization of Asia and Africa, a process thatconcluded in 1975 with the independence of the lastPortuguese dominions, Mozambique and Angola. Al-though the United Nations reported that, as of 2012,there were still sixteen “non-self-governing territories,”colonialism, as customarily defined, is no longer at thecore of the world economy, and the impetus for self-governance, while not fully realized, concerns smallerpopulations and areas.

These temporal boundaries are justified by a centraldifference between classical and modern empires. In thelatter, colonization was characterized not only by theconquest of a territory and its population, or by theextraction of monetary, human, or material resources, aswas the case in antiquity, but also by a thoroughrestructuring of the colonial economy for the benefit ofthe economic interests of the metropolis. The securing ofraw materials to be used exclusively by imperial industriesor the restrictions placed on the production of goods inthe colonies in order to transform them into exclusivemarkets for metropolitan products are examples of suchrestructuring.

In addition to reshaping economic structures,modern colonialism also attempted to change the culturesof the populations conquered. The successful catechiza-tion of Latin America in the sixteenth century, despite thefrequently syncretic character of the resulting religion(that is, its being a combination of originally Amerindianand European beliefs), is a case in point. In fact, this

cultural change was often a prerequisite for the economicexploitation of the acquired territories, because traditionallabor patterns and economic structures had to betransformed according to the economic requirements ofEuropean industries and settlers. Colonialism’s practicalemphasis on the modification of the cultures of theconquered populations and the concomitant resistance ofthe latter, as well as the unavoidable hybrid identitiesgenerated by this encounter, have become key objects ofstudy for contemporary theorists.

But the difficulties to be found in conceptuallydelimiting colonialism remain implicit in such a descrip-tion. The most obvious problem is that processes ofcolonization and decolonization are not discrete andchronological. In fact, the first postcolonial societies in theAmericas arose before the second wave of Europeanimperialist expansion crested in the nineteenth century.Furthermore, as José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930)noted in the 1920s, colonial practices, institutions, andideologies did not disappear with formal independencebut frequently constituted the bases on which the newnations were built. Thus, it becomes possible to talk of aninternal colonialism present in politically independentnations in which cultural, racial, ethnic, religious,linguistic, or caste differences form the basis for theinstitutionalized economic exploitation of one group byanother. Then, moreover, there is the unique case of theUnited States: a postcolonial society that itself became afull-fledged colonial power in the second half of thenineteenth century through the annexation of PuertoRico, the Philippines, and Hawaii and that in thetwentieth century helped establish new patterns ofinternational domination and unequal resource flows.Given this inequality, it is possible to argue that currentinternational economic structures and relationshipsamong different national and regional economies consti-tute a continuation and development of colonialism ratherthan its abolition.

IMPERIAL DIFFERENCES

Critics have questioned the validity of the chronologyproposed above by distinguishing Spanish and Portuguesecolonialism, on one side, and the later French and Britishempires, on another. Unlike the more fully capitalistBritish or French colonial regimes, the earlier Iberianempires were frequently mercantilist and precapitalist,even medieval. While the former restructured the newcolonies’ economies so as to propel metropolitan capitalistgrowth, the latter colonial enterprises were based mainlyon the acquisition or extraction of directly marketableresources, such as gold or spices, and on the taxation ofnative and settler populations as direct sources of income.From this perspective, colonialism as a fully modern

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capitalist undertaking must be differentiated from earlierIberian empire building. In fact, critics have argued thatterms such as colonialism, imperialism, or postcolonialism“evince the history of British colonial/imperial involve-ment with Ireland, India, and South Africa” and that theiruse leads to the “(mis)understanding and (mis)labeling ofthe so-called colonial American situation” (Klor de Alva1995, 264). Thus, mainstream analyses of colonialismwould be applicable only to the European empires built inAsia and Africa during the eighteenth and particularly thenineteenth centuries.

A concept frequently used to separate earlier Iberianand later colonialisms is that of imperialism. In 1917Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924), arguably the mostinfluential critic of imperialism, claimed that it constitut-ed “the monopoly stage of capitalism.” For him, colonialexpansion responded to the needs of monopolistic financecapital, which he believed to be the hegemonic sector in amodern economy, to find a “guarantee against allcontingencies in the struggle against competitors” byensuring access to markets and resources (Lenin 1974,260). Because Lenin saw finance capital as firmlynational, imperialism necessarily led to war as the colonialpowers attempted to acquire “precapitalist” areas, toforcibly take over each other’s colonies or even to try togain access to the natural resources located in Europe.(World War I [1914–1918] was Lenin’s prime exampleof how the hegemony of financial monopoly capitalinvariably led to war.)

Critics have noted, however, that one can free Lenin’sarguments from his national, political, and militaryframework. In this way it becomes possible to speak ofa US imperialism that is no longer based on the formalpossession of colonies, as Harry Magdoff (1969) firstargued; or of a neocolonialism in which first world nationsuse international economic, political, and cultural struc-tures and institutions to maintain their political andeconomic control over nominally independent nations, asthe Ghanaian independence leader Kwame Nkrumah(1909–1972) proposed in 1965. In their 2000 bookEmpire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have taken thisloosening of the ties between economic relations and thenational sphere to its ultimate conclusion. For them,globalization has led to the creation of a true empire ofcapital in which unequal flows of resources are organizedby means of a “decentered and deterritorializing apparatusof rule” that no longer has a geographically defineddirection (Hardt and Negri 2000, xii). While inequality isseen as probably growing, the concept of imperialism,based on notions of metropolises and colonies, as well asits dependency-theory derivation of center and periphery,is, therefore, obsolete.

Paradoxically, this postmodern interpretation ofempire has been proposed at precisely the moment when

the United States has acquired unparalleled economic,military, and technological superiority and has claimed theright to use military force to achieve its goals, exercisingthis “right” first in Afghanistan (2001) and then in Iraq(2003). Indeed, critics as well as supporters of contempo-rary US foreign policy frequently describe it as imperial.Thus, current discussions of imperialism and empirefrequently attempt to elucidate the role played by theUnited States in international economic inequalities. Forinstance, Aijaz Ahmad (2000) argues “what we actuallyhave is, finally, for the first time in history, a globalisedempire of capital itself, in all its nakedness, in which theUnited States imperium plays the dominant role,financially, militarily, institutionally, ideologically.”Whether this new globalized capitalism is a dramaticallynew stage in capitalism that invalidates earlier analyseswhether Marxist or not, as Hardt and Negri argue, orsimply an intensification and elaboration of the basic traitsof capitalism and imperialism—as analyzed by Karl Marx(1818–1883) and Lenin—as Ahmad and others propose,is a matter of disagreement.

The standard chronology of colonialism has also beenput into question by arguments that in order tounderstand European colonization it is necessary toanalyze its underlying discursive and ideological under-pinnings. Thus, in his 1978 book Orientalism, arguablythe foundational text of postcolonial studies, Edward W.Said (1935–2003) traces the construction of the “Orient”back to early modern and even Greek sources, analyzes itsinfluence on the self-construction of the “West,” andnotes how this European production of knowledgeaffected colonialist practice in the region. From a relatedperspective, Nelson Manrique (1993) has emphasized themanner in which the mind-set formed by seven hundredyears of contradictory interaction among Christians,Muslims, and Jews was transplanted by the Spanishconquistadores to very different American realities.According to these and related studies, the conventionalchronology of European colonialism leads only to thedistortion, even the mutilation, of history.

Given these difficulties in establishing a clearlybounded definition of colonialism and related terms,these must be seen as constituting a semantic field inwhich conceptual boundaries blur into one another and inwhich historical frameworks, though necessary, necessarilybreak down. But underlying the semantic field there existsa continuum of unequal and exploitative economic, social,and political phenomena that directly affects the relation-ships among science and technology and has ethicalconsequences that have yet to be fully explored.

COLONIALISM AS TURNING POINT

Iberian colonialism nevertheless signaled a turning pointin world history. Not only did European power and

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culture begin its process of expansion and impositionthroughout lands and populations unknown by the West,but also new unequal flows of resources favoring colonialpowers were for the first time established on a planetaryscale. British and French colonialism, even contemporaryinternational trade relations, are subsequent capitalistdevelopments within this unequal planetary framework.Furthermore, the pivotal role played by the Iberianempires is evidenced by the way they developed two of thecentral institutions characteristic of eighteenth- andnineteenth-century colonialism and beyond—slavery andthe plantation system—as well as the ultimate ideologicalbasis on which colonialism would be built: racism. As theSpanish philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1490?–1572 or 1573) argued, the colonization of the Americasand the exploitation of the Amerindians was justifiedbecause these were “as inferior to Spaniards as children areto adults and women to men … and there being betweenthem [Amerindians and Spaniards] as much difference asthere is between … monkeys and men” (Sepúlveda 1951[1547], 33). Although the mixing of races was morefrequent in Iberian colonies than in those of France orEngland, it was the product of necessity, given the limitednumber of women who traveled with the conquistadores,and was not incompatible with the development ofintricate racial hierarchies that became legacies of theSpanish and Portuguese empires. Indeed, the scientificracialism of the nineteenth century would ground asimilar discourse, not on philosophical and religiousreasons, as Sepúlveda did, but on (pseudo)scientific ones.

Colonialism is thus more than a set of institutions orpractices that permit the establishment and maintenanceof unequal economic exchanges among regions orcountries. Underlying colonial economic relations andinstitutions are evolving beliefs or ideologies that makepossible the permanence and reproduction of colonialism.For instance, the Spanish conquistadores saw even theirmost brutal actions justified by their role in spreading theCatholic religion. It is reported that Hernán Cortés(1485–1547), the conqueror of Mexico, claimed that “themain reason why we came … is to praise and preach thefaith of Christ, even if together with this we can achievehonor and profit” (quoted in Zavala 1972, 25). In asimilar vein, the British and French empires found theirjustification in supposedly bringing civilization to “primi-tive” regions of the world.

Western culture is thus permeated by pseudorationaljustifications of racial hierarchies, which would seem toground colonialism on nature. Even the usually skepticalDavid Hume (1711–1776) accepted colonial racialhierarchies when he states in his 1752 essay “On NationalCharacteristics” that he considered “the Negroes and ingeneral all other species of men (for there are four or fivedifferent kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites.

There never was a civilized nation of any othercomplexion than white, nor even any individual eminenteither in action or speculation” (Hume 1994 [1752], 86).Writing about “[John] Locke, Hume, and empiricism,”Said has argued “that there is an explicit connection inthese classic writers between their philosophic doctrines[and] racial theory, justifications of slavery [and] argu-ments for colonial exploitation” (Said 1978, 13). Othercanonic names are easily added to that of Hume, andmany other disciplines to that of philosophy, fromevolutionary biology—which, despite the misgivings ofCharles Darwin (1809–1882), ended up applying itsnotions of competition to humanity—to historicallinguistics, which helped provide a pseudoscientific basisfor the racist celebration of the so-called Aryan race.

ANTICOLONIALISM

Yet just as colonialism found occasional supporters amongits subjects in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, theEuropean reaction to colonialism was not homogeneous.There was an important streak of anticolonial thought andaction in Europe as long as colonies existed, and this tooleft an imprint on Western thought. Indeed, colonialismnot only permeated Western culture, it also establishedthe framework within which anticolonialist thought andaction frequently developed. Because of the central roleplayed by Catholicism in the justification of Spanishexpansion, the anticolonialist reaction in sixteenth-centurySpain used the intellectual tools provided by the church.Thus, Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566), the greatestcritic of the Spanish conquest, used biblical exegesis,scholastic philosophy, canonic law, historiography, andhis own and others’ eyewitness accounts to convince theSpanish court and the church of the humanity of theNative American populations and to achieve partialrecognition of their rights. In fact, the arguments of LasCasas and other like-minded contemporary critics ofcolonialism, such as Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1486–1546),are the seeds from which contemporary notions of humanrights and international law have sprung. But Las Casasdid not deny the need to evangelize Native Americans orfail to acknowledge the sovereignty of the Spanishmonarchy over them, even as he vindicated their rightto self-government and to be treated as human beings.

Even texts produced in the Americas that aregenerally taken to be expressions of indigenous cultures,such as the Popol Vuh, an anonymous seventeenth-century compilation of Meso-American myths, or theAndean chronicler Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Elprimer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (The first newchronicle and good government), also finished in the earlyseventeenth century, were intellectually framed byCatholicism. While the Popol Vuh uses Latin script to

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reconstruct the Mayan hieroglyphic books destroyedduring the Spanish catechization, and can, therefore, beconsidered an act of absolute resistance to the Spanishconquest, its anonymous author describes the text aswritten “in Christendom.” Although Guaman Poma deAyala’s very title implies criticism of Spanish rule, it is ahybrid text in which traditional Andean structures, such asthe hanan/hurin (upper/masculine–lower/feminine) bina-ry, are maintained while acknowledging Catholicism andincorporating into its narrative idiosyncratic versions ofbiblical stories.

This dependence on European thought, even onsome of the basic presuppositions of colonialism itself, willbe continued by most oppositional movements and textsproduced after the first moment of resistance to Europeaninvasion. For instance, while for Lenin imperialism isrooted in the nation and in national capital, anti-imperialmovements will likewise be national movements strug-gling to achieve independence. If the spread of “civiliza-tion” is seen in the nineteenth century as validatingcolonial expansion, the Cuban anticolonial activist,revolutionary, and scholar José Martí (1853–1895), inhis classic essay “Our America,” proposed the establish-ment of the “American University,” in which adecolonized curriculum would, for example, privilegethe Incas and not the Greeks as the foundation of culture.Even the appeal of Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) tononviolence as the basis of the struggle against colonialoppression, while rooted in his reading of the BhagavadGita, is also a reinterpretation of principles first proposedby Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) and developed byLeo Tolstoy (1828–1910), with whom the great Indianleader corresponded.

A similar appropriation and modification of Westerndiscourse can be found in twentieth-century anticoloni-alism’s relationship with Marxism, even if in this case, asin that of nonviolence, it is an oppositional rather than ahegemonic one that is being used. Thus, Mariátegui(2011, 130) argued that “[socialism] must be a heroiccreation. We have to give life to an Indo-Americansocialism reflecting our own reality and in our ownlanguage.” And this attempt at translating Marxism intolocal cultural traditions was replicated throughout most ofthe colonial and neocolonial world, as authors as diverse asErnesto “Che” Guevara (1928–1967), Amilcar Cabral(1921–1973), and Mao Zedong (1893–1976) attemptedto create “socialisms” not only compatible with the socialand cultural conditions of Latin America, Lusophone(Portuguese-speaking) Africa, and China, respectively, butalso rooted in them. Precisely because of the importancegiven to local conditions, this anticolonial and nationalistMarxism was characterized by an emphasis on the culturaleffects of political actions, and vice versa. Although notcompletely ignored, culture and nation did not play

prominent positive roles in the works of classic Europeanrevolutionary authors, such as Marx, Friedrich Engels(1820–1895), and even Lenin. The subsequent preoccu-pation with culture is a link between anticolonial Marxismand postcolonialism, understood as a cultural and politicalcritique of the surviving colonial and developing neocolo-nial structures and discourses.

POSTCOLONIALISM

But questions remain regarding postcolonialism. Is thepost in postcolonialism merely a temporal marker? If so, allpostindependence literary and critical production in allformer colonies, regardless of whether they deal with orpromote cultural and structural decolonization, would bepostcolonial. Or is it a reference to those writings thatattempt to deal with the aftermath of colonialism, withthe social and cultural restructuring and healing necessaryafter the expulsion of the European colonists? In this casethe novels of James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) andeven those of Henry James (1843–1916), all of which, inone way or another, deal with the problem of establishinga US identity distinct from those of England and Europe,could be classified as “postcolonial.” In Latin America,several figures would qualify as postcolonial thinkers,including the nineteenth-century polymath Andrés Bello(1781–1865), with his didactic poetry praising and,therefore, promoting “tropical agriculture,” and hisattempt at modifying Spanish orthography so as to reflectSpanish American pronunciation; the Cuban scholarFernando Ortiz (1881–1969), producer of pioneeringstudies of the cultural hybridity characteristic of thecolonial and postcolonial experiences for which he coinedthe term transculturation; and, as well, the aforementionedMartí and Mariátegui, who among others, initiated in theregion the systematic criticism of neocolonialism, internalcolonialism, racism, and cultural dependence.

Or is the post in the term a not-so-implicit alignmentwith poststructuralism and postmodernism—that is, withthe anti-foundational philosophies developed by, amongothers, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Gilles Deleuze(1925–1995) and Félix Guatari (1930–1992), and MichelFoucault (1926–1984)? If so, despite the existence oftransitional figures such as Frantz Fanon, whose writingscombine anticolonial agitation, Marxism, French philoso-phy, and psychoanalysis, postcolonialism could be seen asopposed to Marxist and non-Marxist anticolonialism andto mainstream attempts at understanding and under-mining neocolonialism. From this anti-foundationalperspective, if the stress on cultural topics characteristicof anticolonial and postindependence fictional andtheoretical texts establishes a connection with postcoloni-alism, their frequent essentialism, occasional blindnesstoward gender hierarchies, and emphasis on politics and

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economics over constructions of subjectivity make them atbest flawed precursors. And from the point of view ofscholars who claim to be developing the perspectivesproposed by anticolonial theorists—Marxist or other-wise—postcolonialism can be interpreted as the directapplication of theories developed in Europe and theUnited States that disregard earlier local theorizations andmediations.

Regardless of how one understands its relationshipwith anticolonial thought, this postcolonialism as exem-plified by the works of Said, Homi K. Bhabha, andGayatri Chakravorty Spivak, among others, has generatedchallenging analyses of the role of gender within colonialand postcolonial institutions, of the political implicationsof hybridity and diaspora, of racism, and of theimportance of constructions of identity within colonial,neocolonial, and postcolonial situations. Moreover, it haspermitted the extension of its analyses of subjectivity andof heterogeneous social groupings to the colonial archive,permitting the elaboration of innovative historical recon-structions that go beyond the obsession with facts andevents of conventional historiography or the frequentlyexclusive preoccupation with classes and economicstructures characteristic of Marxism.

ASSESSMENT

The study of colonial and postcolonial structures andideologies is important because contemporary internationaleconomic and cultural relations and realities, rather thanbeing their negation, can be read as their continuation. Infact, contemporary American, African, and Asian nationalboundaries are part of the colonial inheritance. Theseborders, drawn according to purely administrative andpolitical criteria by the imperial powers without taking intoaccount cultural, ethnic, linguistic, or historical differencesamong the diverse populations thus brought together, havebeen a contributing factor to the ethnic and nationalviolence that have plagued postcolonial areas.

But international economic inequality is the mostegregious legacy of empire. The depth of this continuingdisparity is such that, according to the Food andAgriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations,of the 850 million people classified as undernourishedbetween 2006 and 2008, 839.4 million lived inpostcolonial areas (FAO 2011). A similar inequality,although undeniably less dramatic in its immediateconsequences, is present in the field of science andtechnology. For instance, Latin America holds only 0.2percent of all patents (Castro Díaz-Balart and Pérez Rojas2002). While this is the direct result of the countries ofthe so-called developing world investing only 0.3 percentto 0.5 percent of their gross domestic product in thefields of science and technology—in contrast, first world

countries set aside 2 percent to 5 percent for the samepurpose (Castro Díaz-Balart and Pérez Rojas 2002)—it isalso a consequence of the unequal manner in which thecontemporary global economy is structured, which trans-forms scientific and technological research into a luxury.Moreover, this low investment in science and technologyconstitutes a contributing factor to the perpetuation ofthis international inequality (Castro Díaz-Balart and PérezRojas 2002). Furthermore, colonialism and the continu-ing global inequality it created can be seen as determiningthe patterns of consumption of natural resources that haveplayed a central role in past and current exploitation andthe destruction of colonial and postcolonial environments.For instance, Richard P. Tucker (2000, 2) has noted thatthe United States, as a neocolonial power, has come “to beinseparably linked to the worldwide degradation of thebiosphere.” Thus, the inheritance of colonialism, de-scribed by the constellation of the heterogeneous termspostcolonialism, neocolonialism, or imperialism—in bothits territorialized and deterritorialized conceptualiza-tions—not only constitutes a central problematic in thefields of science and technology but also is at the core ofthe major ethical dilemmas faced by humanity in the earlytwenty-first century.

SEE ALSO Development Ethics; Globalization; IndustrialRevolution; Scientific Revolution.

BIBL IOGRAPHY

Adas, Michael. 1989. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science,Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press.A broad, comparative study of the history of European responses to thecultures of sub-Saharan Africa, India, and China that emphasizes the roleplayed by Western evaluations of technological differences.

Ahmad, Aijaz. 1992. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures.London: Verso.Ahmad, an Indian poet and literary critic, provides a stringent critique ofpostcolonial theory and a defense of the continuing relevance of Marxistanalysis to the understanding of colonial and neocolonial literatures,cultures, and politics.

Ahmad, Aijaz. 2000. “Globalisation: A Society of Aliens?”Frontline 17 (20). http://www.frontlineonnet.com/fl1720/17200490.htmIn this article, Ahmad provides a Marxist analysis of globalization.

Bello, Andrés. 1997. Selected Writings of Andrés Bello. Translatedby Frances M. López-Morillas. Edited by Iván Jaksić. NewYork: Oxford University Press.This is a selection of essays and didactic poetry by the most influentialnineteenth-century Spanish American intellectual of the independence andpostindependence periods.

Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London:Routledge. One of the key sources for the concept of hybridityin the humanities and social sciences.Bhabha analyzes the manner in which cultural mixture underminescolonial and postcolonial projects.

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Brockway, Lucile H. 1979. Science and Colonial Expansion: TheRole of the British Royal Botanic Gardens. New York: AcademicPress.Arguably the foundational text in the new literature of case studies on therelationship between Western science and colonialism.

Cabral, Amilcar. 1979. Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings.Translated by Michael Wolfers. New York: Monthly ReviewPress.In this collection of his writings, Cabral, the main leader of the strugglefor the independence of Guinea-Bissau, provides sophisticated Marxistanalyses of the roles played by culture and nationalism in anticolonialrevolutions.

Castro Díaz-Balart, Fidel, and Hugo Pérez Rojas. 2002.“Globalization, Science, and Development.” Perspectives onGlobal Development and Technology 1 (3–4): 322–339.A study of contemporary international inequalities in scientific researchand their impact on development.

Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated byConstance Farrington. New York: Grove Press.Fanon, at the time deeply involved in the struggle for Algerianindependence, applies insights from psychoanalysis, Sartrean existentialism,and Marxism to the colonial situation in Africa. Originally published1961.

Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated byCharles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press.In this book, Fanon, a trained psychoanalyst, studies the influence ofcolonialism on black colonial subjects. Originally published 1954.

Fishlock, Trevor. 2004. Conquerors of Time: Exploration andInvention in the Age of Daring. London: John Murray.Extended narrative stressing how technological inventiveness was oftenstimulated by problems encountered in colonial settings.

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).2011. The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2011. Rome:Author. http://www.fao.org/docrep/014/i2330e/i2330e.pdf

Gandhi, Mahatma. 1983. The Essential Gandhi: His Life, Work,and Ideas; An Anthology. Edited by Louis Fischer. New York:Vintage Books.Useful collection of essays, speeches, and interviews by the spiritual leader ofIndia’s independence movement.

Grove, Richard H. 1995. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion,Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism,1600–1860. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Argues that modern notions of ecology are heavily dependent on the colonialexperience, and especially professional scientists working in the Dutch,French, and British colonies.

Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe. 1978. Letter to a King: A PeruvianChief’s Account of Life under the Incas and under Spanish Rule.Edited and translated by Christopher Dilke. New York:Dutton. Finished circa 1615 and known in its original Spanishlanguage as El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno [The firstnew chronicle and good government]. (Spanish version isavailable from http://www.kb.dk/elib/mss/poma/)Written by a regional noble, this early seventeenth-centuryillustrated chronicle is not only the most thorough expression of theindigenous perspective on the conquest of Peru, but its 398 drawingsprovide an invaluable visual record of life during the first years ofthe colony.

Guevara, Ernesto “Che.” 1997. Che Guevara Reader: Writings byErnesto Che Guevara on Guerrilla Strategy, Politics, andRevolution. Edited by David Deutschmann. Melbourne,Australia: Ocean Press.Comprehensive selection of essays and speeches by the Argentine-born leaderof the Cuban revolution who became the international symbol for anti-imperialist and anticapitalist struggles.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press.Influential attempt to apply poststructuralist theories to the analysis ofcontemporary international economic reality.

Hume, David. 1994. “On National Characteristics.” In PoliticalEssays, edited by Knud Haakonssen, 78–92. Cambridge, UK:Cambridge University Press.This essay exhibits most clearly the racist ideas held by the eminentempiricist philosopher.

Johansen, Bruce E. 1982. Forgotten Founders: Benjamin Franklin,the Iroquois, and the Rationale for the American Revolution.Ipswich, MA: Gambit.Study of the influence of Iroquois political institutions on those of theUnited States.

Klor de Alva, Jorge. 1995. “The Postcolonization of the (Latin)American Experience: A Reconsideration of ‘Colonialism,’‘Postcolonialism,’ and ‘Mestizaje.’” In After Colonialism:Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, edited byGyan Prakash, 241–275. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UniversityPress.Analysis of the difficulties found in the application of postcolonial theory tothe Latin American colonial experience.

Las Casas, Bartolomé de. 1992. A Short Account of the Destructionof the Indies. Edited and translated by Nigel Griffin. London:Penguin. Originally published 1552 in Spanish as Brevísimarelación de la destrucción de las Indias.A devastating account of the genocide of the Amerindians by the Spanishconquistadores written by the foremost sixteenth-century defender ofindigenous rights.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. 1974. “Imperialism, the Highest Stage ofCapitalism.” In Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 22, edited byGeorge Hanna, translated by Yuri Sdobnikov, 185–304.Moscow: Progress Publishers. Originally published 1917 inGerman.Classic Marxist analysis of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-centuryimperialism.

Loomba, Ania. 2005. Colonialism-Postcolonialism. 2nd ed. Lon-don: Routledge.Careful introduction to the history of colonialism and its contemporaryincarnations and to the different theoretical approaches to the topic.

Magdoff, Harry 1969. The Age of Imperialism: The Economics ofU.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Monthly Review Press.Collection of essays that analyze from an economic perspective how USimperialism works.

Manrique, Nelson. 1993. Vinieron los sarracenos: El universomental de la conquista de América [The Saracens arrived: Themental universe of the conquest of America]. Lima: Desco.Well-documented reconstruction of the evolution of the “mental world” ofmedieval Spain that helped determine the attitudes and actions of theSpanish conquistadores in the New World.

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Mao Zedong. 1970. Mao Papers, Anthology, and Bibliography.Edited by Jerome Ch’en. London: Oxford University Press.Collection of some of the Chinese revolutionary’s most influential essays andspeeches.

Mariátegui, José Carlos. 1971. Seven Interpretive Essays onPeruvian Reality. Translated by Marjory Urquidi. Austin:University of Texas Press. Originally published 1928 inSpanish. Foundational text of Latin American Marxism.It studies Peru’s history, social and economic structures, and cultural topicsfrom a heterodox perspective; also influenced by Georges Sorel, FriedrichNietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.

Mariátegui, José Carlos. 2011. José Carlos Mariátegui: AnAnthology. Edited and translated by Harry Vanden and MarcBecker. New York: Monthly Review Press.A collection of essays on political and cultural topics written by thePeruvian Marxist in the 1920s.

Martí, José. “Our America.” 2002. In José Martí: Selected Writings,edited and translated by Esther Allen, 288–296. New York:Penguin.Originally published 1881 in Spanish as “Nuestra América.” Influentialanti-imperialist tract written by the great poet and martyr of Cuba’sindependence.

Nkrumah, Kwame. 1965. Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage ofImperialism. London: Nelson.Analysis of the manner in which political independence does not necessarilylead to economic independence.

Ortiz, Fernando. 1995. Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar.Translated by Harriet de Onís. Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press. Originally published 1940 in Spanish.By means of a study of the histories of the tobacco and sugar industries inCuba, Ortiz provides the foundational study of cultural contact in Cubaand the Caribbean.

Reingold, Nathan, and Marc Rothenberg, eds. 1987. ScientificColonialism: A Cross-Cultural Comparison. Washington, DC:Smithsonian Institution Press.The proceedings of an Australian conference that studies the role played bycolonialism in stimulating the development of Western science.

Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon.One of the foundational texts in postcolonial theory. Studies the discursiveformation of the notion of the Orient and its distorting effect on colonialand contemporary policies and analyses.

Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de. 1951. Demócrates segundo; o, De lasjustas causas de la guerra contra los indios [The secondDemócrates; or, Of the just causes for the war against theIndians]. Edited by Ángel Losada. Madrid: Instituto Franciscode Vitoria. Justification of the conquest originally written in1547 by Las Casas’s main ideological rival and one of Spain’sforemost Renaissance Aristotelians.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1996. The Spivak Reader: SelectedWorks of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Edited by Donna Landryand Gerald MacLean. New York: Routledge.A collection of essays informed by poststructuralism and feminism on postcolonialliterature and history, as well as on other theoretical and cultural topics.

Tedlock, Dennis, trans. 1996. Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of theDawn of Life. Rev. ed. New York: Simon and Schuster.A collection of Maya creation myths written shortly after the conquest by ananonymous indigenous author.

Tucker, Richard P. 2000. Insatiable Appetite: The United Statesand the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World. Berkeley:University of California Press.An extended analysis of the negative impact of the United States as aneocolonial power on the world’s environment.

United Nations. 2013. “The United Nations and Decoloniza-tion.” Accessed July 9, 2013. http://www.un.org/en/decolonization/

Young, Robert J. C. 2001. Postcolonialism: An HistoricalIntroduction. Oxford: Blackwell.Good overview that emphasizes the links between anticolonial andpostcolonial theories.

Zavala, Silvio Arturo. 1972. La filosofía política en la conquista deAmérica [Political philosophy in the conquest of America].Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Originallypublished 1947.Analysis of the philosophical and political debates in Spain andthe Americas on the rights of Amerindians that emphasizes their links tothe development of modern notions of democracy and human rights.

Juan E. De CastroRevised by De Castro

COLUMBIA ACCIDENTSEE Space Shuttles Challenger and Columbia Accidents.

COMMON HERITAGE PRINCIPLEThe common heritage principle (CHP)—also known asthe common heritage of mankind or common heritageof humanity principle—as it was presented to theUnited Nations General Assembly in various declara-tions and treaties, and as it is understood in the twenty-first century, affirms that the natural resources of thedeep seabed and of outer space are held in common byall nations, and should be distributed equitably forthe benefit of all humankind. Specifically, the CHP ofthe 1979 Treaty Governing the Activities of Stateson the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (MoonTreaty), refers to the equitable sharing of outer spaceresources; the nonappropriation of in-place resources,particularly with regard to outer space mining activities;and the institution of an international regime tosupervise commercial activities in space.

The CHP was presented with the understanding thatit was crucial to plan for future exploration and uses ofthese important regions in order not only to ensure anequitable distribution of their natural resources but toprevent conflicts among nations as have occurred during

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