Theories on European Dominance and Indigenous Displacement

Sangaralingam Ramesh ()
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Sangaralingam Ramesh: University College London and University of Oxford

Chapter 6 in The Political Economy of the Indigenous Peoples of the World, Volume II, 2026, pp 259-312 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This chapter reconsiders the principal explanations advanced for European global dominance and Indigenous displacement, offering a critical assessment of the theories that have shaped modern understandings of conquest, expansion, and empire. It rejects racial, civilizational, and triumphalist narratives that portray European ascendancy as the natural outcome of cultural superiority, and instead situates imperial expansion within contingent processes of capitalist accumulation, colonial extraction, military adaptation, and ideological legitimation. The chapter surveys technological, geographic, institutional, and economic interpretations of European power while exposing their tendency to marginalize Indigenous agency and to misrepresent Indigenous societies as static, deficient, or pre-political. Against these accounts, it emphasizes the complexity of Indigenous governance, agriculture, mobility, ecological management, and knowledge systems, showing that displacement resulted not from incapacity but from violent encounters structured by disease, coercion, legal exclusion, and resource appropriation. The analysis also engages materialist and world-systems perspectives, acknowledging their explanatory force while arguing that they remain incomplete without Indigenous historical and cosmological understandings of land, continuity, and resistance. The chapter ultimately calls for a decolonized historiography that restores Indigenous peoples to the centre of global history and rejects narratives that naturalize European dominance as inevitable, deserved, or historically neutral.

Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-032-24129-0_6

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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-24129-0_6

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