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Document Details :

Title: Colonies - Colonisation - Colonialism
Subtitle: A Typological Reappraisal
Author(s): SOMMER, Michael
Journal: Ancient West & East
Volume: 10    Date: 2011   
Pages: 183-193
DOI: 10.2143/AWE.10.0.2141818

Abstract :
Colonies, colonisation and, in particular, colonialism are concepts carrying heavy ideological subtexts – yet they loom over the current debate about the dynamism of the Iron Age Mediterranean. Forty years after M.I. Finley’s ‘attempt at a typology’, this paper tries to thin out the terminological jungle: by employing cross-cultural historical comparison, it demonstrates how complex and manifold seemingly straightforward ideal types are; and that ‘colonies’ and ‘colonialism’ in the classical period of European imperialism were altogether different from the settlements Greeks and Phoenicians established in their Mediterranean diasporas.

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