Six domains a colonial regime reaches into
Who named what: Eric Wolf (Europe and the People Without History, 1982) showed that no society studied by anthropologists was ever outside world history. Immanuel Wallerstein (1974) named the core and periphery of a single world economy. Edward Said (Orientalism, 1978) traced how describing a people became a way of governing them, and Bernard Cohn (1996) catalogued the census, the map, the survey and the museum as instruments of rule. Johannes Fabian (Time and the Other, 1983) named the denial of coevalness — writing about living people in a timeless present tense, as though they occupied an earlier stage of history rather than the same moment as the writer.
A word about words. The nineteenth-century ladder of savagery → barbarism → civilisation came from Lewis Henry Morgan (1877) and E. B. Tylor (1871); James Frazer (The Golden Bough, 1890) ranked magic below religion below science, all of it written from an armchair using other people’s reports. That scheme supplied colonialism with its justification. Franz Boas dismantled it — arguing each culture must be understood in its own historical terms — and this is where cultural relativism comes from. The societies on this page are not earlier versions of Europe. They are contemporaries who were invaded.