The colony

As European empires spread across the world in the nineteenth century, the meanings and applications of the word ‘colony’ multiplied. Etymologically colony was an agricultural metaphor, from the Latin colere to till, and colonus a husbandman. Thus colonia, a colony, meant an estate in the country or a rural settlement. It was then applied to the new cities that settlers came to from Rome, and the imperial associations of this usage were extended in Greek where the word also had the sense of civilising barbarous people. There is an implicit contrast here between the colonist and the townsperson, or civis, from which the word civilisation derives. A civis, unlike a colonist, is someone whose home does not move. In the early modern period colonies were made by sending people to settle and plant; thus in Hobbes's Leviathan, colonies are sent from England to plant Virginia. Swift, in Gulliver's Travels, offers perhaps the first postcolonial usage of the word:

The connection between a parent state and a new settlement is integral to all these usages, and it is the settler who establishes and maintains this relation.