Colony

Abstract

‘Colony’ and ‘colonialism’ have been identified by a distinguished medievalist as ‘two of the most dangerous concepts in historical writing’. Should medievalists then simply eschew the term? This chapter argues that discarding ‘colony’ as an analytical category would be mistaken. The challenge for the medievalist is, rather, to recover the underlying concepts in the absence of the word. Drawing on evidence from England’s late-medieval dominions, this chapter explores the language of plantation, cultivation, and edification which described ‘the colonial’ in the Middle Ages. The chapter argues that this medieval vocabulary was still familiar to England’s sixteenth-century humanists, who merged it with the Roman language of colonia to formulate the first explicit statements of ‘colonial theory’.