Today for the first time I heard the phrase ‘reverse colonialism’. This refers to the observation that after centuries of Eurocentric cultures exploiting the rest of the world for their own economic gain, the rest of the world is – de facto – colonizing these first world countries back. England is filling up with people from India, France is becoming populated by Muslims who bring their own culture with them, and so on and so on, in Germany, Holland, and various other nations that have become wealthy over the centuries with the assistance of a somewhat exploitive world economic order.
I’m not sure how fair is this description of the current state of affairs, but even the concept itself contains a wicked irony. The exploited taking over the identity of the exploiter, the tables turned.
I realize that this is nothing new. Rome is now populated by its formerly subjugated peoples, and the ancient Greeks were long ago displaced by the progeny of Alexander’s one-time conquests.
Perhaps this is siimply an inevitable narrative throughout human history, destined to repeat itself forever: In the end, colonialism always flows both ways.
Ken
As you can tell, I am just now reading your blog, going all the way back into time. As you say, this is nothing new. The Roman Republic & Empire both accomodated formerly conquered peoples, and there were vast numbers of them in Rome. And there was a lot of discussion about whether formerly pure Roman values were being debased by these eastern influences. In fact you can still “see” a harmonic on that topic when you realize that Augustus used that theme against Marc Antony in propaganda against him by saying that he had been corrupted by Cleopatra and the decadent east. (It was all propaganda, but an effective theme in context of that struggle).
In other words,the first example of Neocolonialism was the Greco-Roman World,where Rome subjugated their former mentors,the Greeks.