The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (47 page)

The policy and practice of a strong power extending its control territorially over a weaker nation or people. Originally the Latin
colonia
simply meant a country estate. But already in classical Latin it acquired the meaning of such an estate deliberately settled among foreigners. This sort of colonization was commonplace in the classical Mediterranean and in medieval Europe. Medieval and early modern English governments colonized both Wales and Ireland in this classical sense, intending the English farmers to defend English rule against the hostile Welsh or Irish. The pattern of settlement in, for instance, the west of Ulster reflects this to the present day, with Protestant ‘colonial settlers’ planted amongst the native Catholics. In an influential book of the same title, Michael Hechter (1975) has examined the
Internal Colonialism
of the British Isles, claiming that peripheral regions were internal colonies of England.
But ‘colonial’ must be in distancing quotation marks because, where such colonization occurred a long time ago, the descendants of the settlers feel themselves as much part of the territory as those whose ancestors they displaced (in South Africa, for instance). Colonialism is more often thought of as an attribute of the late-nineteenth-century imperialists who conquered large tracts of the globe to find themselves ruling, in Rudyard Kipling's phrase, ‘new-caught, sullen peoples, | Half-devil and half-child’ (
The White Man's Burden
). It is usually used pejoratively to denote an unwarranted sense of racial superiority and the set of attitudes, beliefs, and practices that sprang from this sense. It has been often argued that racism and xenophobia are colonialism brought home.

 
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Literally, a small group of people to whom a larger group has delegated the power to act or formulate recommendations. In ordinary usage, however, a committee is not always a subgroup of a larger one (‘the Committee of 100’ was a free-standing group in
CND
in the 1960s, for instance), and a committee may be regarded as any small group of voters ( see
Black
).

 
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Legislative committees are normally restricted in their membership, whereas all members are entitled to participate when a legislature meets as a committee of the whole. This device is extensively used in the United States House of Representatives (although not in the Senate) as a means of expediting legislative business. The proceedings are chaired by an appointee of the Speaker, formal rules are suspended, and a quorum of only 100 is required instead of the 218 otherwise needed. At Westminster committees of the whole have had different purposes; they have been used for the discussion of matters of especial importance where it is thought that any member should, in principle, be allowed to participate. Thus for centuries prior to procedural changes in the 1960s all bills authorizing taxation or expenditure were first considered by the House of Commons sitting as a committee of the whole. In 1993, the committee stage of the Maastricht bill was dealt with under this procedure.
DM 

 
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In the UK Parliament, each bill which reaches this stage is examined clause by clause and amended by a committee, usually a standing committee of about twenty MPs who form a microcosm of the party composition of the house. For extremely important bills the entire House may act as the committee ( See also
committee of the whole
; bill). In the United States, congressional committees have more independence.

 
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An idea added into the first chapter of the second edition of
Marx's
Capital
, but not present in the first edition. In general, the analysis of the commodity is held to reveal the microscopic anatomy of bourgeois society, and also to show that capitalist wealth is always bound to appear as commodities. However, according to Marx, the mystical or fetishistic characters of these commodities does not lie in their use-value but in the fact that they are labour products, such that definite social relations between men assume the fantastic and alienated form of a relationship between things. Here fetishism is taken to be involved whenever human relationships come to be seen as properties of inanimate objects. Following
Feuerbach
, his mentor until 1845, Marx sees the true analogy in religion. In religion in general and idolatry in particular, what are no more than productions of the human brain appear as independent beings with a life of their own. Just as gods are inseparable from their human creators, so fetishism is inseparable from the production of commodities. This concern with fetishism is now often taken to show the permanence of Marx's early concern with human
alienation
and with the estrangement of labour.
JH 

 
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