The Colonial History of the Norman Conquest?

Abstract

Among Anglo-Norman historians there has always been argument about the effects of the Conquest: was there continuity or change? Although most have used the term ‘colonization’ of England and of the Welsh and Irish frontier lands and of settlements within the kingdom of Scotland, since 1966 some have specifically compared the Conquest to imperial and colonial rule. England has been described as a Norman colony, part of a Norman, later Angevin or Plantagenet empire. Apart from loose usage of the technical terms ‘analogy’ and ‘model’, where ‘empire’ and ‘colony’, and their abstracts ‘imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’, have been defined at all, these medieval historians have been neither consistent with each other nor familiar with modern imperial and colonial historians' discussion of the terms which they have borrowed. Assuming that what is common both to medieval and to modern conquest and colonization is expansion, Anglo-Norman historians have accepted inadequate explanations of expansion—shortage of land, greed for profits—and equated it with oppression and exploitation. These are inadequate explanations of imperialism and colonialism, not least because these ‘isms’ are themselves models, not realities. Nevertheless, there are theories of colonial administration, notably those of indirect rule and of modernization, which might suggest new questions, especially about legitimacy and land tenure, and thus provide fresh insights into the surviving evidence of Norman rule in England.