Nilanjana Gupta:

I think that colonization and imperialism were a means of governance in which affected all aspects of our life. Obviously, it was primarily an economic setup and economic exploitation was the core of it. But economic exploitation happened before and it's happening now. There was something very special about the period of colonization, where the entire societies that were colonized, they were taken over by the imperialist and completely transformed from top to bottom in their culture, their social life, their intellectual life, --everything was completely changed. And if we look at the works of historians who have looked at this phenomenon, we find that we're talking about India, before colonization, there was a fully functioning economy, trade system, intellectual systems, schools, universities, philosophers, all you know, religion, of course, all kinds of things, not everything was good, but there was an entire system. And that entire system was disturbed and taken over by the colonization. It was a process which affected every part of our society, every part of our life.

Aveen Hameed:

The British Empire was really successful in exploiting other countries. I'm a geologist and geology and mining played a huge role in this. Minerals were a resource that the Empire was interested in. And that's why we set up geological surveys in countries like Canada and India. And we set about mapping countries that were part of the colony, so that we could explore, exploit those resources and repatriate the profits back to the to the empire. And as a result of this, we left environmental damage, we left social damage, and we left a legacy that people are still dealing with today.

Frances Martin and Fatima Pirbhai-Illich:

Although the words ‘colonialism’ and ‘colonization’ are similar, there are definite nuances of meaning. So colonization is the action or process of taking possession of the lands, establishing control over, and settling among indigenous peoples of an area. It also refers to the processes of the possession of minds, bodies, and spirits, for what was then known as ‘God, gold, and glory’ -- for example the slave trade from Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas, and the British rule in India. Colonialism is the Western imperial or colonial expansion from Europe across the world with the intention of inquiring full or partial political control over other countries, occupying with settlers and exploiting them economically. It's the practice of domination, of the violent conquest and subjugation of one nation by another, conquering the population and forcing the colonizers’ language and cultural values upon the people. So for us, imperialism and colonialism are similar concepts, in that they are the structures that were systematically developed to support colonization. But we also want to talk about coloniality. But coloniality is the underlying logic of all Euro Western modern colonial imperialism. That is the ideology of extending rule over others. That is the ongoing legacy of colonialism. It is also a knowledge system that classifies phenomena on the basis of objective characteristics, putting them into categories that are arranged in a hierarchical structure of superior/inferior, according to, and amongst others, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and knowledge systems.