Full article: COLONIALITY AND MODERNITY/RATIONALITY
Translated from the Spanish original by Sonia Therborn. This essay was originally published in Globalizations and Modernities. Experiences, Perspectives and Latin America, Stockholm, FRN-Report, 99: 5, 1. With the conquest of the societies and the cultures which inhabit what today is called Latin America, began the constitution of a new world order, culminating, five hundred years later, in a global power covering the whole planet. This process implied a violent concentration of the world's resources under the control and for the benefit of a small European minority – and above all, of its ruling classes. Although occasionally moderated when faced with the revolt of the dominated, this process has continued ever since. But, now during the current crisis, such concentration is being realized with a new impetus, in a way perhaps even more violent and on a much larger, global scale. The ‘Western’ European dominators and their Euro-North American descendants are still the principal benefic