Instead, the episodic, opportunistic quality of the colonial phenomenon is emphasized, while even the applicability of terms such as “colonization” is questioned. Land and trade are no longer seen as antithetical poetic and semi-mythical traditions that emphasize poverty or civil conflict in the home cities are now often interpreted as retrojections that draw on well-established poetic topoi the fundamental role of the state as an organizing power is downplayed and relations with indigenous populations are seen as more complicated, with entanglement, hybridity, and the “middle ground” often deployed hermeneutically as a way of understanding the colonial encounter. In the postcolonial era, many of these assumptions have been questioned, and most of the original lines of inquiry have been reframed. According to this view (oversimplified to be sure, but fundamental to the study of Greek colonies well into the second half of the 20th century), the Greeks-like forerunners of the British and, to a lesser extent, the other European powers-had dispatched colonies, which, like spores born on the wind, carried Greek culture to all quarters of the Mediterranean and Black Sea littoral. These include the assumption that this was a state-sponsored activity that land hunger and trade were the primary (but often conflicting) motivations that conditions in the mother cities, such as poverty, famine, and civil stasis, fed the process and that the Greeks brought their culture with them, which they then imposed on generally passive and inferior indigenous populations.
The legacy of this perspective was a set of questions and assumptions that have remained at the heart of modern studies of the phenomenon. The modern phenomenon of colonization by the British, French, and Dutch, and to a lesser extent the Italians and Germans, provided the initial lens through which the dispersal of the Greeks around the Mediterranean and Black Seas was viewed. For much of the 20th century, the topic of colonization reflected-sometimes unwittingly, but sometimes explicitly-the profound connection between classical scholarship and the 19th-century context that shaped the discipline.