I'm writing an essay on the impact the Belgians had during their colonial rule over Rwanda/Ruanda-Burundi, but I've sort of asked myself a question that has left me curious: were there any identifiable differences in colonial methods of rule? I know there was a lot of violence, forced labour, (essentially) theft of natural resources, imposition of foreign-instated religious/economic/political practices, etc., but were there any other identifiable differences between how a "mother" country would rule its colonies? E.g., was it common, as the Belgians did with the Tutsis, to recognize one group as superior to the others? Are there other examples of this, or was this unique? Were there any other practices unique to the colonizer?
I looked through the list of readings for colonization and I'm not finding anything beyond what is already on my reading list, and I'm not even sure if this is a thing that has been studied or if it has been left as 'colonization was bad, this is generally why, end of story'.
Colonial rule varied vastly between colonies and empires; and colonies within empires.
For instance in my field; how France treats the Polynesians in Tahiti vs the Polynesians in the Marquesas or the Kanaks in New Caledonia varies wildly, even though they are all colonized- or claimed and appointed a French governor- within the same decade (1843-53). At least in this instance, the variation is due largely to French perception of the indigenous peoples; the French believed the Tahitians to be civilized and the Kanak to be primitive; they believed the Tahitians had a preexisting sense and legal recognition of private property so they mostly respected Tahitian land rights (or at least relegated themselves to challenging them in courts); whereas in New Caledonia, French discourse identified the Kanak as living in "communal primitivism" and claimed them to only be "provisional landholders" until such time as the French state needed the land- therefor they were pushed into reservations so French cattle ranchers could expand their stations.
At least in regards to the French Empire and colonization; there are a few (but growing number) of works that provide a more complicated view of French colonization- in that they recognize that competition was as much as conflict/competition between colonizer and colonized, but amongst colonizers and amongst colonized.
Especially useful might be- (these are all French geared since that is my background)
Alice Conklin, Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa (1997)
Benjamin Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France's Empire in the Algerian Sahara 1844-1902 (2009)
Frederick Cooper, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (1997)
J. P. Daughton, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880-1914 (2006)
Matt Matsuda, Empire of Love: Histories of France and the Pacific (2004)
Osama Abi-Mershed, Apostles of Modernity: Saint-Simonians and the Civilizing Mission in Algeria (2010)
I would also strongly recommend Hobsbawm and Ranger's Invented Traditions; especially Ranger's chapter on colonial Africa; his focus in the British in Kenya, but I believe the racial discourse and the invention of ethnicities and identities in Africa by the colonial state as part of its methods of control would be very useful.
Otherwise; having done research on the Belgian Congo, I would caution, as many of the authors I have mentioned would as well, the idea that the Belgians had an coherent set of 'religious, economic, political practices' that they wanted to impose on the indigenous peoples. I know at least in the Congo there was always competition between the Francophones and the Flemish speakers from Belgium, the German speaking missionaries and colonies next door, and English speaking missionaries and commercial agents who operated in the colony. The goals of the missionaries were quite different from those of the government administrators or the commercial enterprises.