Old World colonial place-naming treated new sites as siblings, not successors

Evidence

What is startling in the American namings of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries is that ‘new’ and ‘old’ were understood synchronically, coexisting within homogeneous, empty time. Vizcaya is there alongside Nueva Vizcaya, New London alongside London: an idiom of sibling competition rather than of inheritance. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 716

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the shift from diachronic ‘new as inheritor’ naming (Southeast Asian cities) to the synchronic sibling-comparison naming of the Americas.
• XREF: connects to: Colonial renaming erased Innu place-names like Patshetshunau — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 331

Related

• American colonial toponyms made ‘new’ and ‘old’ coexist synchronically, unlike older inheritance namings (similarity 0.90)
• Renaming colonized subjects is a political act that declares a new epoch (similarity 0.78)