The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), or East Turkestan, located in northwest China, is geo-strategically and economically important to the Chinese state. It is also the centuries-old homeland of Turkic/Muslim Uyghurs and an area of ongoing conflict between them and successive Chinese rulers, from dynastic to nationalist to Communist, culminating in a now high-profile case of egregious violations of Uyghur human rights, including the incarceration of at least a million Uyghurs in so-called “re-education” camps, under China’s Western Development Plan and justified by China’s People’s War Against Terrorism. This dissertation makes the case that China’s expansion into and rule over the Uyghur homeland has always been, to lesser and greater degrees, by internal colonialism, in which the lands, culture, and way of life of a typically indigenous or minority people are expropriated and/or expunged by a majority-ruled state within its borders. China’s contemporary economic development, which extends both its national economy through resource extraction in the XUAR and its global economic reach through its Belt and Road Initiative to serve as gateway to commerce with Central Asia and beyond, is, in part, being achieved through a violent phase of internal colonization of the Uyghurs. I argue that not only does the treatment of the Uyghurs constitute internal colonialism rather than merely ethnic discrimination. Furthermore, the internal colonialism that the Uyghurs experience under the Chinese state and Han-Chinese majority rule explains why the Uyghurs are not benefitting from, and are actually being undermined by, China’s economic and security policies. By revealing how a globalizing China discursively constructs itself as a modernizing force and Uyghurs as a “backward” and inherently violent people, to justify its actions against them in the name of neoliberal development and anti-terrorism, I expose mechanisms of internal colonialism at work in contravention to China’s self-identity as an anti-colonial state. To reveal other aspects of past and contemporary internal colonialism of the Uyghurs, I trace the treatment of Uyghurs by the Chinese state historically, including some violent reactions of Uyghurs against this over time, based on secondary sources; empirically determine the economic, cultural, religious, educational, and infrastructural impacts of China’s development model on Uyghurs through analysis of policy and media documents; and investigate more recent non-violent resistance to various features of China’s internal colonization of the Uyghurs through international human rights reports, press accounts, Uyghur lobby documents, social media postings, and interviews with Uyghur people in exile in Turkey. I find that the adverse conditions of the Uyghurs have become so acute that Uyghurs, who are fleeing from China in ever greater numbers, are also speaking out in greater numbers in the diaspora, gaining international attention and some support, particularly from Western countries as well as human rights organizations. Whether such support will have any impact on China’s Uyghur policies remains an open question. However, Chinese government claims about the Uyghurs as backward Islamic terrorists to justify their surveillance, criminalization, incarceration, “re-education,” forced labor, disappearances, and even sterilization are losing credibility with international publics.