For five centuries European empires ruled much of the earth, redrawing maps, moving peoples and extracting wealth. The empires fell, but their borders, languages and inequalities endure.
Last updated: October 2026
Colonialism is the practice by which one state establishes control over foreign territory and its people, settling its own population there, extracting resources, and imposing its laws, language and religion. European colonialism, which began in the fifteenth century and peaked in the early twentieth, eventually covered most of the surface of the earth: by 1914, European powers and their settler offshoots controlled about 85 percent of the globe. The age of formal empire ended in the great wave of decolonization after the Second World War, but colonialism left behind the borders of the modern world, the global distribution of languages, and inequalities that still shape trade, migration and politics.
Colonialism is often confused with imperialism, and the two overlap but are not identical. Imperialism is the broader policy of extending a state's power over other peoples, which can be achieved through trade, debt, military bases or political pressure without formal rule. Colonialism is the specific form in which the imperial power governs the territory directly or through settlers, planting its flag, its officials and often its farmers on foreign soil. A country can practice imperialism without colonies, as the United States did in much of Latin America, and it can hold colonies without settling them, as Belgium did in the Congo.
Colonies also varied enormously. Settler colonies, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Algeria, imported large European populations that displaced or marginalized Indigenous peoples and eventually became states of their own. Plantation colonies, such as Jamaica, Saint-Domingue and Java, imported enslaved or indentured labour to grow export crops. Trading-post empires, such as the early Portuguese and Dutch presence in Asia, held coastal forts rather than territory. And protectorates, such as Egypt under Britain or Morocco under France, kept a local ruler in place while the colonial power controlled foreign policy and finance. These differences explain why decolonization produced such different outcomes: settler states inherited the colonists' institutions, while plantation and extraction colonies often inherited economies built to serve someone else.
Historians also distinguish between colonialism and older conquests. The Roman, Arab, Ottoman, Mongol and Aztec empires all conquered and ruled foreign peoples, and their conquests are sometimes called colonial. What made European colonialism distinctive was its global reach, its combination with industrial capitalism, and its racial ideology: from the sixteenth century onward, European law and science increasingly classified colonized peoples as inferior, a doctrine that justified dispossession and forced labour and that outlived the empires themselves.
European colonialism began with the Atlantic. Portugal seized Ceuta in North Africa in 1415, then built a chain of forts down the African coast and across the Indian Ocean, aiming to control the spice trade rather than to govern large populations. Spain, after Columbus reached the Caribbean in 1492, conquered the Aztec and Inca empires within a generation and claimed most of South and Central America. The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, brokered by the Pope, divided the non-European world between Spain and Portugal, an early sign that colonialism would be organised by international agreement among the colonizers, with no voice for the colonized.
The conquest of the Americas was catastrophic for Indigenous peoples. European diseases, above all smallpox, measles and influenza, killed a large majority of the Indigenous population within a century, a demographic collapse that made the seizure of land easier and that historians now describe as one of the greatest mortality events in human history. Encomienda and later plantation systems extracted silver from Potosi and Zacatecas and sugar from Brazil and the Caribbean using enslaved Indigenous and then African labour. The wealth that flowed back, especially Spanish silver, reshaped the global economy: it financed European wars, flowed onward to China in exchange for tea, silk and porcelain, and linked the world's regions into a single trading system for the first time.
The first wave also produced the first anti-colonial revolutions. The United States declared independence in 1776, and Haiti in 1804. Between 1810 and 1825, Spanish America broke away under leaders such as Simon Bolivar and Jose de San Martin, and Brazil separated from Portugal in 1822. These revolutions ended Iberian colonial rule in the Americas, but they rarely ended the colonial social order: land stayed concentrated in few hands, Indigenous peoples were pushed to the margins, and slavery survived for decades in Brazil and Cuba.
The nineteenth century brought a second, larger wave driven by industrial power. Britain conquered India piecemeal through the East India Company, then ruled it directly after the rebellion of 1857. France took Algeria in 1830 and Indochina by the 1880s. The Netherlands consolidated control over the Indonesian archipelago. The Opium Wars of 1839-1842 and 1856-1860 forced China to open treaty ports and cede Hong Kong, a form of semi-colonial domination in which foreign powers controlled trade and law inside a formally independent state. Steamships, quinine against malaria, repeating rifles and the telegraph gave Europeans advantages that earlier colonizers had not possessed, and they used them to penetrate continents that had previously resisted.
Africa was partitioned with astonishing speed. In 1880, Europeans controlled about a tenth of the continent, mostly coastal enclaves. By 1914, only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent. The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, convened by Germany's Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, set rules for claiming African territory: a claim required effective occupation, notified to the other powers. No African ruler was invited. Within three decades, the continent was divided among Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Spain and Portugal, with borders drawn along lines of latitude and rivers that cut through peoples, languages and kingdoms. The Scramble was driven by rivalry between the powers, by the search for raw materials and markets, and by the strategic value of places such as Egypt and the Suez Canal.
Colonial rule in this period was often brutal. In the Congo Free State, King Leopold II of Belgium ran a rubber regime enforced by mutilation and murder that caused a severe population decline. In German South West Africa, now Namibia, German forces carried out the extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples in 1904-1908, an atrocity the German government acknowledged as genocide in 2021. In British India, colonial economic policies contributed to repeated famines, including the Bengal famine of 1943, in which an estimated two to three million people died while food continued to be exported and stockpiled for the war effort. Historians debate the precise weight of colonial policy in each case, but the pattern is clear: colonial economies were organised to serve the metropole, and colonized populations paid the price in hunger and blood.
Resistance never stopped. It ranged from armed uprisings, such as the Indian rebellion of 1857, the Mahdist war in Sudan, the Maji Maji rebellion in German East Africa and the Rif War in Morocco, to boycotts, strikes, newspapers and cultural revival movements. Religious leaders, chiefs, traders and, later, Western-educated lawyers and teachers built the organisations that would become nationalist movements. Colonial schools, intended to produce clerks and interpreters, produced the lawyers and journalists who used the colonizers' own language of rights against them, a paradox that runs through the whole history of decolonization.
The two World Wars accelerated the end. Colonized soldiers fought in both wars in large numbers, Indians, Senegalese, Algerians, Moroccans and many others, and returned home unwilling to accept the old order. The wars bankrupted Britain and France, discredited the idea of European superiority, and left the United States and the Soviet Union, both officially anti-colonial, as the dominant powers. The Atlantic Charter of 1941 promised self-determination, and colonized peoples held the signatories to their word. The United Nations Charter of 1945 enshrined the principle of self-determination, and the General Assembly's 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples declared colonialism a denial of fundamental human rights.
Decolonization took many forms. India and Pakistan won independence in 1947 after mass nonviolent resistance led by Gandhi and the Congress, followed by a partition that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions. Ghana became independent in 1957, Guinea in 1958, and 1960, the Year of Africa, saw seventeen new African states. Algeria won independence in 1962 after a war that killed hundreds of thousands. Portugal's colonies, Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, became independent only in 1975, after Portugal's own dictatorship fell. In some places independence came by negotiation; in others by war; in a few, such as Southern Rhodesia, white settler minorities clung to power for years, until Zimbabwe's independence in 1980.
The most visible legacy is the map. Most of today's borders in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia were drawn by colonial powers with little regard for the peoples they divided, and many of the world's persistent conflicts, from Kashmir to the Western Sahara to the borders of the Democratic Republic of Congo, run along lines colonial rulers drew. The partition of India created two, then three, states whose rivalry still shapes South Asia. The Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, by which Britain and France secretly divided the Ottoman Middle East, is still invoked in arguments about the region's borders a century later.
Language and law are the second legacy. English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic are spoken across continents because of colonial expansion, and they remain languages of government, education and literature in dozens of postcolonial states. Legal systems follow the same pattern: common law in former British colonies, civil law in former French and Portuguese ones. Economic patterns persist too: many former colonies still export a small number of raw commodities and import manufactured goods, a structure colonial policy created, and multinational companies still dominate mining and plantation sectors in several countries. Frantz Fanon argued in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) that political independence without economic decolonization left the old structures intact, a claim that remains central to debates about development and debt.
The third legacy is cultural and intellectual. Colonial museums in London, Paris, Brussels and Berlin hold hundreds of thousands of objects taken from colonized peoples, and restitution has become a major public issue: Nigeria has received Benin Bronzes back from several museums, and France returned 26 objects to Benin in 2021. Colonial archives, school curricula and monuments are being re-examined, and the histories written by colonized peoples themselves, long ignored in European universities, now reshape the field. The argument is not about erasing history but about who gets to tell it, and on the basis of whose evidence.
Formal empire is over: the United Nations lists a small number of non-self-governing territories, most of them small islands, and the last large decolonization conflicts concern places such as Western Sahara and the Chagos Archipelago. But the word neocolonialism, popularised by Ghana's first president Kwame Nkrumah, describes the argument that economic and political domination continues without formal rule: through debt, trade terms, military bases, multinational corporations and the conditions attached to loans from international institutions. Critics of the term reply that it excuses the failures of postcolonial governments, and that many former colonies, from Singapore to Botswana to Vietnam, have built prosperous economies and stable states. Both arguments have evidence behind them, and the debate is one of the liveliest in development economics.
Reparations are the sharpest edge of the argument. Caribbean states, through CARICOM, have formally demanded reparations from European governments for slavery and colonialism, including debt cancellation, development finance and formal apologies. Germany has agreed to pay Namibia development aid tied to acknowledgement of the Herero and Nama genocide, though Namibia's opposition has called the arrangement inadequate. Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands have issued apologies for specific colonial crimes, but none has accepted a general legal liability. Historians can establish what happened; whether the present owes the past a payment is a political and moral question that no archive can settle.
Colonialism ended as a system of rule, but its questions endure: who draws the map, who owns the wealth under the ground, who tells the story, and who pays for what was taken. The empires are gone. The arguments they started are not, and they now play out in parliaments, courts, museums, universities and trade negotiations, in the voices of the descendants of the colonized as much as in those of the colonizers.
Christopher Columbus (1451-1506). Genoese navigator whose 1492 voyage to the Caribbean, financed by Spain, opened the European colonization of the Americas and began the Columbian exchange of crops, animals, diseases and peoples.
Simon Bolivar (1783-1830). Venezuelan general and statesman known as the Liberator, who led the wars that freed Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia from Spanish rule between 1810 and 1825.
Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898). German Chancellor who convened the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, setting the rules for the partition of Africa while pursuing Germany's own colonial ambitions.
King Leopold II (1835-1909). King of the Belgians who ran the Congo Free State as a personal possession from 1885 to 1908, presiding over a rubber regime of forced labour, mutilation and mass death.
Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948). Indian lawyer and leader of the nonviolent mass movement that pressed Britain to leave India, pioneering satyagraha, nonviolent resistance, as a political method of global influence.
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961). Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary writer whose books Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961) became foundational texts of anti-colonial thought and postcolonial studies.
Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972). Ghana's first prime minister and president, who led the Gold Coast to independence in 1957, the first sub-Saharan African colony to achieve it, and popularised the concept of neocolonialism.
Jomo Kenyatta (c. 1897-1978). Kenyan nationalist leader imprisoned by the British during the Mau Mau emergency, who became the first president of independent Kenya in 1964.
Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969). Vietnamese revolutionary who led the Viet Minh against French colonial rule, defeating France at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and leading North Vietnam in the war against the United States.
Nelson Mandela (1918-2013). South African anti-apartheid leader imprisoned for 27 years, who became the country's first Black president in 1994, ending the last white-minority settler regime in Africa.
Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970). French president who, after the Algerian War, accepted Algerian independence in 1962 and reorganised France's remaining colonial ties through the French Community and later cooperation agreements.
Patrice Lumumba (1925-1961). First prime minister of independent Congo, whose government collapsed amid secession, Belgian intervention and Cold War intrigue; his assassination in 1961 became a symbol of thwarted decolonization.
Colonialism's legacy is not a single inheritance but several, pulling in different directions. It left a world of states whose borders, languages and legal systems were shaped by outside powers, and whose economies were built to export raw materials. It also left networks that postcolonial societies have made their own: the English, French and Portuguese languages now carry literatures written in Lagos, Dakar, Luanda and Mumbai that belong to no metropole. It left international law's most powerful principle, self-determination, which was forged in the fight against empire and remains the legal basis for every independence claim today.
The argument now is about what comes after acknowledgement. Museums are returning looted objects, governments are apologising for specific crimes, and former colonies are negotiating debt, trade and climate finance in terms that their predecessors could not have imagined. The history of colonialism matters because its structures, borders, debts, languages and museums, are still the furniture of the present. Understanding how they got there is the precondition for deciding what to do with them, and that decision belongs to the people who live with the consequences, not to the empires that created them.
