The Scope of Colonial Empire

Any account of the modern world that treats European colonial empire as a peripheral or regrettable episode has misunderstood the basic geography of the last five centuries. At the peak of European imperial control, in the years immediately before the First World War, the combined territories of European states and their settler offshoots encompassed roughly 85% of the earth's land surface, either as direct colonies, protectorates, dominions, or spheres of influence (Hobsbawm 1987, pp. 56-59; Pakenham 1991, pp. xxi-xxiii). This is not a statistic that can be absorbed as background. It is the structural fact that the subsequent sociology of the modern world has to explain.

The European imperial project proceeded in historically distinguishable phases. The early-modern maritime phase (approximately 1500-1700) was driven by Portugal and Spain and later by the Netherlands, England, and France; it centered on the Atlantic, the Caribbean, the coasts of the Americas, and selected points along the African and Asian coasts. It produced the trans-Atlantic slave trade — approximately 12.5 million Africans forcibly transported across the Atlantic between 1500 and 1866, with a Middle Passage mortality rate of about 14% (Slave Voyages Database 2023; Eltis and Richardson 2010, pp. 17-30). It produced the first sustained colonial plantation complexes in Brazil and the Caribbean. And it produced the early Spanish conquest of the Americas, including the demographic collapse of Indigenous populations, estimated by most demographic historians at 50-90% over the century after 1492, primarily through introduced disease but also through conquest, enslavement, and forced labor (Mann 2005, pp. 91-110).

A second phase — which matters most for the sociology of the contemporary world — runs roughly from 1880 to 1914. In those three and a half decades, the Scramble for Africa partitioned the continent among European powers almost in its entirety. In 1880, approximately 10% of Africa was under European rule; by 1914, approximately 90% was (Pakenham 1991, pp. xxi-xxiii). The Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, convened by Bismarck, established the diplomatic protocols under which European powers would recognize one another's claims. No African representatives attended. The borders that emerged — for Nigeria, Sudan, the two Congos, Kenya, Tanganyika, and the rest — were drawn largely to the convenience of European negotiation and only incidentally with reference to the populations, polities, language groups, or ecological regions they traversed (Herbst 2000, pp. 71-96). The same late-nineteenth-century decades saw the consolidation of British rule in India under the Crown (from 1858), the French conquest of Indochina, the European partition of China into concession zones, and the United States' acquisition of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and effective control over Cuba after 1898.

A third phase — decolonization — runs roughly from 1947 to 1975, with a long tail into the 1990s. India and Pakistan gained independence in 1947; Ghana in 1957 opened a wave of African independence concentrated in 1960; Algeria's independence came in 1962 after a brutal war of liberation; Vietnam's final reunification in 1975 ended more than a century of French and then American intervention; Namibia gained independence from South Africa in 1990; South Africa's transition to non-racial democracy followed in 1994 (Cooper 2005, pp. 1-30). Formal empire as a global system ended within a human lifetime.

The sociological point follows from the scale. A structure that for four hundred years organized the majority of the earth's population and land into a hierarchical relationship with a small set of European metropoles cannot have left the contemporary world unmarked. The wealth distribution among nations, the racial order that persists inside and beyond former colonies, the borders of today's African and Middle Eastern states, the composition and anxieties of European cities, the dominance of English and French as world languages, and the institutions of international law — all carry the imprint of colonial history. Treating colonialism as an episode is therefore not an alternative interpretation; it is an empirical error. The purpose of the topic that follows is to specify what that imprint consists of, with the precision the subject demands.