Colonial empire


A colonial empire is a state engaging in colonization, possibly establishing or maintaining colonies, infused with some form of coloniality and colonialism. Such states can expand contiguous as well as overseas. Colonial empires may set up colonies as settler colonies.
Before the expansion of early modern European powers, other empires had conquered and colonized territories, such as the Roman Empire in Europe, North Africa, and West Asia. Modern colonial empires first emerged with a race of exploration
between the then most advanced European maritime powers, Portugal and Spain, during the 15th century. The initial impulse behind these dispersed maritime empires and those that followed was trade, driven by the new ideas and the capitalism that grew out of the European Renaissance. Agreements were also made to divide the world up between them in 1479, 1493, and 1494. European imperialism was born out of competition between European Christians and Ottoman Muslims, the latter of which rose up quickly in the 14th century and forced the Spaniards and Portuguese to seek new trade routes to India, and to a lesser extent, China.
Although colonies existed in classical antiquity, especially amongst the Phoenicians and the ancient Greeks who settled many islands and coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, these colonies were politically independent from the city-states they originated from, and thus did not constitute a colonial empire. This paradigm shifted by the time of the Ptolemaic, Seleucid, and Roman Empires.
The European countries of the modern era that are most remembered as colonial empires are the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Netherlands, France, Germany, and Belgium.

History

European colonial empires

Portugal began establishing the first global trade network and one of the first colonial empires under the leadership of Henry the Navigator. The empire spread throughout a vast number of territories distributed across the globe that are now parts of 60 different sovereign states. Portugal would eventually control Brazil, territories such as what is now Uruguay and some fishing ports in north, in the Americas; Angola, Mozambique, Portuguese Guinea, and São Tomé and Príncipe in the North and the Subsaharan Africa; cities, forts or territories in all the Asian subcontinents, as Muscat, Ormus and Bahrain in the Persian Gulf; Goa, Bombay and Daman and Diu in India; Portuguese Ceylon; Malacca, bases in Southeast Asia and Oceania, as Makassar, Solor, Banda, Ambon and others in the Moluccas, Portuguese Timor; and the granted entrepôt-base of Macau and the entrepôt-enclave of Dejima in East Asia, amongst other smaller or short-lived possessions.
During its Siglo de Oro, the Spanish Empire had possession of Mexico, South America, the Philippines, all of southern Italy, a stretch of territories from the Duchy of Milan to the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium, parts of Burgundy, and many colonial settlements in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Possessions in Europe, Africa, the Atlantic Ocean, the Americas, the Pacific Ocean, and East Asia qualified the Spanish Empire as attaining a global presence. From 1580 to 1640 the Portuguese Empire and the Spanish Empire were conjoined in a personal union of its Habsburg monarchs during the period of the Iberian Union, but beneath the highest level of government, their separate administrations were maintained.
Subsequent colonial empires included the overseas possessions|English], Dutch and French possessions and colonies|French] empires. Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, by virtue of its technological and maritime supremacy, the British Empire steadily expanded to become by far the largest empire in history; at its height ruling over a quarter of the Earth's land area and 24% of the population. Britain's role as a global hegemon during this time ushered in a century of "British Peace", lasting from the end of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars to the start of World War I. During the New Imperialism, Belgium, Italy and Germany also built their colonial empires in Africa, while Japan started to encroach into former Chinese domains after they have settled their own reformation.

Timeline

The chart below shows the span of some European colonial empires.
  • Black lines mark the year of the empires largest territorial extent of land area.
  • Red represents that the empire is at that time a monarchy.
  • Blue represents that the empire is at that time a republic.

ImageSize = width:750 height:450
PlotArea = width:650 height:350 left:50 bottom:50
DateFormat = yyyy
Period = from:1400 till:2000
TimeAxis = orientation:vertical
ScaleMajor = unit:year increment:50 start:1400
  1. there is no automatic collision detection,
  2. so shift texts up or down manually to avoid overlap
Colors=
id:red value:red
Define $dx = 25 # shift text to right side of bar
Define $dy = -5 # adjust height
PlotData=
bar:Belgian color:red width:25 mark: align:left fontsize:7
from:1908 till:1962 shift: color:red
at:1928 mark:
bar:British color:red width:25 mark: align:left fontsize:7
from:1707 till:1997 shift: color:red
at:1920 mark:
bar:Danish color:red width:25 mark: align:left fontsize:7
from:1536 till:1953 shift: color:red
at:1810 mark:
bar:Dutch color:red width:25 mark: align:left fontsize:7
from:1602 till:1806 shift: color:blue
from:1806 till:1975 shift: color:red
at:1806 mark:
at:1930 mark:
bar:English color:red width:25 mark: align:left fontsize:7
from:1585 till:1649 shift: color:red
from:1649 till:1660 shift: color:blue
from:1660 till:1707 shift: color:red
at:1649 mark:
at:1660 mark:
at:1707 mark:
bar:French color:red width:25 mark: align:left fontsize:7
from:1534 till:1792 shift: color:red
from:1792 till:1814 shift: color:blue
from:1814 till:1870 shift: color:red
from:1870 till:1980 shift: color:blue
at:1792 mark:
at:1814 mark:
at:1870 mark:
at:1920 mark:
bar:German color:red width:25 mark: align:left fontsize:7
from:1884 till:1918 shift: color:red
at:1912 mark:
bar:Italian color:red width:25 mark: align:left fontsize:7
from:1885 till:1946 shift: color:red
from:1946 till:1960 shift: color:blue
at:1946 mark:
at:1939 mark:
bar:Portuguese color:red width:25 mark: align:left fontsize:7
from:1415 till:1999 shift: color:red
from:1910 till:1999 shift: color:blue
at:1910 mark:
at:1815 mark:
bar:Russian color:red width:25 mark: align:left fontsize:7
from:1721 till:1917 shift: color:red
at:1895 mark:
bar:Spanish color:red width:25 mark: align:left fontsize:7
from:1492 till:1931 shift: color:red
from:1931 till:1947 shift: color:blue
from:1947 till:1975 shift: color:red
at:1873 mark:
at:1874 mark:
at:1931 mark:
at:1810 mark:
at:1947 mark:
bar:Swedish color:red width:25 mark: align:left fontsize:7
from:1638 till:1663 shift: color:red
from:1784 till:1878 shift: color:red
at:1658 mark:

List of colonial empires

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