The establishment and maintenance of political and economic control by one society over another — the system through which European powers between the 15th and 20th centuries dominated most of the world's surface, extracting resources, displacing populations, restructuring economies, and imposing administrative systems whose consequences persist long after formal colonial rule ended.
Colonialism is not primarily a historical curiosity. It is the process through which the modern world was organized — its political borders, its economic hierarchies, its racial categories, and its cultural hierarchies. The plantation slavery of the Atlantic, the famines of British India, the extraction economies of Central Africa, and the settler displacement of indigenous populations in the Americas, Australia, and elsewhere were not aberrations from colonial rule; they were its characteristic products. Understanding colonialism requires understanding not just what was done but the intellectual frameworks that justified it — and their continuing influence on how development, civilization, and human difference are understood today.