We take for granted today the boundary lines which divide countries. Those borders set in 1884 had little rationale but continue to have long-term consequences. 80 years after being divided, the new countries were provided with relative Independence. This was partially due to their struggles against colonial rule and partly due to the decision taken by the USA to have economic access to the world. They all kept the boundaries created during colonialism.

African colonisation was significantly different from all other forms of European invasion. At the end of the 19th century, the continent was divided up into multiple relatively small nation-states. As a result, each state has found the processes of moving towards industrialisation difficult. The story of the colonisation of the continent is how this situation came about.

Colonisation in the Indian subcontinent was a different experience when compared to the invasions in the Americas or Russia. In 1600, the Indian subcontinent (that is modern-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar) was an ancient civilisation of huge diversity. The whole country had a centralised government run by the Mughals, alongside some 500 distinct but powerful and equally ancient kingdoms.

The Khmer Rouge regime frequently arrested and often executed anyone suspected of connections with the former Cambodian government or with foreign governments, as well as professionals, intellectuals, Buddhist monks and ethnic minorities. The regime attempted to purify Cambodian society along racial, social and political lines. Cambodia's previous military and political leadership, business leaders, journalists, students, doctors, and lawyers were all killed.

Colonisation and slavery were the cornerstones of the Industrial Revolution. European industrialisation and Atlantic-American slavery as two structural global transformations must be understood as an integral whole. Industrialisation in the 19th century was enough to bring Europe out of a backwater in terms of global wealth and power. The processes of industrialisation have been written about in detail by scholars, and students of economic history will be deeply aware of industrialisation.

The so-called National Charter companies were innovative at the time. They were financed from private sources, allowed to arm themselves for protection, and they set out to control the trade they could muster. The East India companies avoided the Ottomans, sailed around the Cape to India, and began to set up local agreements and build forts. Each of the new European companies rapidly discovered that the Indian and Chinese governments did not want to obtain what Europe had to offer, rather they felt themselves to be self-sufficient.

The many great empires in every continent, that spread across the world in 1492 when Drake first crossed the Atlantic Ocean had already been in existence for many hundreds and in some cases thousands of years. Between 1500 and 1918, all the existing ancient empires in the Americas, Asia Africa and Europe would be destroyed. First to go were the Aztecs and the Incas, in the 16th century. In Europe, the Holy Roman Empire disappeared in 1815, and the Austro/Hungarian empire 100 years later after the 1914/18 war.