The early Colonies from 1492 onwards were all ruled and settled by ‘white settlers.’ The areas settled included the Americas and to a small extent the Portuguese colonised Africa, and the Dutch settled in Southern Africa in 1652. All of these can be characterised as ‘settler colonies.’

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.

Colonisation led to impoverishment on a scale that has never been measured as such measurements are hard to create with any degree of accuracy. In the following three blogs, I examine the most intense two forms of impoverishment: holocausts and famine. The processes of impoverishment varied widely. In the continent of Africa, the colonising nations enslaved tens of millions of men and women. In the Americas, the indigenous people were almost but not quite eradicated. In India and China, the richest and most powerful parts of the world in 1500, the mechanisms of impoverishment were more complicated.

Many historians have detailed the long history of colonisation by the Irish in the Americas and later in India. In this blog, I summarise some of the key themes of the process of the colonisation of Ireland. If we are to understand colonisation in the Americas we must understand Britain’s first colony, that is, Ireland. Ireland has been unique in British history. Ireland has always been deeply foreign to the British despite her geographical closeness to the mainland of Britain.

After having outlined in the previous blog the origins of the early monopoly companies, it is now worth pausing to understand how these monopoly companies operated. Divest yourself of any conception you might possess of a trading company today. From their origins, these companies operated like ships of war. They were designed to combat all aggression from any direction: aggression from the people they might meet on landing, from other ships that might wish to steal their cargoes, and from other European monopoly companies that wished to steal their trade.

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.

Racial chattel slavery, as practised in the North and South Americas over four centuries, represented bondage not seen before at new levels of human inferiority and violence. European chattel slavery required two elements which on the whole was not present in earlier forms of slavery; private ownership and racism. Only under the ideology of European racism could chattel slavery exist in the extreme from that it took. Chattel slavery was the ownership of one person by another as a form of property; it became prerequisite for plantation settlement for sugar and coffee - the beginnings of industrial capitalism.

Feudalism and the Christian church had been deeply integrated with one another in the 15th and 16th centuries, providing the governance and framework for social, political, economic and religious aspects of life for all Europeans. This was the system that made sense of people’s lives, providing rules that covered everything from marriage to people’s rights to land, even on how to understand the universe. This system also covered political power: the divine rights of monarchs, and the duties of nobles towards their people.

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.