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.

Racism had many consequences for the indigenous peoples of invaded lands. The various strands of Christianity fed into the colonial mindset from the last decades of the 18th century when missionaries followed the invaders. For the churches, these were their ‘civilising missions’, bringing what they thought was the best of their own culture. The literature is full of chaplains seeing their missions as bringing light to the darkness of the heathen. Many of the invaded did not see it that way, viewing the Christian churches as an attempt to denigrate their cultures and ways of life.

Racism was the ideology of European, then the US and Japanese Colonisation; the framework of ideas that justified every act that subdued populations across the world. The ideas varied over time. In 1492, racism was mixed with Catholicism, by the Spanish invaders. By the time the Reformation and the Settlement of the Calvinists into America, racism was mixed with the new religion.

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.

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.