The colonial history of China is particularly important as we consider her rise on the world stage once again. Readers of this blog may remember my brief discussion about The Silk Road early at the outset of these discussions of world history. Before the advent of national economic statistics across the world, it was impossible to measure the comparative wealth of different peoples. Yet, the evidence we do possess shows that China and India were considerably more wealthy than anywhere else in the world until Britain invaded China in the 1840s.

Unlike European Colonisation after 1492,  and American invasion (both North and South), Russian expansion over during roughly the same period needs to be understood in different terms. Russia was an ancient feudal society right through until the 1917 revolution. The character of her expansion and colonisation reflected this fact. In this blog, I compare Russia’s imperial expansion mainly with the USA, the only other land colonisation of the period.

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.