Colonialism is a now, mostly defunct approach to dealing with foreign groups of people and the land and other resources

they control. Under the logic of colonialism, that you are able to militarily dominate those other

people means you are more capable of also managing their lives and whatever wealth they might

control. A militarily powerful nation then might roll into a new continent, defeat the locals in battle,

and then set up any existing cities and towns and villages and tribes

as a sort of economic offshoot of that victorious, dominating country.

This is a practice that has been seen throughout history on various scales, but it really

heated up on a global level in the 15th century, when mostly European nations began

to explore the world beyond their traditional stomping grounds, and realized that, first,

there's a lot of world out there, and second, the people living in these places they were beginning to discover and explore

were not as good at war as them.

The reasons behind these imbalances are many, and most trace back to geographic differences

and the raw randomness of history.

If the Europeans had encountered some of the cultures they conquered during

this period, during an earlier period, they would almost certainly have been handedly defeated instead.

But because these encounters took place at a time of relative wealth, population abundance,

and technological sophistication for the Europeans, and because that upsurge in these traits generally correlated with the opposite

elsewhere. The world looked like a big candy jar to many of these nations, and proponents of the

ideologies to which they subscribed, from mercantilism, which allowed them to justify the taking

of resources and labor in the form of people elsewhere to strengthen their homeland,

to Christianity, which being a proselytizing faith encouraged them to convert the non-believers

they encountered around the world. These incentives added up to a pretty compelling rationale

...