The End of Empire and the Problem of Neocolonialism

In terms of the long sweep of world history, the period of Western colonial empire was relatively brief, although its economic, cultural, political, and intellectual impact on the global community was, and continues to be, enormous. Beginning in the late fifteenth century with Spanish and Portuguese claims in Central and South America and continuing (if we include the breakup of the Soviet Union) until the final decade of the twentieth century, the British, Dutch, Belgians, French, Germans, Spanish, Portuguese, Russians, and Americans built powerful imperial regimes that touched every continent and forged a series of dependent relationships that clearly advantaged the colonizer. A amalgam of power and ideology under-girded the West’s physical occupation of large portions of the globe during these centuries, and it was a combination of European weakness, the spread of nationalist ideology to colonial peoples, and superpower opposition to traditional forms of colonialism that brought about the downfall of most territorial empires after 1945.