This chapter provides conceptual toolsto account for the rise and decline of Euro­pean global dominance. Chapters 3-7 in part 2 are largely descriptive.

They discuss changes in the territorial scope of European empires in each of five phases and identify distinctive features associated with each phase. Part 3 (chapters 8-11) ad­vances a theory of why overseas empires were formed, part 4 (chapters 12-13) ^an account of why they persisted, and part 5 (chapters 14 and 15) a theory of their decline and fall.

Chapter 16 identifies significant consequences of European colonialism. The final chapter addresses normative issues. Ethical judgments are scattered throughout the text, including statements reflecting biases of which I may be unaware. I have tried, however, to avoid making “too many” such judgments along the way. The aim is not to avoid considering the ethical dimension but, on the contrary, to permit thoughtful ethical reflection to take place, on its own terms and separately from the work of description, analysis, and explanation. After reflecting on how value-laden judgments might be made, chapter 17 makes them. Readers are invited to draw their own conclusions using norms, standards, and evidence that may differ substantially from mine, with correspondingly different results.

“Empire,” “imperialism,” “colony,” “colonialism,” and “decolonization” are terms one uses at considerable risk. For one thing, they have been defined in diverse ways in a vast academic and popular literature. For another, they have often been employed without being clearly defined, leading to confused and unproductive de­bates. Another problem is that they have powerful emotional and normative con­notations, serving routinely as ammunition in polemic battles between defenders and critics of the European imperial project. It is difficult to “unload” loaded words and persuade readers to assign them a primarily descriptive meaning.

Abandoning these terms poses its own problems, however, not least having to locate suitable substitutes.

V. I. Lenin’s enormously influential essay on imperialism, written in 1916, illustrates the problem by defining imperialism as the final stage of capitalism.¹ This permits him to count as instances of imperialism virtually everything associated with advanced capitalism, including the rise of financial institutions, the formation of industrial cartels, the scramble for unclaimed non-European territory, and the ori­gins and early course of World War I. The concept has been stretched to cover so many things that its power to clarify and explain any one thing has been drastically compromised.² Lenin’s usage precludes serious discussion of empire building at other periods in world history, such as precapitalist, early capitalist, or postcapitalist. Subsequent writers in this tradition have faced an even more serious explanatory problem than Lenin because they have so much more evidence—the vast and contra­dictory array of events occurring since the essay was written in 1916—to consign to the catchall category of advanced (final stage) capitalism.³

By the same token, if the phenomenon to which a word refers is defined as good or bad, claims about its moral status cannot be subjected to empirical investiga­tion. Colonial rule might be defined as intrinsically evil. But then the question of whether colonialism was good or bad becomes moot because the answer has already been assumed.

Several options are available for “empire,” depending on how much one wants to concentrate on the political dimension as distinct from the economic, technologi­cal, social structural, cultural, psychological, and the like. I define “empire” in politi­cal terms as a relationship of domination and subordination between one polity (called the metropole) and one or more territories (called colonies) that lie outside the metropole’s boundaries yet are claimed as its lawful possessions.⁴ To be effective over the long term imperial rulers need to establish dominance in arenas outside of government. That said, the distinctive core feature is political control.

But what is political control? What indicators point to its existence and exten­siveness? What does a territory need to score on these indicators to be called a colony? One way to answer these questions is to examine legal-formal aspects of unequal relationships. Does the dominant state explicitly claim authority to make binding decisions affecting the weaker territory? Does the weaker territory lack legal status as a sovereign state within the international system? An alternative approach is to examine who controls and influences whom in real-life situations. Does the dominant state control a small or large portion of the weaker territory? a small or large number of activities?

A third approach, the one I adopt, is to combine de jure and de facto consider­ations: a dominant state is an imperial metropole and a weaker territory a colony when

the dominant state formally claims the right to make authoritative decisions affect­ing the weaker territory’s domestic affairs and external relations;

the weaker territory is not recognized as a sovereign state by major actors in the interstate system; and

the dominant state establishes and staffs administrative structures that extract re­sources, allocate resources, and enforce regulations within some economically or strategically significant portion of the weaker territory.

A territory can be considered an imperial possession even if a metropole is unable effectively to govern its entire area.

This definition excludes relationships among unequally powerful entities in which

a stronger state does not advance formal claims to control the weaker territory’s domestic or foreign affairs;

the weaker territory is widely recognized as a sovereign state; yet the stronger state’s institutions exert marked influence over affairs in the weaker territory.

Such relationships are not only unequal; they are also conducive to exploita­tion of the inhabitants of the weaker territory. But these features do not by them­selves make the stronger state an imperial power or the weaker territory a colony. If they did the distinction between formal power and informal influence in inter­national relations would virtually disappear. By my definition it is misleading to speak of “informal empire” and “the imperialism of free trade,” as John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson do in discussing Britain’s economically dominant role in nineteenth-century Latin America and other areas the British government did not formally claim.⁵ Here terms have been stretched beyond manageable limits. Winfried Baumgart puts the point well: “ ‘Informal imperialism’ creates more problems than it solves. If subjected to logic it creates no clear borderline. It is synonymous with any form of dependence and is therefore unacceptably vague.”⁶

In some cases it is unclear whether a territory should be designated part of an empire. Suppose a strong state lays claim to a nonsovereign territory yet sets limits to the scope of its own authority. When Canada and Australia attained “responsible government” and their elected legislatures took control over domestic (but not foreign) affairs, did they cease to be part of the British Empire? What of Kuwait and Bahrain, protectorates in which treaties with local sheikhs confined Britain’s author­ity to external relations? I include these territories within Britain’s empire but recog­nize their borderline status by calling them quasi colonies.

A metropole regards components of its empire as politically subordinate and territorially distinct.

Imperialism is the process of constructing an empire. The term thus covers a period of several centuries during which west Europeans made territorial claims and regulated an increasing range of activities overseas. I am particularly interested in expansion into areas not previously claimed or effectively governed by Europeans. Of less interest are situations in which one empire grew at the expense of another. It is the net gain or loss in the geographic coverage of European empires, considered cumulatively, that needs to be explained, not changes in the distribution of colonies among metropoles.

A colony is a dependent territory within an empire. It has a name, specified boundaries, and an urban administrative center. Policy-making authority is ex­ercised by a person officially designated by metropolitan rulers to hold power in their name. Typically this person is a citizen of the metropole, regards the colony as a temporary place of residence, and looks to superiors in the metropole’s capital for overall guidance and direction.

A colony is a penetrated polity. Its foreign relations are monopolized and its domestic affairs strongly influenced by officials who come from outside its borders. In the modern world a colony may be seen as a protostate. That is, it is potentially a legally sovereign state like the one ruling it because many of the institutions and procedures associated with statehood have been imported and are functioning at some level. Yet the potential for sovereignty is not realized because the metropole insists on retaining ultimate authority to make critical decisions. The colony’s gov­ernmental institutions are accountable outward and upward to the metropole’s rul­ers, not downward to the territory’s residents.

The residents may include settlers, emigrants from the metropole or nearby areas who came to earn their living in the colony.

Under the colonial heading are territories assigned a wide range of administra­tive headings and legal statuses. These include viceroyalties, audiencias, captaincies, intendencies, protectorates, Crown colonies, overseas provinces, overseas territories and departments, League of Nations mandates, and United Nations trusteeship territories. To the extent that statuses matter—and on occasion they did, with im­plications for the pace and character of decolonization—the meaning of a particular status will be noted.

Colonialism is the set of formal policies, informal practices, and ideologies employed by a metropole to retain control of a colony and to benefit from control. Colonialism is the consolidation of empire, the effort to extend and deepen gover­nance claims made in an earlier period of empire building.

Decolonization is the process by which a territory sheds colonial status and becomes a legally sovereign independent state, recognized as such by other states. Ultimate formal authority over domestic and foreign policy is removed from for­eigners and placed in the hands of locally resident citizens. Decolonization reverses the flow of power that marked eras of imperial expansion. From the colony’s per­spective, the process is described as attainment of political independence and victory for the leading nationalist movement.

The foregoing definitions are essentially political. They focus on disparities of coercive resources and legal status that mark the formation and consolidation of em­pire, and on transfers of executive and legal authority that mark the end of empire. This is by no means to say that imperialism, colonialism, and decolonization are only or merely political in their nature or effects. On the contrary, it is precisely because narrow definitions are used that one can investigate the extent to which changes outside the political arena accompanied the rise and fall of European empires. And attention paid legal-formal dimensions of power does not in any way belittle the importance of informal influence in economic, technological, cultural, and psycho­logical arenas. Europeans exerted influence in Africa and Asia long before forming empires there and in much of the New World for decades after imperial rule was ended. A definition of imperialism and colonialism that errs on the side of formal­ism has the advantage of permitting and indeed encouraging questions about rela­tionships between formal power and informal influence. Under what conditions, for example, did Europeans feel they needed to create colonies in order to protect or enhance existing spheres of influence? Under what conditions was it possible to protect or enhance influence without expanding the scope of empire—or even by acquiescing to the impending loss of overseas possessions?

What to call actors in the transcontinental drama recounted here poses a semantic problem because every locution for broad categories of people is arbitrary and has its drawbacks. “Europeans” refers to people born and raised in west Euro­pean countries who think of those countries as their homelands even if they reside overseas for parts of their lives. “Non-Europeans” are people born and raised outside of Europe who do not fit the above categories. This is an especially troublesome term, not only because it is an enormous residual category but also because it classifies human beings by attributes they lack rather than by ones they possess. Using it risks adding psychological insult to semantic injury because the word was employed in the past by Europeans to connote the collective inferiority and other­ness of people unlike themselves. I employ it, with the historic connotation excised, for two reasons. First, it highlights a contrast with Europeans that is itself a distinc­tive feature of the colonial situation. The persistent tendency to classify people in terms of real or alleged blood ties to Europeans can be observed in racially, culturally, and temporally diverse settings. Second, there is no viable alternative. Eric Wolf’s effort to grapple with the problem is reflected in the title of his magisterial work, Europe and the People Without History. But Wolf was speaking with tongue firmly implanted in cheek. He would be horrified if his residual category were put to analytic use. “Indigenous” does not work, since one consequence of Europe’s global impact was the transfer of millions of human beings from one continent to colonies in other continents. Nonindigenous African slaves and Asian indentured servants and their descendants played major roles in the economic development and social/ demographic evolution of lands that were initially foreign but became their homes.

“The colonized” is a composite term referring to indigenous residents of colonies, groups just mentioned, and so-called mixed blood groups tracing descent to people of diverse continental origins.