The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) put global power thinking into words that perceived of colonial possessions as a political, economic and cultural right, last not least even as an obligation to a civilizing mission that was only definitively shaken with the independence of India in 1947. No European country remained exempt – all directly or indirectly participated in the colonial division of the world. What is now understood as globalisation has a critical background in the world historical involvement of the non-European sphere from the Early Modern Period up and into the period of decolonisation. Colonialist urges of this type do not explain the expansionistic economic, military and other forces in the periphery that compelled the governments of the mother countries into a defensive pressing forward. This includes capitalist striving for profit, the colonies as valves for overpopulation, the spirit of exploration, scientific interest, and religious and ideological impulses up to Social-Darwinistic and racist motives. It is characteristic that the impetus for colonialism was often derived as an answer to European history itself.

The imperial expansion since about 1870 was not a European invention but its chronological and spatial dimension was as unique as the variety of colonial methods of rule. But similar to the Phoenician and the Roman empires, the phenomenon of expansion usually ended with colonisation and not in colonial development. The extraordinary continuity of Chinese colonialism or that of the Aztecs in Central America before the Spaniards arrived is indeed structurally comparable to modern European expansion. A similar claim was never staked out in this form by a world empire of Antiquity or a non-European colonial power in the modern period, such as Japan or the USA. When Spain and Portugal partitioned the world by signing the Treaty of Tordesillas on 7 June 1494, they declared a genuine European claim to hegemony.

In world history, no continent has possessed so many different forms of colonies and none has so incomparably defined access to the world by means of a civilising mission as a secular programme as did modern Europe. See also the article 'Travail et migrations forcés dans les colonies européennes' in the EHNE.

War age of imperialism 2