Colonialism is when one state or group takes control of another land and people to gain wealth and power. From about the 15th to the 20th centuries, European powers ruled large parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas as subordinate colonies. Colonialism involves foreign control over territory and government, legal inequality between colonizers and the colonized, and systematic extraction of land, labor, and resources for the benefit of the foreign country. Colonialism also involves cultural dominance. Colonizers enforce language, religion, education, and social norms that depict the colonizers as ‘civilized’ and the colonized as ‘backward’ or inferior. In short, colonialism is the structured domination of one group by another, maintained through power and justified by beliefs of superiority. Historians debate the reasons and circumstances behind why ‘the West’ colonized ‘the East’. There is no single cause, but several overlapping advantages helped parts of Europe project power out...
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