Introduction

Abstract

The story of European colonialism occupies a deceptively neat period of modern history. It begins with the first Portuguese voyages into the Indian Ocean at the start of the sixteenth century, and ends with the breakup of the British, French, Dutch and other empires (including the Soviet one) five centuries later, during the twentieth. That neat framework is, however, debatable. There were Western Christian colonies in the Holy Land, and Portuguese and Italian voyages to Africa, long before Bartolomeo Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope. And five hundred years later, a globalizing international scene is in many ways dominated by political and financial institutions in which, former colonies sometimes complain, they are the objects and the former colonialists the subjects. Nevertheless, European and, more broadly, Western colonialism looks like a reasonably closed historical epoch and it is possible to discuss not only its details but the larger trends which made it an important and fascinating phenomenon.