The colonial expansion of European states into the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, followed by the collapse of these empires and their replacement by sovereign nation-states, is a double movement of great historical importance. The following briefly reviews the larger contours of this history and outlines some central arguments about its causes and consequences.

Imperialism and Colonialism

The term "imperialism" was first used in the 1830s to recall Napoleonic ambitions. It gained its core contemporary meaning around the turn of the century as a description of the feverish colonial expansion of Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, and Italy. But the term is not confined to formal colonial expansion; in particular, the continuing dependence of much of the Third World on Western states and multinational corporations is often understood as neocolonialism or neoimperialism (Magdoff 1969; Nkrumah 1966).

Contemporary efforts to distill these...