France

France, much like Britain, went through two periods of distinct colonial and imperial
activity. Indeed its experiences mirrored those of Britain in many other ways. In the seventeenth
century, it too began focusing on establishing colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America
and sugar colonies in the Caribbean before developing an interest in India in the eighteenth
century. But in all instances, the British emerged as the more successful power. The key conflict
in this regard was the Seven Years War between Britain and France, which ended in 1763 with
New France, the basis of modern-day Canada, in British hands and the British preponderant in
India. Beginning in the 1830s with the conquest and colonisation of Algeria, the French set off
on a new wave of imperial expansion which was second only to Britain. This involved acquiring
a huge swathe of north-western Africa as colonies covering much of modern-day Chad, Mali, the
Central African Republic, Niger, and the countries along the coast of Africa, such as the Cote
d'Ivoire and Ghana. The French also conquered Indochina in the 1880s and 1890s, making
France second only to Britain in terms of its overseas empire by the end of the nineteenth
century. The French were one of the most liberal of colonial powers. From the beginning in New
France, they were interested in the culture and values of the local Huron and other native Indian
people, while in Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, relations were more
harmonious than can be said for many other European colonial powers. As a result, even as
decolonisation began in the late 1950s, the concept of Francafrique developed, whereby
countries like Cote d'Ivoire and Senegal sought to maintain close relations with Paris. However,
admittedly, the French disentanglement from Algeria was an unpleasant, unethical affair.

Dutch

When it comes to colonial methodologies, the Dutch Republic might best be said to have
been a copycat nation. In the sixteenth century, the Low Countries, a region approximating to the
modern-day Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of north-eastern France, were ruled
by Spain as the seventeen provinces of the Low Countries. In 1568, in response to excessive
taxation and in defense of their Protestantism, the Dutch rebels of the northern provinces
revolted against Spanish rule and commenced what is now known as the Eighty Years War,
which would drag on, as one might expect from the name, until 1648. In the course of this,
Holland's wealthy merchants hit on the idea that they could both profit and undermine Spain by
striking at Portugal's overseas colonies, Portugal having entered into a direct royal union with
Spain in 1580 whereby King Philip II of Spain became King of Portugal as well, though the two
nations would remain distinct of each other. This arrangement would prevail down to the 1640s.
Thus, beginning in the late 1590s, the Dutch, under the aegis of the Dutch East India Company,
began sending out fleets to Asia to replace the Portuguese as the primary power in India and the
East Indies. They were enormously successful in the East Indies and, by the 1620s, had wrested
control of much of the region from the Portuguese, a situation which would pertain until the
granting of independence to Indonesia in 1949. Along the way, the Dutch also colonised the
Cape Colony at the tip of South Africa, Ceylon, and Sri Lanka and even set up New Holland in
what is now New York in North America. However, in all instances, these other colonies would
eventually be acquired by Britain, New Holland during the Second Anglo-Dutch War of the mid-
1660s, and the Cape Colony and Ceylon as a result of the Napoleonic Wars of the early
nineteenth century. The Dutch were exploitative colonists who ran their colonies according to a
market-centred ideology that cared little for the welfare of those they ruled. Accordingly, slavery
was common across vast parts of its empire, and conditions were brutal in some regions, a fact
which the Dutch government is only now addressing and seeking clemency for.

Belgium ( Kind of )

Belgium has arguably the most unusual and the most unsavoury colonial history.
Belgium itself did not exist until 1830, this part of the Low Countries having been variously
dominated by Spain and Austria for centuries prior to this. When it did emerge as a nation, one
of its first rulers, King Leopold II, became determined to acquire his own personal colonial
fiefdom in Africa during the scramble for land across the continent. To that end, he petitioned at
the Congress of Berlin in 1884 to be acknowledged in his ownership of a vast tract of land in the
Congo. This was duly agreed on by the other European powers, and the Congo Free State came
into being as a personal colony of Leopold's rather than of the state of Belgium. Leopold soon
turned it into a hellish place, one in which his private mercenary forces, the Force Publique,
enslaved, mutilated, displaced, and killed millions of natives of the Congo, all in the pursuit of
profits from exploiting the rubber plantations he established across the Free State at a time when
the product was enjoying an international boom on the back of the automobile revolution.
Leopold used the immense wealth which he acquired from this rapacious exploitation of the
Congo to engage in a costly building programme back in Europe, erecting buildings such as the
Cinquantenaire memorial arch in Brussels. Eventually, though, Leopold's methods came to
international attention, and in the early twentieth century, the Free State was taken under direct
control of the Belgian government, but not before the population of the Congo had fallen by
several million people. Thereafter the Belgian government pursued damaging policies as well,
turning native groups against each other in order to rule the region cheaply. In the case of the
Rwanda region in the east of the Belgian colony, the divisions which this sowed between the
Hutus and the Tutsi peoples would be a major factor in the Rwanda Genocide of the mid-1990s.
Belgium granted independence to its former colonies in the Congo in the early 1960s.

Germany

Belgium's colonial methods and history were mirrored in those of Germany. Like
Belgium, a German state did not come into being until the nineteenth century when the Prussian
statesman Otto von Bismarck united over three dozen German states into the Second German
Empire in 1871. Bismarck was generally opposed to colonialism, but he could not prevent the
German government from entering the Scramble for Africa in the mid-1880s, eventually
acquiring a number of colonies in Sub-Saharan Africa, notably the Cameroons, a large colony in
south-western Africa approximating to modern-day Namibia and an equally large colony in East
Africa around the region now dominated by Tanzania, as well as a number of small colonies in
Micronesia and the island of Papua New Guinea in Asia. The Germans' methods soon became
brutal. When the Herero and Namaqua people rebelled against German rule in Namibia in the
mid-1900s, the Germans effectively engaged in genocide by driving tens of thousands of people
into the desert, where they died of dehydration. And it was all for very little. Studies have
demonstrated that Germany acquired some of the poorest and more marginal African lands,
which reaped very little profit for the Berlin government, unlike, for instance, the enormous
profits Leopold generated in the Congo through his barbarous regime.
 Italy

Another power which only belatedly became involved in imperial endeavours was Italy.
Its two main areas of interest were Libya, which it invaded in 1911, and the Horn of Africa,
where it was acquiring colonies from the late 1880s right down to the 1930s. All of this was
controversial. Under Mussolini, ambitions to create a 'Fourth Shore' in Libya where upwards of a
million Italians would live saw hundreds of thousands of Libyans displaced and concentration
camps set up, while the war to expand Italy's presence in the Horn of Africa by invading
Abyssinia in 1935 involved the use of chemical weapons and effectively revealed the League of
Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations, to be utterly powerless when it came to stopping
such wars of aggression. Ultimately Italian colonisation followed the general drift towards
fascism back home, but it was a short-lived affair, and once the Second World War ended, Italy
was stripped of most of its colonies.

Russia

A wholly anomalous colonial power was Russia. One does not generally think of Russia
when it comes to colonial activity. After all, it had no imperial possessions in Africa in the
nineteenth century and did not go through a period of decolonisation in the twentieth. But Russia
was a colonial power. The Russian state, it should be remembered, emerged from the Duchy of
Muscovy, a small polity centred on Moscow which controlled only a small territory around the
city. Beginning in the fifteenth century, it began expanding to incorporate other Russian city-
states and duchies like those of Pskov and Novgorod, as well as the lands of the Kazakh Tartars
down the River Volga to Astrakhan and the Caspian Sea. This might broadly be said to be a
process of state consolidation and centralisation. But once it was completed, Russian colonists
and adventurers began crossing east over the Ural Mountains into Siberia in the late sixteenth
century. What followed was three centuries of gradual colonisation of northern Asia, a process
which has resulted in Russia's emergence as the largest nation on earth in geographical terms. It
even extended across the Bering Sea to Alaska in the nineteenth century when there was no more
of Asia to colonise. Russia has been able to retain control of this vast territory because it was
largely unpopulated in many parts of it, and there was no central power to press for
decolonisation. However, some lands were lost. Alaska was sold to the United States in 1867,
and one could argue that the manner in which Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan,
and Turkmenistan in Central Asia acquired independence from the Soviet Union in the early
1990s at the end of the Cold War was a form of decolonisation.

What all of this should make clear is that the colonial experiences of these major
European nations were very different. For instance, some, such as Portugal and Spain, were
already engaged in building their empires in the fifteenth century and peaked in the sixteenth and
seventeenth, while others, like Belgium, Germany, and Italy, did not emerge as imperial powers
until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. There were other differences. Spain and Portugal's
early colonial empires and the imperialism of Germany and Italy later were state-directed in that
their governments deployed resources to take direct control over other parts of the world.
Conversely, England's empire was originally built on free enterprise. The first colonies in North
America were settled by corporate companies and religious refugees and were only taken over by
the British government decades later. More significantly, the British Raj was created and built by
the English East India Company, the most successful corporation in history. It was only in 1857,
following the Great India Mutiny, that the British government took direct control over the
subcontinent. Other differences in approach concerned the attitude towards the natives of one's
colonies. On the extreme end were the Belgians and Germans in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, who effectively engaged in genocide in the Congo and Namibia. Three
centuries earlier, the Spanish intermarried with the natives of Central and South America,
indicating a much more tolerant approach. In between were the English, who co-existed to some
extent alongside the Native Americans of New England and Virginia in the seventeenth century,
but eventually ended up at war with their early hosts. Finally, the very method of colonisation
could differ greatly from country to country. For instance, the Portuguese and the Dutch
generally favoured simply establishing trading posts in the East Indies with small numbers of
merchants and making money in this way without actual extensive settlement. As a result, there
are few people of Portuguese or Dutch heritage in Indonesia today. The converse of this was
when Britain or Spain sent out vast numbers of settlers to the Americas, changing the
demographic landscape of the western hemisphere through this settler colonialism.
 So what is the legacy of all of this? Much of it is deeply unpleasant. At least twelve and a
half million slaves were trafficked across the Atlantic to the Americas during the early modern
period to work on the sugar, tobacco, and cotton plantations of nations like Britain, Spain,
France, and Portugal. The legacy of Belgium, Germany, and Italy in Africa has almost nothing
by way of redeeming qualities and resulted in the deaths and immiseration of millions of
Africans. Britain carried out one of the world's most comprehensive genocides on Tasmania in
the 1820s and early 1830s, a legacy which is airbrushed by referring to it as the 'Black War.' But
there are positives on the account. When countries like Britain and France arrived to many parts
of the world, they were effectively living in the Neolithic period. Although it has not always
been smooth or pleasant, these colonial powers began the process of social and economic
advancement, which over time has resulted in a marked increase in all manner of living standards
in the world beyond Europe. British colonisation of North America in the seventeenth century
was as negative an experience as it undoubtedly was for the Native American people, resulting in
the emergence of the United States and the most consequential nation of modern history. All of
these are legacies of European colonisation, both good and bad. The two need to be borne in
mind in any appraisal of this conflicted period of human history.