Colonial empire

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Animated map of the colonial empires since the 15th century.

As a colonial empire were referred to during the period of imperialism and colonialism all of the colonies of a particular state , the motherland of the respective colonies.

The United Kingdom, for example, had the largest colonial empire with the British Empire , followed by France , while the German Empire , Italy , Belgium and other states had comparatively short-term or smaller colonial empires.

The colonial empire is not to be confused with the actual empire , which consists of the colonial empire and the motherland. During the time of colonialism, the totality of the colonies of the United Kingdom (= colonial empire) together with the United Kingdom formed the British Empire. The German colonial empire , together with the German Empire, formed the actual German Empire .

Deviating from this, one speaks of earlier epochs of colonial empires, such as that of the Spaniards or the Venetians . In modern times , the colonial empires of European states encompassed ever larger parts of the world. In 1492, when Columbus discovered America, the Europeans controlled only about nine percent of the world's land area. In 1801 it was already around a third and in 1880 it was two thirds. In 1935, around 85 percent of the land area and 70 percent of the world's population were politically controlled from Europe.

List of known colonial empires

The following table provides an overview of the well-known colonial empires of European colonial powers of the modern era. In addition, there were unstable or small-scale empires of non-European powers, such as the Japanese and the US . Smaller empires such as the Norwegians , Austrians and Swedes are also not listed . The internal colonialism of Tsarist Russia is a special form , in which the mother country and the colonial empire cannot be clearly distinguished from one another.

rich	Area in km²	population	Year of greatest expansion	map
Portuguese colonial empire	4,000,000	14,000,000	1580
Dutch colonial empire	3,700,000	37,400,000 (1914)	1650
Spanish colonial empire	13,700,000	64,000,000	1740
Danish colonial empire	2,700,000		1814
Russian colonial empire	24,458,509		1866
German colonial empire	2,950,000	13,500,000	1914
French colonial empire	13,500,000	112,000,000	1919
British colonial empire	33,000,000	458,000,000	1921
Belgian colonial empire	2,330,000	13,500,000	1925
Italian colonial empire	3,900,000	1,300,000 (1914)	1940

See also

• Colonial power
• European expansion
• Race for Africa

literature

• David Kenneth Fieldhouse : The colonial empires since the 18th century (= Fischer world history . Volume 29). Fischer paperback, Frankfurt am Main 1965.

Web links

Commons : Atlas of colonialism  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Wiktionary: Colonial Empire  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Alvin Toffler : The third wave - future opportunity. Goldmann, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-442-11350-4 , p. 103.
2. ↑ ^{a b} James Mitchell (ed.): Great illustrated world history. From the French Revolution to the present . Parkland, Stuttgart 1990, ISBN 3-88059-379-5 , p. 66.
3. ^ Winfried Speitkamp : German Colonial History . Reclam, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-15-017047-8 , p. 40.
4. ↑ David Kenneth Fieldhouse : The colonial empires since the 18th century (= Fischer world history . Volume 29). Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1965, p. 313.