Colonialism is the expansion of a nation's sovereignty beyond its borders through the establishment of colonies. It is usually seen as a substantial part of imperialism, especially when involving sovereignty over foreign cultures or peoples. The word today is usually tied to the European expansion during and after the Age of Exploration and involved lands that were far away from the nation ruling them.
Colonialism was motivated and made possible by science, technology, and investment in "emerging markets" and the developing world, despite Marxists making a dirty word out of the term.
Colonialism typically involves the spread of a nation or people's culture through the establishment of new settlements (e.g. English settlement of the New England states) or population transfers to existing settlements (e.g. Dutch dominance of South Africa.) Generally speaking, colonialism was caused by "overpopulation" in the home country and a lack of economic opportunities for a growing population. A segment of the population departed to economically underdeveloped lands as tradesmen to market manufactured goods from the home country. In the new country, colonists developed mining, agricultural, and other raw natural resources for export to the home country. Eventually, the economically undeveloped, or "colonized" lands, developed their own manufacturing economy, commercial laws, judicial, and administrative systems.
Colonialism is most associated with the Roman Empire, British Empire and French ambitions in Africa, and with Japan in Asia.
Generally speaking, young people often migrate to a country that provides better economic opportunities than the country of their birth. This can be people from a rich country migrating to a poorer country to develop opportunities, or people from a poorer country to a rich land to take advantage of the opportunities already present.
In speaking of the "Age of colonialism", texts often claim European peoples "imposed" their administrative laws on native people's. Colonialism was an expansion of trade opportunities intended to develop markets for European manufactured goods. Colonies were typically established among tribal people who were often dominated by warlords, where laws varied in the same region from tribe to tribe. Natives often welcomed European administration and courts, which brought a more uniform system of justice, jobs and opportunities, and more prosperity for the surrounding region.
During the Apartheid period it was said South Africa's native blacks were an oppressed majority. South Africa's majority blacks are not native to South Africa - they are the descendants of economic migrants who came to South Africa to participate in the economic development that white Europeans brought to South Africa. Whites also brought a more just administration of laws than migratory blacks found among their native tribes and regions.
During the Cold War, South Africa was a ripe target for Kremlin-directed Marxist propaganda. Soviet financed Marxist hate speech and lies live on in the Social Justice Warriors who rule South Africa today, driven by racial animus, political correctness and a hatred for freedom, capitalism and Western Civilization.
India is a massive subcontinent that willingly embraced British administration and laws to govern the myriad of commercial disputes that inevitably arise from economic development. India's hundreds of tribes and languages were ill-situated and ill-equiped in a domestic environment that had been feuding among itself for nearly a millenium, often violently, whether to live under Sharia law administered by its Muslim minority, of some other localized system. The white Europeans brought with them a system of laws that seemed more democratic, along with job opportunities, prosperity, and trade that hadn't previously existed.
It was the anti-capitalist leftists of the Cold War that have dominated the Western educational system and have driven the planet toward global race war on false premises.
Yemen is a great example of the tribalism, chaos, and warlords who dominated and controlled the region, and still do. Colonial rule never extended outside the port of Aden, which the British Empire deemed a necessary beach head in the pirate infested waters between Suez and Bombay. The waters are still some of the most dangerous and lawless pirate infested waters on the planet, and are a constant threat to global shipping and trade.
Beirut is a French colonial port city the French Empire had carved out for itself for off-loading and sale to the Arab world of French manufactured goods. Because French exporters and traders, and the French government, could never come to terms with locals who wanted to use Shariah law to settle commercial disputes (Shariah law has no areas governing corporations), France carved out for itself the province of Lebanon staffed by a local, secular Arab civil service.
Lebanon is a multicultural province of Syria, with recognition as a "sovereign" state in the United Nations.
France never had control of Syria, Lebanon, or Beirut as the anti-colonial Marxists' and communists present in American universities and textbooks. France was always dependent on secular locals who willingly volunteered to cooperate with France, and occupied all the positions of the Western-style civil service. These native Arab collaborators viewed the teachers and enforcers of Shariah law as their oppressors.
Indeed, the modern nation state of Syria was created in a non-competition clause of a trade agreement between the British and French Empires. Syria would not exist as a bureaucracy or state entity otherwise (recall, Shariah law does not recognize corporate entities, and secular governments are corporate entities) and was always staffed by secular locals who respected the rights of foreigners and non-Muslims.
This confusion of facts in Marxist propaganda and American school textbooks has led to some amazing, outlandish, and incredible dichotomies and claims. In 2014 for example when the Islamic State was declared, Wikipedia claimed that Syria had won its "independence" from France in 1940 when France "liberated" Syria from France. The article has since been cleaned up somewhat, but still leaves more questions than answers for serious students seeking to understand the contemporary Syrian conflict, sans Marxist distortion of terms and historical meaning.
Hong Kong was among the most successful "victims" of Western colonialism who built a native tradition of love for freedom, and whose native population has "suffered and been victimized" by Western prosperity "forced" on the population.
Barack Obama's half-brother in Dinesh D'Souza's 2016: Obama's America had acknowledged that they shouldn't have thrown off the colonists until after they've learned how to make bicycles.