Colonialism itself is a doctrine that during the 19th and 20th centuries sought to justify the control and exploitation of numerous territories by Western powers for their own benefit, i.e. the act of colonisation.
The first cases that respond to the process of domination and exploitation of a territory by a foreign human group can be identified as early as the first millennium before our era in the Mediterranean, in the Cretan, Phoenician and Greek foundations. These were permanent commercial establishments at a great distance from the metropolis that created and controlled them.
However, it is the enormous process of Roman expansion that gives its name to this phenomenon. Colonialism and colonisation come from the term colony, which derives from the Latin verb colere (to cultivate). The Roman colonies are settlements of citizens (colonists) in the territory conquered by Rome for agricultural exploitation, and their multiplication led to the Romanisation process.
Before the development of the modern colonial era, in the 14th and 15th centuries, Venetian and Genoese settlements emerged, Mediterranean commercial establishments that would have a major influence on later colonisation phenomena.
European colonial expansion
From the 15th to the 20th century, the modern colonisation that has had such an influence on the historical development of the 20th century and whose economic, social and political consequences can still be seen at the beginning of the 21st century. In this sense, knowledge of the modern and contemporary colonial process is fundamental for understanding the global reality of the 21st century.
In the modern colonising process, three stages can be distinguished; the first developed the 15th and 18th centuries, which can be described as modern European colonial expansion, an intermediate phase in the 19th century, characterised by the greatest colonial expansion and the change of the colonising powers, and a later phase developed from the end of the 19th and 20th centuries, which can be described as modern imperialist.
European expansion took place through various models: establishments or factories for commercial purposes, support bases and territorial possessions for the settlement of colonists from the metropolis.