For thousands of years, from ancient Persia, to Greece, Rome, China, and Aztec and Inca America, to the enormous colonial empires of Britain, Spain, and France in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, colonialism was claimed by leaders of the metropole to be good for both the imperial power and the colonial holding. Colonialism – the political control, physical occupation, and domination by one group of people over another people and their land for purposes of extraction and settlement to benefit the occupiers – was considered a “normal” practice until the early twentieth century. In most cases, occupied land was distant from the center, or metropole, of the people from the occupying state and control was against the express wishes of the occupied people.