In the chronicle of relations between distinct groups and polities, conquest and empire-building figure prominently. History is in significant part a story of the rule of one “people” over others. Empires, not nation-states, have been the predominant forms of political organization throughout recorded history. Some empires, as typified in the Mongol sweep into Eastern Europe and the fertile crescent areas in the twelfth to fourteenth century, were based on systematic violence, plunder, destruction, and depredation. Such polities seldom endured beyond the lives of the great conquerors (e.g., Tamerlane, Ghengis Khan). Others, like the Roman Empire, while created primarily by force and subjugation, eventually developed legal systems that gave them a modicum of longevity and legitimacy. The colonization of the “New World” starting in the early sixteenth century resembled – at least for those who were conquered – more the Mongolian pattern. The early European colonial ventures in the New World amounted to a system of massacres, ethnic cleansing, forced labor, and coerced religious conversion. Though it had some legal underpinnings, it was more a process of conquest than of institution-building. Our concern is not with this early stage of European expansion, but with the creation of the modern empires that began in the early 1880s. This phase had all of the characteristics of international institutions as we have defined them.

Modern colonialism as an international institution

Here was a form of expansion in many ways distinct from its fifteenth- to eighteenth-century European predecessors and scarcely resembling most historical conquests.