Modern socialism and modern colonialism are coeval products of the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries – a period of transition that in the West saw the formation of new political ideas and social theory, socialism among them. It was also a watershed for the West’s periphery. Emancipatory movements swept the American empires of Britain and Spain. Slavery in Haiti was overthrown in a revolution claiming universal human rights. The newly formed states in America spawned settlement projects of continental dimensions, epitomized in the US idea of Manifest Destiny, radicalized settler colonialism. British colonial conquest reached to India, southern Africa, and Australia; from the 1830s, France resumed expansion into Africa, beginning in Algeria.