This highly acclaimed book represents a new approach to colonialism. Concise but sweeping, it encompasses the processes of colonization and decolonization from the early modern period to the twentieth century.

Virtually all other authors to date have looked at strategies of colonial conquest, exploitation, and rule from the imperial point of view. Osterhammel shows that the colonial situation developed in ways that duplicated neither the metropolis nor the pre-colonial society, but instead blended these and added a new direction characteristic only of colonial realms.

Osterhammel emphasizes that the Europeans were normally not considered dangerous invaders by local population until they threatened the traditional cultures with missionaries, European schools, and bureaucracy.