State-creation in the former colonial areas, and to a different degree in some of the former Soviet republics since 1991, has taken patterns and trajectories significantly different from those of Europe since the fifteenth century. In the latter, there was a lengthy historical project to give political meaning to the geographical expressions called France, Germany, Sweden, and the like. The consequence of wars, centralization, taxes, and the provision of services was to create a form of political organization called the state.

The original purposes of colonialism, in contrast, never included state-making. European overseas conquests after the fifteenth century had nothing in common with the state-consolidation projects of Louis XIV, Peter the Great, Frederick the Great, or Bismarck. Imperialism was driven by a variety of purposes: trade, slavery, exploitation of resources, “civilizing” the barbarians, religious conversion to Christianity, ending the Arab slave trade (late nineteenth century), securing strategic territories, and emulation: if the British were expanding in Africa, the Germans had to do the same in order to maintain their status as a great power. Colonialism was as much a product of European external rivalries as of domestic imperatives. Conspicuously absent from this non-exhaustive list of the purposes of colonialism is any state-making project. Whether the colonialism of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries, or its late nineteenth-century counterpart, the colonial leaders, encompassing the military, government officials, colonial societies, political parties, and the churches, never assumed that some day the subjugated peoples should or could create a state form of political organization.