We hear of anti-colonialism and imperialism constantly, which prompted me to explore a simple question: what would the world look like if everyone had been isolationist?

Not morally isolationist. Not intellectually closed. Just nations largely staying within their own borders, developing internally, trading cautiously, and resisting the urge to dominate distant lands.

It’s an impossible counterfactual, of course—but it’s a revealing one.

Europe Without Empire

Without colonial expansion, Europe does not disappear from history. It simply becomes less dominant.

The scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, modern universities, legal systems, and capitalism all predate large-scale imperialism. Europe still modernizes. It still innovates.

What it loses is acceleration.

Empire provided cheap resources, captive markets, and vast capital flows that turbocharged European economies. Without it, Europe develops more slowly, more evenly, and with less global reach. Financial centers remain important but not hegemonic. National pride is rooted more in internal achievement than global conquest.

The World Without Extraction

For much of Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East, colonialism did not introduce modernity—it interrupted it.

India, once one of the world’s largest economies, was systematically deindustrialized and reorganized around extraction. Without British rule, it likely industrializes earlier and more organically, closer to East Asia’s path.

Africa’s story is more complex, but without artificial borders and extractive institutions, many regions would likely be less poor, more politically coherent, and less dependent, even if not uniformly prosperous.

The global south would not be utopia—but it would not be structurally broken in the same way.

The Settler-State Paradox

Countries like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand raise uncomfortable questions.

Without colonialism:

  • These states likely do not exist as we know them
  • Indigenous civilizations persist and evolve
  • Population sizes are smaller
  • Borders look very different

Modern settler democracies are inseparable from imperial expansion. A non-colonial world is also a world without these nations in their current form.

That’s not a moral judgment. It’s historical reality.

What Wouldn’t Change

Even in an isolationist world:

  • Inequality would still exist
  • Power would still concentrate
  • Violence would still occur
  • Strong institutions would still outperform weak ones

Colonialism intensified inequality, but it didn’t invent hierarchy.

Empires existed everywhere. Europeans just globalized and industrialized the model.

The Real Lesson

The most honest conclusion is also the least satisfying.

Without colonialism:

  • Europe would be less dominant
  • The global south would be stronger
  • Global inequality would be lower
  • But injustice would not disappear

History doesn’t offer clean alternatives. It offers trade-offs.

Colonialism was morally indefensible and devastating. It also shaped the world we live in, including institutions that later enabled decolonization, globalization, and modern states.

Two things can be true at once.

Why Context Still Matters

Reducing history to slogans—“empire bad” or “empire built the modern world”—misses the point.

The world we inherited is uneven because power is uneven. Colonialism magnified that imbalance, but human societies have always organized around dominance, extraction, and hierarchy.

The real question isn’t whether history could have been fair.

It’s whether we can be more honest about how unfair it was—and still is.

Closing Thought

A world without colonialism might have been more equal, less violent, and less traumatized.

It also would have been slower, smaller, and more fragmented.

Context doesn’t absolve history.
But without context, we misunderstand it entirely.