Map: European

colonialism conquered
every country in the world
but these five
Updated by Max Fisher on February 24, 2015, 10:24 a.m. ET

It's no secret that European colonialism was a vast, and often devastating,
project that over several centuries put nearly the entire world under control
of one European power or another. But just how vast can be difficult to fully
appreciate.
Here, to give you a small sense of European colonialism's massive scale, is
a map showing every country put under partial or total European control
during the colonial era, which ran roughly from the 1500s to the 1960s.
Only five countries, in orange, were spared:

As you can see, just about every corner of the globe was colonized outright
or was dominated under various designations like "protectorate" or
"mandate," all of which are indicated in green. This includes the entirety of
the Americas (French Guiana is incorrectly labeled as part of Europe due a
technical issue, but make no mistake, it was colonized) and all of Africa
save for little Liberia. More on Liberia later. The Middle East and Asia were
divided up as well.
ALMOST EVERY CORNER OF THE GLOBE CAME UNDER EUROPEAN
CONTROL
Some countries instead fell under "spheres of influence," marked in yellow,
in which a European power would declare that country or some part of it
subject to their influence, which was a step removed from but in practice
not all that distinct from conquering it outright. Iran, for example, was
divided between British and Russian sphere of influence, which meant that
the European powers owned exclusive rights to Iranian oil and gas in their
areas, among other things.

Most of the areas under spheres of influence on this map were politically
dominated by the British, who ruled through proxies: Afghanistan (which
also endured Russian influence), Bhutan, and Nepal. Mongolia was
effectively a proxy state of the Soviet Union for much of the Cold War.
Something similar happened in China, where European powers established
parts of coastal cities or trade ports as "concessions," which they occupied
and controlled. Some, such as Shanghai, were divided into multiple
European concessions. Others, like British-controlled Hong Kong, were
fully absorbed into the European empires. This is why China is labelled as
partially dominated by Europe.
Modern-day Saudi Arabia came under partial domination; in the early
1900s, most of the Arabian peninsula transitioned from the Ottoman Empire
to the British Empire, though the British left much of the peninsula's vast
interior relatively untouched. Parts of modern-day Turkey itself were divided
among World War One's European victors, though Turkish nationalists
successfully expelled them almost immediately in a war for independence
that established modern-day Turkey.

A French pith helmet used in colonial service in Madagascar under the Second French Empire (Rama)

There are only four countries that escaped European colonialism

completely. Japan and Korea successfully staved off European domination,
in part due to their strength and diplomacy, their isolationist policies, and
perhaps their distance. Thailand was spared when the British and French
Empires decided to let it remained independent as a buffer between Britishcontrolled Burma and French Indochina. Japan, however, colonized both
Korea and Thailand itself during its early-20th-century imperial period.

Then there is Liberia, which European powers spared because the United
States backed the Liberian state, which was established in the early 1800s
by freed American slaves who had decided to move to Africa. The Liberian
project was fraught the Americans who moved there ruled as a
privileged minority, and the US and European powers shipped former
slaves there rather than actually account for their enslavement but it
escaped European domination.
There is also debate as to whether Ethiopia could be considered the sixth
country never subjugated by European colonialism. Italy colonized
neighboring countries, and Ethiopia ceded several territories to Italian
colonization as part of an 1889 treaty. The treaty was also intended to force
Ethiopia to cede its foreign affairs to Italy a hallmark of colonial
subjugation but the Amharic version of the treaty excluded this fact due
to a mistranslation, leading to a war that Italy lost. Later, Italy conquered
Ethiopia in 1935 and annexed it the next year, but this lasted only until
1941. While some consider this period of Italian rule to be a function of
colonialism, others argue that it's better understood as part of World War
Two and thus no more Italian colonization than the Nazi conquest of Poland
was German colonization although it could be certainly be argued that
these fascist expansions were in fact a form of colonialism, as many
eastern Europeans might.
The colonial period began its end after World War Two, when the
devastated nations of Western Europe could no longer afford to exert such
global influence and as global norms shifted against them. The turning
point is sometimes considered the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US and
Soviet Union pressured British and French troops to withdraw after
invading Egypt to seize the Suez Canal with Israeli help. But it took a
couple of decades for the European colonialism to fully collapse; France
was fighting for Algeria until 1962 and Portugal did not abandon its African
colonies until 1974. So this map, of a European-dominated world, is not as
distant as it may feel for many Americans.