Book excerpt: From the late 1400s to the mid-1900s, the world's great powers engaged in a virtual feeding frenzy of conquest, colonization, and often ruthless exploitation of less developed regions and populations. Only in 1970 did the United Nations outlaw colonialism. This volume documents the rise and fall of the great colonial empires in North and South Amercia, Africa, the Far East, and the Pacific region, and explores how many of the political and cultural problems the world faces today were created by the imperial and colonial practices of the past.