Thailand never got colonized by any power, European or Asianīut the biggest, most remarkable thing in the map is the ebb and flow in the territory controlled by the big European powers. The Japanese empire was pretty huge in 1938. Denmark had the earliest westward European colonies, in Greenland. Thailand never gets colonized by any power, European or Asian. Take a look at this GIF charting the rise and fall of (mostly) European empires from 1492, when the European discovery of the Americas kicked off their movement west and south, to 2008.Ī lot of interesting things pop out in that GIF. This modern success is all the more remarkable by the fact that, for most of history, countries loved to conquer land and subjugate the people living there.Įuropean colonialism has been far and away the worst offender in this regard in the last 500 years.
One of the things that bothers people so much about Russia's slow play to gobble up chunks of Ukraine is that countries, by and large, have stopped annexing each others' territory since World War II.
