Colony

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A colony is a territory subject to a form of foreign rule,^[1] which rules the territory and its indigenous peoples separated from the foreign rulers, the colonizer, and their metropole (or "mother country").^[2] This separated rule was often organized into colonial empires, with their metropoles at their centers, making colonies neither annexed or even integrated territories, nor client states. Particularly new imperialism and its colonialism advanced this separated rule and its lasting coloniality. Colonies were most often set up and colonized for exploitation and possibly settlement by colonists.^[3]

The term colony originates from the ancient Roman colonia, a type of Roman settlement. Derived from colonus (farmer, cultivator, planter, or settler), it carries with it the sense of 'farm' and 'landed estate'.^[4] Furthermore, the term was used to refer to the older Greek apoikia (Ancient Greek: ἀποικία, lit. 'home away from home'), which were overseas settlements by ancient Greek city-states. The city that founded such a settlement became known as its metropolis ("mother-city"). Since early-modern times, historians, administrators, and political scientists have generally used the term "colony" to refer mainly to the many different overseas territories of particularly European states between the 15th and 20th centuries CE, with colonialism and decolonization as corresponding phenomena.

While colonies often developed from trading outposts or territorial claims, such areas do not need to be a product of colonization, nor become colonially organized territories. Territories furthermore do not need to have been militarily conquered and occupied to come under colonial rule and to be considered de facto colonies, instead neocolonial exploitation of dependency or imperialist use of power to intervene to force policy, might make a territory be considered a colony, which broadens the concept, including indirect rule or puppet states (contrasted by more independent types of client states such as vassal states). Subsequently, some historians have used the term informal colony to refer to a country under a de facto control of another state. Though the broadening of the concept is often contentious.

Contemporarily colonies are identified and organized as not sufficiently self-governed dependent territories. Other past colonies have become either sufficiently incorporated and self-governed, or independent, with some to a varying degree dominated by remaining colonial settler societies or neocolonialism.