Which European countries had the largest colonial empires?

By 1914 the British Empire was the largest in human history, covering about a quarter of the world's land. France held the second-largest overseas empire, followed by the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Denmark. The United States built a contiguous and overseas empire from 1803 onward.

Which colonial empire was the most violent per capita?

Belgium. King Leopold II's Congo Free State (1885–1908) killed between 5 and 15 million people on a population base smaller than any other major colony, with mass amputation institutionalised as a quota-enforcement tool by the Force Publique.

Did the United States have colonies?

Yes. The US annexed Hawaii (1898), seized the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam and Cuba from Spain (1898), occupied Haiti (1915–1934) and the Dominican Republic (1916–1924), and still administers Puerto Rico, Guam, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands. It maintains roughly 750 overseas military bases in about 80 countries.

When did the European empires end?

Formal decolonisation peaked between 1945 and 1980 but never fully concluded. France still controls the CFA franc across 14 African states; the UK, France, the Netherlands, Denmark and the US still hold inhabited overseas territories; and the Commonwealth retains the British monarch as head of state in 14 realms.

I·0Reference — Empires

The Empires

Six modern states, each a defendant on its own terms. Country profiles, audited.

Modern European colonialism was not the work of a single nation. It was a five-century joint enterprise carried out by roughly a dozen states, financed by their banks, insured by their underwriters, blessed by their churches and taught in their schools as civilisation. This section profiles the six whose archives are deepest, whose death tolls are most contested, and whose afterlives are most visible in the world of 2026.

Each profile is built on the same template: a chronology, a method of extraction, a casualty range with sources, a reckoning record (apologies, returns, reparations — paid or refused), and a short list of what survives today. Pages are designed to be read in isolation — share a single empire's link without losing context — but written so that, read together, the same patterns reappear: chartered companies, racial law, plantation labour, famine policy, repression of revolt, denial in the metropole.

Why these six

The selection is not a ranking of guilt. It is a working scope chosen on four criteria: (1) the empire's archives are open enough to allow audited claims rather than estimates; (2) its colonial period overlaps with the industrial era and global capital, so the wealth it produced still circulates; (3) it has been the subject of sustained academic historiography in the past three decades; and (4) its political successor state still exists, so the reckoning has a defendant who can answer the door.

Portugal, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Russia and Japan are not absent because their record was milder. They are deferred because each deserves the same level of citation discipline the existing six have been given, and the archive prefers slow over comprehensive. Where their actions intersect the profiled empires — the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, the Spanish silver mines of Potosí, the Italian use of poison gas in Ethiopia, the Danish slave trade in the Caribbean, Japan's colonial rule in Korea and Manchuria — they appear in the relevant chapter.

At a glance

Empire	Peak extent	Lower-bound deaths	Formal end	Still holding territory?
Belgium	~2.3M km² (Congo)	5–15 million (Congo Free State)	1960	No
Britain	~35.5M km² (1920)	tens of millions (famines, partitions, camps)	1997 (Hong Kong)	Yes — 14 BOTs incl. Chagos, Falklands
France	~13M km² (1920)	~1m Algeria; Haiti, Indochina, West Africa	1962 (Algeria)	Yes — DOM-TOM; CFA franc zone
Germany	~2.9M km² (1914)	Herero/Nama genocide (~80,000)	1919 (Versailles)	No
Netherlands	~2M km² (Indonesia)	Banda massacre; Java; police actions	1949 (Indonesia)	Yes — Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten
United States	~10M km² (contiguous)	Indigenous nations; Philippines; interventions	n/a	Yes — 5 inhabited territories; ~750 bases

Figures are lower-bound and rounded; per-empire chapters give the contested ranges and the historians who argue them.

Empires not yet profiled

A working list of states whose colonial records are documented in the chapters above but do not yet have full audit pages of their own:

Spain — the Americas after 1492; Philippines; Equatorial Guinea; Western Sahara.
Portugal — Brazil; Angola; Mozambique; Guinea-Bissau; East Timor; the foundations of the Atlantic slave trade.
Italy — Libya (1911–1943); Ethiopia (1935–41); Eritrea; Somalia; the use of mustard gas against civilians.
Denmark — the Danish West Indies; the Gold Coast slaving forts; Greenland.
Russia / USSR — Siberia; the Caucasus; Central Asia; the Tsarist and Soviet imperial structures.
Japan — Taiwan (1895–1945); Korea (1910–1945); Manchukuo; wartime forced labour and comfort women.