The colonies they still hold.

The word "post-colonial" was an act of optimism. It assumed something had ended. The following is a partial — deliberately partial, because the full list would be a book — inventory of what has not.

I. The colonies that still have governors

The United States holds Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands as "unincorporated territories" — a legal category invented by the Supreme Court in the Insular Cases of 1901, which ruled that the Constitution does not fully apply to people whose ancestors the United States acquired by war. Roughly three and a half million U.S. nationals cannot vote for the president whose military serves in their name.

The United Kingdom still holds fourteen "British Overseas Territories", including the Falklands, Gibraltar, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, and the British Indian Ocean Territory — that last one created in 1965 by forcibly expelling the entire Chagossian population so the United States could build a military base on Diego Garcia. The Chagossians, more than half a century later, are still not allowed home.

France holds thirteen overseas dependencies, including Mayotte, Réunion, French Guiana, Martinique, Guadeloupe, New Caledonia and French Polynesia. New Caledonia held independence referendums in 2018, 2020 and 2021; Paris counted the third one despite a Kanak boycott during COVID and announced that the territory had chosen France. In May 2024, when the French parliament tried to dilute the Kanak vote further, the territory rose in protest and Paris flew in police.

The Netherlands still holds Aruba, Curaçao, Sint Maarten, Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba; Denmark still administers Greenland, whose subsoil — newly accessible as the ice melts — is suddenly of intense strategic interest. None of these are anomalies. They are the continuation, in legal form, of the project that began in the fifteenth century.

II. The Commonwealth and the trick of the soft word

The British Empire did not dissolve. It rebranded. The Commonwealth of Nations, with its 56 member states and its smiling biennial summits, is the empire's pension plan. The British monarch remains head of state in fifteen "Commonwealth realms" — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Jamaica, the Bahamas and others — and judicial appeals from several Caribbean and Pacific countries still go, ultimately, to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council sitting in London. A judge in Westminster can still overturn a court in Mauritius, by treaty.

The "Commonwealth" preference scheme also gave Britain, for most of the twentieth century, privileged access to the food, raw materials and cheap labour of the formerly colonised. The Windrush generation, invited from the Caribbean to rebuild post-war Britain, were then in 2018 stripped of their citizenship by a Home Office that had quietly destroyed their landing cards.

III. The currency that is not yours

Fourteen African states still use the CFA franc, a currency invented in 1945 — its initials originally stood for "Colonies françaises d'Afrique"— and managed, in practice, from Paris. Until 2019, half of these countries' foreign reserves were held in the French Treasury. The CFA's fixed peg means African governments cannot devalue when they need to; their monetary policy is, in effect, made by the European Central Bank. Senegal's elected leadership cannot set its own interest rate. Côte d'Ivoire's central bank cannot print to fight a recession. This is a colonial relationship described in the language of central banking.

IV. The bases on someone else's lawn

The United States operates an estimated 750 military bases in roughly 80 countries, including in countries that have asked it, repeatedly, to leave. France maintains permanent garrisons across the Sahel and the Pacific. The United Kingdom retains "sovereign base areas" in Cyprus. None of these arrangements are reciprocal. There is no Senegalese base in Bordeaux, no Iraqi base in Texas, no Cuban base in Florida.

V. The land, the seabed, the subsoil

Most of the cobalt that powers the electric vehicles in Berlin, Oslo and San Francisco is dug, often by children, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The processing then happens in China; the profit accrues to listed companies in the North; the social and environmental cost stays in Lualaba. The pattern repeats with lithium in the salt flats of Bolivia and Chile, with bauxite in Guinea, with coltan in eastern Congo, with rare earths in Inner Mongolia and Myanmar, with uranium in Niger that has lit French light-bulbs for half a century.

When the Sahel coup wave of 2020–2023 produced governments that wanted to renegotiate these arrangements, the Western press explained, with grave concern, that the region was "destabilising". The arrangement being defended was the colonial concession.

VI. The new colonialism: data, code, and seeds

A farmer in Maharashtra now pays a royalty, every season, to a Missouri-based corporation for the right to plant a seed her grandmother could have saved from last year's harvest. The intellectual-property regime imposed through the WTO's TRIPS agreement turned ancestral knowledge — turmeric, neem, basmati — into objects that could be patented in Western capitals and licensed back to the people who had cultivated them for millennia.

The new "AI revolution" runs on text and images scraped, without consent, from the archives of every culture on earth, but the resulting models are owned by five American and two Chinese corporations. The cloud infrastructure those models depend on sits in five jurisdictions. The labelling work — the part where humans tag thousands of disturbing images per shift for two dollars an hour — is contracted out to Kenya, the Philippines and Venezuela. The pattern is so familiar that giving it a new name would be flattering it.

VII. Brain extraction

The most efficient extraction in the modern system is no longer rubber or sugar. It is a person. A British medical school costs the NHS more than £270,000 per graduate; a Filipino, Nigerian or Indian doctor working in the same hospital arrived pre-trained, at no cost to the British taxpayer. Roughly 38% of Iranian physicians work outside Iran. Over half of Sierra Leone's nurses work abroad. The richest countries on earth import care work from the poorest, refuse to pay for the training, and then complain about the cost of immigration.

VIII. The war as extraction

Every major Western war of the last seventy years has, in addition to its stated objective, restructured a national economy in a way useful to Western contractors. The 2003 invasion of Iraq produced the privatisation of Iraqi oil and a generation of no-bid contracts for Halliburton, KBR, Bechtel and Blackwater. The 2011 destruction of Libya delivered the country's oil fields to a chaos that the international majors have learned to operate in. The 2014–2024 wars in Yemen, Syria and Sudan have delivered, between them, a refugee crisis that European centre-right governments have used to roll back the right to asylum across the continent.

A useful test: whenever a Western military intervention is described as "humanitarian", look at the contracts that follow it. The humanitarianism leaves; the contracts stay.

IX. The labels themselves are a tool

"Developing country." "Emerging market." "Failed state." "Global South." "Sub-Saharan Africa." "MENA." "Fragile context." "Conflict-affected." Each of these terms describes the same set of countries from a different angle, and each implies the same thing: that the natural state of these places is incomplete, that they are on a journey towards a destination defined by someone else, and that the someone else is permitted — even obligated — to assist, advise, or in extremity, intervene.

A more honest vocabulary would talk about the over-exploited world. Or about the creditor nations, since most Global South countries are net creditors to the Global North if you count what was taken. Or simply about countries by name, without the imperial subtitle.

X. The undersea cable and the satellite

Roughly 99% of all intercontinental internet traffic moves through fewer than 600 submarine cables. The companies that own and lay them — SubCom, Alcatel Submarine Networks, NEC, and increasingly Google, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon — are headquartered almost entirely in five jurisdictions: the United States, France, Japan, the United Kingdom and (now) China. African internet traffic between two African cities routinely transits via Marseille or London. Latin American traffic frequently routes through Miami. The colonial ports of the 19th century — Suez, Alexandria, Singapore, Lisbon, Marseille — are still the chokepoints, only now they carry data.

Low-earth-orbit satellite internet is consolidating along the same axis. A single American company operates more than 60% of all active satellites in orbit, can be switched off or geofenced unilaterally, and was reportedly disabled near Crimea by its owner in the middle of an ongoing war. There is no equivalent African, Latin American or Southeast Asian network. There is no plan for one.

XI. Vaccine apartheid

When mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 became available in 2020, rich countries pre-purchased enough doses to vaccinate their populations four or five times over while South Africa and India spent the next two years asking the WTO to suspend patent protection so the technology — developed largely on public funding — could be produced locally. The proposal was blocked at the WTO by the EU, the UK, Switzerland and (until a partial reversal) the United States, on behalf of Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and BioNTech.

By the time Africa had vaccinated 20% of its population, the United Kingdom had dosed 75% of its own and started discarding expired stock. Estimates published in Nature put the avoidable death toll of vaccine apartheid at over 1.3 million in the first 18 months alone. The pattern repeats with HIV antiretrovirals, with insulin, with cancer therapy — the molecule belongs to whoever can pay the licence.

XII. Carbon colonialism and the offset market

The new wave of climate finance increasingly takes the form of land deals: European and North American corporations buy 'offsets' from forests in Kenya, Tanzania, Liberia, Cambodia, Peru and Indonesia, often by displacing the Indigenous communities who have managed those forests for centuries. The Ogiek of Kenya were evicted from the Mau Forest in 2023 to clear a carbon-credit project. The Maasai are being moved out of Loliondo for conservation concessions sold to Gulf royalty. Investigations by The Guardian, Die Zeit and SourceMaterial found in 2023 that more than 90% of rainforest offsets sold by the largest certifier, Verra, were 'worthless' — the claimed emissions reductions did not exist.

The carbon economy is, structurally, the new sugar economy. The North continues to emit. The South provides the land. The intermediaries in London and Geneva take a cut on the paperwork. The Indigenous communities are moved, again.

XIII. The investment-tribunal regime

Buried inside more than 2,500 bilateral investment treaties signed in the 1990s and 2000s is a mechanism called Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS). It allows a foreign corporation to sue a sovereign government — outside its courts, in a private arbitration panel of three lawyers — when a new law (an environmental regulation, a minimum wage, a tobacco-control measure) reduces expected profits. Philip Morris sued Uruguay over plain-packaging tobacco rules. Vattenfall sued Germany for €4.7 billion when it phased out nuclear power. Chevron has fought Ecuador for decades over Amazonian oil contamination. Awards routinely exceed a country's annual health budget.

The architecture is the same as the 19th-century capitulations — extraterritorial courts to which the strong party submits the weak — only this time the language is 'investor protection'. There is no equivalent mechanism through which a citizen of Niger can sue a French oil company in a French court for what was extracted from the Aïr massif.

XIV. The ghost fleets and the stolen fish

Off the coast of West Africa, between 30% and 50% of all fish caught are taken illegally by industrial trawlers flagged to Spain, China, Russia, South Korea and the EU at large. Senegalese, Mauritanian and Guinean small-boat fishers, whose families have worked these waters for centuries, return empty. The collapse of coastal fisheries is then explained, in EU policy papers, as a 'driver of irregular migration', and the same EU pays Frontex to intercept the men whose livelihoods its trawlers just destroyed. The boat in the Mediterranean and the trawler off Dakar are the same story.

XV. The waste returns, but only one way

Europe ships roughly 1.5 million tonnes of plastic waste a year to Southeast Asia and West Africa for 'recycling', much of which is in fact dumped or burned, poisoning the groundwater of villages in Malaysia, Vietnam, Turkey and Ghana. Old electronics go to Agbogbloshie in Accra and to Guiyu in Guangdong. Decommissioned European ships, full of asbestos and PCBs, are beached at Alang, Chittagong and Gadani for hand dismantling by workers paid two dollars a day. The Basel Convention is meant to prohibit this. It is routinely circumvented. The arrow of waste, like the arrow of extraction, runs one way.