I bought a book about Indonesia this summer. It was written in 1942, when Indonesia was still a Dutch colony, though Holland was occupied by the Germans, the irony. I am interested in the history of colonization, especially in the former Dutch colonies. There are many books written about that period, but I liked this one because it was written at a time when people still openly thought it was a good idea to colonise other countries. So far, the book is interesting, but that’s mainly because of how the writer writes about how people traveled to the East over the centuries in the first few pages. After that, he brushes over a lot of wars and conquering. To fact-check, I ended up looking at several discussions on YouTube about Dutch history, and I learned a lot. I won’t border you with the details; they are 2-hour-long roundtable discussions in Dutch, easy to find if you are interested. It’s not that I didn’t know these things, but the details fill in many interesting gaps. 

If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism, we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. Vladimir Lenin