There were four key components to historical colonialism: the appropriation of resources; the evolution of highly unequal social and economic relations that secured resource appropriation (including slavery and other forms of forced labor as well as unequal trading relations); a massively unequal global distribution of the benefits of resource appropriation; and the spread of ideologies to make sense of all this (for example, the reframing of colonial appropriation as the release of "natural" resources, the government of "inferior" peoples, and the bringing of "civilization" to the world).

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 64