A number of things may explain colonization [see slides]
Culture might have been one of them: the civilizing push.
Rudyard Kipling, born in Bombay, wrote a poem called “the white man’s burden.”
Schumpeter argues colonialism is not effective economically. In 1919
He argues that colonialism was chaotic and inherited from prior wars (as a habit I guess).
Confucius my beloved
The Arab world is different because there are no strong states. There are suprastates, which are very big. There are too many competitors here. In Europe there were only a handful of states, so they could compete and expand. The Arabs dominated global trade, f.e. the Indian Ocean.
[None of this is new knowledge, I am not taking notes.]