It's no secret that European colonialism was a vast, and often devastating, project that over several centuries put nearly the entire world under control of one European power or another. But just how vast can be difficult to fully appreciate.

众所周知，欧洲殖民主义是一项巨大的，通常也是颇具毁灭性的的工程。长达多个世纪，整个世界不是被这个就是被另外一个欧洲列强所控制。但是这个工程具体有多大却很少有人认知。

Here, to give you a small sense of European colonialism's massive scale, is a map showing every country put under partial or total European control during the colonial era, which ran roughly from the 1500s to the 1960s. Only five countries, in orange, were spared:

在这里，我们将小小的跟您展示下欧洲殖民主义的巨大规模。下面这张地图展示了从16世纪到20世纪60年代的殖民时代，那些曾部分或者举国被欧洲殖民过的国家。只有五个国家，被标为橙色，幸免于难。
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As you can see, just about every corner of the globe was colonized outright or was dominated under various designations like "protectorate" or "mandate," all of which are indicated in green. This includes the entirety of the Americas (French Guiana is incorrectly labeled as part of Europe due a technical issue, but make no mistake, it was colonized) and all of Africa save for little Liberia. More on Liberia later. The Middle East and Asia were divided up as well.

正如您所见，几乎地球上每个角落都曾被欧洲列强直接殖民或者以“宗主国”“保护国”的名义统治过，也就是地图上标以绿色的部分。这包括整个美洲大陆（由于技术故障，法属圭亚那虽然被错误的标记为欧洲本部，但是不会错，它也是殖民地）整个非洲大陆，除去利比里亚。（不久后也包括了利比里亚）中东和亚洲同样也被瓜分殆尽。

Some countries instead fell under "spheres of influence," marked in yellow, in which a European power would declare that country or some part of it subject to their influence, which was a step removed from but in practice not all that distinct from conquering it outright. Iran, for example, was divided between British and Russian sphere of influence, which meant that the European powers owned exclusive rights to Iranian oil and gas in their areas, among other things.

有些国家，被标为黄色，被划为欧洲列强的势力范围。这表明欧洲列强，根据其影响力不同，能够对这些国家的全部国土或者某部分资源保留权力，这也仅仅是比沦为完全的殖民地稍微好了一点点。举个例子，伊朗就曾经是俄国和英国的势力范围，意味着这两国对伊朗境内的油气资源有着独享权。
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Most of the areas under spheres of influence on this map were politically dominated by the British, who ruled through proxies: Afghanistan (which also endured Russian influence), Bhutan, and Nepal. Mongolia was effectively a proxy state of the Soviet unx for much of the Cold War.

这张势力范围地图上的大部分地区被英国通过扶植代理人的方式统治， 如阿富汗（也受到俄国影响）、不丹、尼泊尔。蒙古在大部分冷战时期实际是苏联扶植的代理国家。

Something similar happened in China, where European powers established parts of coastal cities or trade ports as "concessions," which they occupied and controlled. Some, such as Shanghai, were divided into multiple European concessions. Others, like British-controlled Hong Kong, were fully absorbed into the European empires. This is why China is labelled as partially dominated by Europe.

相似的事情也发生在中国，在那里欧洲帝国主义把部分沿海城市或贸易港口作为他们占领并管理的特权区。比如上海就被分为了多个欧洲国家的租界。另外如英国掌控的香港，是被完全置于了欧洲帝国的统治之下。这就是为什么中国被称为欧洲的半殖民地的原因。

Modern-day Saudi Arabia came under partial domination; in the early 1900s, most of the Arabian peninsula transitioned from the Ottoman Empire to the British Empire, though the British left much of the peninsula's vast interior relatively untouched. Parts of modern-day Turkey itself were divided among World War One's European victors, though Turkish nationalists successfully expelled them almost immediately in a war for independence that established modern-day Turkey.

现代沙特阿拉伯也曾被欧洲部分统治。 在20世纪初期， 尽管没有染指半岛的广大内陆地区，大英帝国从奥斯曼土耳其帝国手中夺取了绝大部分阿拉伯半岛的治权。尽管土耳其国家主义者在短时间内成功的通过独立战争赶跑了殖民者并建立了现代的土耳其国，这个国家的部分也还是被一战战胜国瓜分过。


There are only four countries that escaped European colonialism completely. Japan and Korea successfully staved off European domination, in part due to their strength and diplomacy, their isolationist policies, and perhaps their distance. Thailand was spared when the British and French Empires decided to let it remained independent as a buffer between British-controlled Burma and French Indochina. Japan, however, colonized both Korea and Thailand itself during its early-20th-century imperial period.

只有四个国家完完全全的没有遭受过欧洲殖民者的入侵。日本，高丽之所以能够逃离魔爪，部分原因是因为其外交斡旋能力，其孤立主义的国策以及跟欧洲本部之间的距离。泰国的幸免于难是因为英帝国和法帝国决定在英属缅甸和法属人之间留一个独立的缓冲国。但是，日本在其20世纪初期的帝国时期就占领了高丽跟泰国。

Then there is Liberia, which European powers spared because the United States backed the Liberian state, which was established in the early 1800s by freed American slaves who had decided to move to Africa. The Liberian project was fraught — the Americans who moved there ruled as a privileged minority, and the US and European powers shipped former slaves there rather than actually account for their enslavement — but it escaped European domination.

接下来是利比里亚。 它没有个欧洲殖民主义染指的一个原因就是背后有美国撑腰。19世纪时，解放了的美国黑奴决心返回非洲并建立了利比里亚。然而“利比里亚工程”只是个骗局：移居至此的美国人作为特权阶级统治着这个国家，而且美国和欧洲列强将“被解放”的黑奴运输至此，而不是真正给他们以自由。但是不管怎么说，它还是没有被欧洲人统治过。

There is also debate as to whether Ethiopia could be considered the sixth country never subjugated by European colonialism. Italy colonized neighboring countries, and Ethiopia ceded several territories to Italian colonization as part of an 1889 treaty. The treaty was also intended to force Ethiopia to cede its foreign affairs to Italy — a hallmark of colonial subjugation — but the Amharic version of the treaty excluded this fact due to a mistranslation, leading to a war that Italy lost. Later, Italy conquered Ethiopia in 1935 and annexed it the next year, but this lasted only until 1941. While some consider this period of Italian rule to be a function of colonialism, others argue that it's better understood as part of World War Two and thus no more Italian colonization than the Nazi conquest of Poland was German colonization — although it could be certainly be argued that these fascist expansions were in fact a form of colonialism, as many eastern Europeans might.

有关埃塞尔比亚是否是第六个没有被欧洲染指过的国家存在争议。意大利曾统治过其周边的国家，且根据１８８９年的条约，它还向意大利割让过多处领土。该条约同时欲强迫埃塞尔比亚将外交权拱手让给意大利-这就是被殖民的标志。但是在阿姆哈拉语版本的条约上由于翻译的原因将这一点删掉了，从而导致意大利与埃塞尔比亚开战，并且输掉了战争。不久，意大利在1935年侵占了埃塞尔比亚，并于次年吞并该国，但是这种状况仅仅持续到1941年。有些人认为在这段埃塞尔比亚就是在这段时间内被意大利殖民了，但是也有人认为最好还是把这个当做是二战的一部分，就如同德国在波兰的行为一般，并不是殖民，而是纳粹的侵略-虽然在相当一部分东欧人眼中，法西斯的扩张就是殖民主义的另一种体现。

The colonial period began its end after World War Two, when the devastated nations of Western Europe could no longer afford to exert such global influence and as global norms shifted against them. The turning point is sometimes considered the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US and Soviet unx pressured British and French troops to withdraw after invading Egypt to seize the Suez Canal with Israeli help. But it took a couple of decades for the European colonialism to fully collapse; France was fighting for Algeria until 1962 and Portugal did not abandon its African colonies until 1974. So this map, of a European-dominated world, is not as distant as it may feel for many Americans.

殖民时代于二战结束后开始缓缓落下帷幕。满目疮痍的西欧国家已无力维持其全球的影响力，尤其在当时反殖民主义已经是全球共识。1956年的苏伊士运河时间加速了其衰落进程。当法英和以色列在入侵埃及后打算侵占苏伊士运河时，美国和苏联对其施压要其撤军。但是，几十年过后，欧洲殖民主义才真正退出历史舞台：直到1963年法国才停止对阿尔及利亚的军事行动，直到1974年，葡萄牙才放弃其在非洲的殖民地。因此，许多美国人对这幅描述了欧洲治世的地图并不感到陌生。