"There are only ninety thousand people out there. Who gives a damn?"
-- Henry Kissinger on the Marshall Islander people affected by the US nuclear test programme
Like every other part of the world, as the Europeans developed their age of "guns, germs, steel, and sail", discovery, conversion, imperialism, and colonisation would follow in subsequent centuries. Often there is confusion over these terms, especially imperialism and colonialism. Given their importance, brief definitions are provided, before exploring the history, effects, and solutions. The four definitions that follow typically will occur in a temporal order.
Important Definitions
"Discovery" seems obvious enough, but is often used to deny the existing presence of indigenous peoples. Perhaps the most obvious examples are phrases like "Christopher Columbus discovered America", which of course is inaccurate in the sense that he and his crew "discovered" Cuba, the Bahamas archipelago, and then the island later named Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Of course, people had already discovered these lands and had settled there, the Taíno people. Arguably, one could say that if there was a discovery, it was of the mid-North Atlantic. Columbus, for what it's worth, was a religious fundamentalist and apocalypticist who refused to believe that the islands and coastlines that he visited were not part of Asia. As Matthew Inman has pointed out he was not a very nice person at all.
The phrase "conversion" refers to the religious conversion of populations which already had their own faith, and can be carried out through a continuum of forced conversion to persuasion by proselytism, and both means can be backed by State power, including State atheism. Persuasion by proselytism is typically more effective, organised with missionary zeal and acumen (c.f., the Jesuits), and especially when the converting faith, backed with wealth and influence, can incorporate or adapt existing elements of a mythos and social norms into their religious schema. Conversion of existing rulers is an effective means to soften resistance to a forthcoming imperial conquest.