---
name: Colonialism
slug: colonialism
type: political_system
status: deprecated
version: 5.2.1
released: "1415-01-01"
maintainer: "various European crowns (maintainership disputed)"
dependencies:
  - racism
  - mercantilism
  - gunpowder
  - cartography
  - the church
license: Proprietary (self-issued)
tags:
  - empire
  - extraction
  - governance
  - history
  - unresolved
---

Colonialism

What it actually is

A resource extraction framework dressed in a civilisation costume.

How it works

Identify a territory with resources, people, or strategic value.
Arrive with superior violence and a flag.
Install a local administrative layer to reduce overhead.
Extract labor, land, minerals, crops, and cultural confidence.
Write history as though step 2 was step 1.
Depart when operating costs exceed returns. Leave the flag.
Express surprise at instability.

The system is self-funding after approximately one generation. Returns compound. Cleanup costs are externalized indefinitely onto successor populations.

Features

Scalable: Runs on continents, islands, river deltas, mountain ranges.
Self-documenting: Generates enormous paper trails justifying itself.
Persistent state: Administrative boundaries, debt, and legal systems persist long after the main process exits.
Localization: Adapts branding per region. "Civilizing mission," "white man's burden," "protectorate," "mandate."
Missionary module: Optional add-on for cultural overwrite. Frequently bundled.

Known bugs

Identity corruption: Host cultures experience severe data loss. Not recoverable via patch.
Feedback loop: Extracted wealth funds the political systems that protect extracted wealth.
Memory leak: generational trauma accumulates without a garbage collector.
Race condition: Draws arbitrary borders across ethnic, linguistic, and ecological systems. Triggers conflicts centuries later.
Deprecation failure: System declared deprecated in 1960s. Core processes continue running under new process names.

Error codes

ERR_SOVEREIGNTY_VIOLATION       // Raised constantly. Suppressed at source.
ERR_TREATY_NULL_REF             // Treaty invoked on resource that no longer exists.
WARN_HISTORIAN_CONFLICT         // Competing truth tables detected.
ERR_REPARATIONS_UNRESOLVED      // Handler never implemented. Queue growing.
FATAL_CULTURE_SEGFAULT          // Language, religion, or lineage unrecoverable.

Edge cases

When the colonizer is also the colony (see: settler states): recursive dependency, system behavior undefined.
When resources are exhausted before independence: process exits but leaves no working infrastructure. Common.
When the colonized successfully run the same system on neighbors: documentation tends to omit this.

Changelog

Version	Notes
1.0	Portugal opens Atlantic routes. Initial commit.
2.0	Spain, Britain, France fork repo. Competing branches.
3.5	Transatlantic slavery fully integrated as core module.
4.0	Industrial revolution increases extraction throughput significantly.
5.0	"Scramble for Africa." 90% of continent partitioned in under 30 years.
5.2	Post-WWII independence movements. Soft deprecated.
5.2.1	Current. Runs as neocolonialism. Fewer flags. Same architecture.

Deprecation notice

Officially deprecated by the United Nations, 1960. End-of-life support ended. However, the codebase was never open-sourced, the documentation was partially destroyed, and the maintainers retired with full pensions. Migration paths for affected territories remain incomplete.

Several forks remain in active production. They do not use the original name.

drafting spec…