How Colonialism Has Shaped the Design World And how we should talk about it now. Alice Morgan/Getty Images Design has long been a dialogue of visual ideas, on a scale as small as between two individuals—say, colleagues who have a brainstorming session—or as large as between two cultures through trade and conquest. From today’s perspective, one of the most influential factors on design in the modern era is undoubtedly colonialism, namely that of European nations whose imperialistic rule spread throughout the rest of the world from the 16th to the 19th centuries. “The English mode of conquering was to occupy foreign territory and reproduce their society on it. The process was what they called transplanting; hence they referred to the territories as ‘transplantations’ or ‘plantations,’ for short, a term they applied everywhere from Ireland to the plantations of Rhode Island,” says Alexander von Hoffman, Senior Research Fellow at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, who notes that the term was only later applied to the slave-labor farms in the American South. And a large part of the English’s societal reproduction in its colonies was architecture and design.