Colonial rule affected the lives of its subject people in many ways, but the most pronounced change was in their ways of working. The colonial state — with its power to tax, to seize land for European enterprises, to compel labor, and to build railroads, ports, and roads — played an important role in these transformations. Even more powerful was the growing integration of colonized societies into a world economy that increasingly demanded their gold, diamonds, copper, tin, rubber, coffee, cotton, sugar, cocoa, and many other products. But the economic transformations born of these twin pressures were far from uniform. Various groups — migrant workers and cash-crop farmers, plantation laborers and domestic servants, urban elites and day laborers, men and women — experienced the colonial era differently as their daily working lives underwent profound changes.

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To various degrees, old ways of working were eroded almost everywhere in the colonial world. Subsistence farming, in which peasant families produced largely for their own needs, diminished as growing numbers directed at least some of their energies to working for wages or selling what they produced for a cash income. That money was both necessary to pay taxes and school fees and useful for buying the various products — such as machine-produced textiles, bicycles, and kerosene — that the industrial economies of Europe sent their way. As in Europe, artisans suffered greatly when cheaper machine-manufactured merchandise displaced their own handmade goods. A flood of inexpensive textiles from Britain’s new factories ruined the livelihood of tens of thousands of India’s handloom weavers. Iron smelting largely disappeared in Africa, and occupations such as blacksmithing and tanning lost ground. Furthermore, Asian and African merchants, who had earlier handled the trade between their countries and the wider world, were squeezed out by well-financed European commercial firms.