But to ignore the innovative forms of peace and peacemaking put forth and practiced by colonizers and colonized at and shortly after first contact, then by imperial powers and their subjects as consolidations and resistances took place, is to discount the vital roles they have played in shaping those of today in both productive and counterproductive ways. In fact, contemporary means of and motives for making, maintaining and breaking international peace would not have evolved as they have without colonialism and imperialism. Parallel to and in conjunction with nation-states, colonial peace and peacemaking were proposed and implemented on three linked levels: among the colonizers, between the colonizers and the colonized, and among the colonized, best explored, analyzed and assessed in tandem as a second major vehicle towards modernity. The early history of European colonialism is dominated by Spain and Portugal, each of which used scientific knowledge gained from the Islamic peoples of the Iberian Peninsula and the crusading zeal summoned to expel them to further their aims.
