Evil Colonialist

aka: Evil Imperialist

"I came, I saw, I conquered."

"They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much."

— Charles Marlow, Heart of Darkness

This is an imperialist or colonialist man who has just come to take advantage of the natives with a friendly smile and a rifle on his shoulder. He only cares about winning a quick buck at everyone else's expense and exploiting the poor natives since he is convinced his race/culture is superior. Since he is either rich and powerful or in the middle of nowhere where nobody can hear your screams, he becomes the king of the place. He is likely to be Chased by Angry Natives led by a Badass Native either when declaring such dominion or somewhere else along the line.

The character, usually a white one, was originally depicted as Western European (usually from Britain, France, Spain, or Germany, including Those Wacky Nazis), but people from the United States joined the group later. If this is the case, expect some Social Darwinist White Man's Burden and A God Am I excuses for his actions (which usually consists of taking over a place, exploiting the natives and the land, selling them to his Human Traffickers, then leaving the place as an economic waste after the natives get fed up and kick him out). After all, who other than himself could tame the Lost World or Darkest Africa? Two places you stand a good chance of seeing a non-white version of this trope are Chinese and Korean (both north and south, but mostly north) depictions of the Japanese, especially during the years of Japanese imperialism. Chinese communists may also be portrayed this way in western films about Tibet or East Turkestan, as are Soviet communists for Eastern Europe, especially in the Baltics, Ukraine, and Poland.

It's fairly common in works from Africa, India, Ireland, Latin America, and China since those are places where Imperialism hit hardest. It's also a stereotypical villain in Soviet works, and a good source for Western terrorism in those works. In more fantastical settings, there's often overlap between this trope and the Galactic Conquerer. The "conquistador" variety of Scary Dogmatic Aliens is often just this character Recycled In Space.

An evil version of the Gentleman Adventurer, and evil variations of The Missionary qualify. The racial opposite is Mighty Whitey and the ideological one is Dirty Communists. Foil to the Noble Savage and Badass Native. Will likely be good friends with the Egomaniac Hunter (who may serve as The Dragon) and Human Traffickers, if he isn't one himself in his spare time. Subtrope of Foreign Ruling Class, Politically Incorrect Villain, and No Historical Figures Were Harmed. Compare Those Wacky Nazis for similar ideologies, and Western Terrorists for the spiritual modern variations.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro: Tierra (real name Pedro Cortézarro Torres) is a member of the New Bloodline whose ancestors were the Spanish Conquistadores. Tierra inherited all the bottomless greed of his ancestors who plundered the lands of the Incan and Aztec civilizations, stealing the wealth of the kingdoms and effectively wiping the tribes off the face of the earth, turning the same land into their own, all for the sake of untold riches. As a real state mogul, Tierra's modus operandi consisted of forcefully evicting people of their properties to seize them to be used as he saw fit. His business-driven ruthlessness caught the attention of Sicks who eventually invited him to be part of his group.
• "Francisco Xavier" from Samurai Champloo, who claims to be a descendant of the original Xavier, the Navarrese (Basque) monk who brought Christianity to Japan (and other parts of Asia, especially within the Portuguese Empire). His constant condescension and firearms that are impressive by today's standards mark him as a Western-style villain... until it's revealed that he's actually a Japanese guy who was taking advantage of the Christian underground for his own profit.
• Voltes V: The Boazanian Empire, much like their real-life inspiration, practice slavery and colonialism, with a twist of Fantastic Caste System: Horned Boazanians are allowed to live freely, usually as nobles, while Hornless Boazanians are forced to be slaves. The Horned Boazanians also look down on humans for being "primitive" and resembling Hornless Boazanians, hence their desire to enslave them as well.

Audio Play

• In the Big Finish Doctor Who audio Destination Nerva, Lord Jack became this to the Drelloran, to the point that they turned back to their old warlike ways and created an elaborate alien virus for the sole purpose of destroying Earth after Lord Jack and his men stole their ship and virtually destroyed the Drellorans' existing civilisation.

Comic Books

• In the Filipino graphic novel Ang Barbaro, set in the late Spanish-colonial Philippines in the 1800s, the Spanish authorities are obviously portrayed this way, from the scheming governor-general, to greedy friars and landlords, to abusive military and Guardia Civil (the colony-wide paramilitary police force) who will stop at nothing to capture and/or kill the eponymous, heroic native bandit, Barbaro.
• The real villain of the African arc in Hitman is Martindale, a racist American arms dealer who is propping up a bloodthirsty dictator for business purposes while selling him overpriced and shoddy weapons.
• In Mampato, on a trip to the Belgian Congo in 1880, one of the villains is Jones, the owner of a tobacco plantation who brutally mistreats his workers and uses racist insults. Mampato and his caveman friend Ogu humiliate him, and that gives his workers the courage to later rebel themselves and kill Jones by throwing him to the crocodiles.
• Quite a number of Tintin villains are European (usually British) exploiters in China, India, and the Middle East, including:
  • Colonel Sponz exploits the president of San Theodoros making the entire county a puppet of Borduria. The last time Tintin visited San Theodoros in the 1930s they were on the verge of war with a neighboring nation under the interest of a foreign oil company while an arms dealer was selling arms to both sides.
  • Pretty much every policeman or government official associated with the Shanghai International Settlement in ''The Blue Lotus" is represented as corrupt and racist. Though the only real bad guy is the (fictional) chief of police, Dawson; the rank-and-file policemen are mostly presented more as punch-clock villains.
• John Ridley's Black Panther (2021) introduces the interdimensional villain The Colonialist, who is looking to colonialize Earth.

Fanfiction

• In the Discworld of A.A. Pessimal, there is the Sto Plains-born adventurer Sir Cecil Smith-Rhodes, who moves to Howondaland, conquers a country, and has the self-effacing modesty to name it Smith-Rhodesia after himself.

Film — Animated

• Hideously caricatured imperialists cannibalize China in Soviet animator Yuri Merkulov's paper stop-motion film of 1925, China in Flames.
• In Frozen II, Anna and Elsa learn that their paternal grandfather, King Runeard, was one of these. He mistrusted the Northuldra people because he feared their traditions. So he launched a plan to make them dependent on Arendelle through ecological sabotage, which he claimed was a peaceful gift that would enhance the land. When the Northuldra leader voiced his suspicions, Runeard murdered him in cold blood. From there, he manipulated the people of Arendelle into believing that the Northuldra had attacked him. Anna eventually realizes that the only way to atone for her ancestor's misdeeds and free the people of the Enchanted Forest is to destroy the dam Runeard built, even if it also means destroying her own kingdom. Fortunately, the spirits of nature respect Anna's courage in making this sacrifice, and Arendelle is spared, allowing the two groups to interact freely and peaceably once again.
• The Spanish conquistadores from Pachamama not only greatly resemble the page image, but have dialogue that consists solely of the spanish words for gold and precious gems.
• John Ratcliffe in Pocahontas was a real guy who got a Historical Villain Upgrade courtesy of Disney. The real Ratcliffe was more of a chump than a villain and was ultimately tortured to death by the Powhatan tribe. By contrast, the movie portrays him as a comically repugnant, gold-obsessed warmonger who gets sent back to be punished in England at the end of the movie (but doesn't actually get punished until the sequel).
• The arrogant Clayton in Disney's Tarzan is this trope combined with an Egomaniac Hunter, and played by BRIAN BLESSED, no less. This combination means that he isn't seen interacting with any natives and wouldn't be very interested to anyway, given that it's the jungle itself that attracts with the challenges that it offers to him as good sport, along with the financial trophies that he can carry home.
• In Wolfwalkers, the main villain is the Lord Protector, a fictionalized version of Oliver Cromwell. While Ireland was already under England's control before he came to power, the Lord Protector seeks to "tame the lands" further by clearing the forests for farmland and destroying the last of the country's wolves. This isn't too far off from real history, as the real Oliver Cromwell is known for having committed numerous atrocities against the Irish people in order to keep them from rebelling against British rule, all in the name of "civilizing" what England saw as a wild land that needed taming.

Film — Live-Action

• Independent film Amigo (2010), one of the very few fictional works about the Philippine-American War, has this in the form of warmongering Colonel Hardacre (played by Chris Cooper). His subordinates also display this to varying degrees, although many of them are portrayed more sympathetically.
• Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, who actually started out as an idealist but has been driven mad by the jungles of Vietnam.
• The list of Philippine Insurrection examples is growing with Balangiga: Howling Wilderness (2017), which shows American brutalities more indirectly: the context is their unleashing a scorched-earth policy to starve out the Filipino revolutionaries, and the main cast, though civilians, wander through a merciless wasteland where they see the aftermath: crops and houses are torched, and livestock are slaughtered and left to rot, rendering them useless for food or transport.
• Black and White in Color: Pretty much all the white people in Fort Coulais. They have nothing but contempt for the locals and treat them as subhuman. When they go off to attack the German outpost they make the natives carry them in litters. Later, they kidnap natives and enslave them into their little army.
• In Blonde Savage, Mark Harper runs his diamond mine as her own personal fiefdom and attempts to exterminate a native village to eradicate possible evidence of a 20-year-old crime.
• Embrace of the Serpent: We don't actually see any unless the crazed monk raising a little compound of religious zealots counts. But their damage is everywhere. In one scene Manduca stumbles across a little rubber farm with buckets collecting the sap from the rubber trees—and a little graveyard. Then a slave who is missing an arm comes dashing into the grove to collect the rubber sap.
• Several of the British colonialists in Gandhi (1982) are depicted this way, mostly by drawing upon real historical examples, such as the infamous Amritsar Massacre of 1919. Perpetrator General Reginald Dyer is depicted as utterly uncomprehending of the moral consequences of his actions when put before a tribunal because of them.
• Another Philippine Insurrection example in the American generals in the Biopic Heneral Luna (2015). Ironically, they're not as destructive to the Filipino Revolutionaries' cause as the revolutionary leaders themselves.
  • Ditto in Goyo: Ang Batang Heneral (2018).
• The title character in His Majesty O Keefe, played by Burt Lancaster, is one of these, an American sea captain who cheats and cons and gets himself named king of the island of Yap in his zeal to take over the island's copra trade. He's a little bit nicer than the usual example of the trope, being opposed to slavery and racism, but he still seems to view it as his sovereign right to take what he wants from the island, whether the natives want to go along or not. He eventually is shown the error of his ways... and becomes a Mighty Whitey instead.
• Indochine: None of the colonists in French Indochina come off well, but the ones trapping Vietnamese peasants into slavery are the worst.
• The human-hunting Van Pelt in Jumanji. In the animated series, his counterpart is the German hunter Herr Von Richter.
• Colonel Bockner of the Imperial German Schutztruppe in the 1985 version of King Solomon's Mines.
• Leon Rom from The Legend of Tarzan seeks to bring a massive Belgian army into the Congo to rule it.
• Chinese martial arts movies set between the late 1800s and mid 1900s often have Evil Brit versions of this (see for instance The Legend Of Drunken Master and Ip Man 2). Depending on the date of the setting, the Japanese will play this role instead of or in addition to the Europeans, such as in Ip Man.
• The sadistic and genocidal Italian fascist occupiers of 1920s-30s Libya in Lion of the Desert.
• Peachy Carnehan and Daniel Dravot of The Man Who Would be King, who plan to use their British military training and a supply of smuggled arms to take over the tribes of Kafiristan (now a part of Afghanistan).
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Thor: Ragnarok: The film reveals that, contrary to the information presented in the previous Thor films of Asgard as protector of the Nine Realms, our hero's father was a Galactic Conquerer who established the Asgardian empire through bloody colonialism. His long-lost older sister, Hela, Goddess of Death, is eager to continue this part of Odin's legacy and overtake even more realms. This reveal raises questions about how the conflict between Asgard and Jotunheim started.
  • Black Panther: Ulysses Klaue is a charismatic but cruel thief who pillages Wakanda's prized natural resource of Vibranium, justifying it by saying that the Wakandan "savages" don't deserve to have it. He even likens the country to his own personal El Dorado, the city of untold riches in many a colonizer's dreams. However, Klaue is not the film's main villain, and the movie comes down a lot harder not on the colonizers themselves, but on the complicity of those who did nothing about colonization and continue to benefit from its unjust legacy. T'Challa completes his character arc when he calls out all of the previous Black Panthers for not using their power to help anyone besides Wakanda, and vows to correct this by revealing Wakanda's true nature as a technological powerhouse to the world.
  • Captain Marvel: The Amnesiac Heroine eventually learns that she's been tricked into being one of these. The "villains" she's been hunting down are actually desperate refugees whose only crimes were resisting the Kree Empire's expansion. She's rightly horrified when she learns the whole truth and opts to atone for her actions by becoming their protector as they search for a new planet to call home.
  • Black Panther: Wakanda Forever: Namor explains to Shuri that his hatred of the surface world was driven by the things he saw as when he returned to lay his mother to rest. Real-life conquistadors enslaving the Mayan people. To enact his justice upon them, he sent the Talokanil to attack them, cementing who he would later become.
• Many characters in The Milagro Beanfield War, but especially Kyril Montana, played by Christopher Walken.
• The South Pacific slave trader Ben Pease in Nate and Hayes, and, to a lesser extent, the German navy personnel who employ him in order to use slave labor to establish island coaling stations for their navy.
• The British are portrayed as behaving like this during the Boer War in the 1941 Nazi propaganda film Ohm Kruger. While in Real Life considerable controversy was stirred up by the British treatment of Boer civilians during this war, it doesn't take a genius to detect the bitter irony of a Nazi propaganda film attacking a foreign enemy for putting people in concentration camps.
• The Pagan: Slater is the standard-issue white racist and ruthless exploiter of the natives. He takes advantage of Henry's naivete to get his coconuts for free. He later gives Henry some disingenuous advice to "borrow money from the bank" to stock his store. Slater owns the bank. He forecloses.
• Pompeii: Senator Quintus Attius Corvus is a cruel, imperialistic Roman senator who has slaughtered many people from the countries Rome has conquered, including the main Celtic character Milo's horseman tribe in Northern Britannia.
• The Prince of the Pacific: Commandant Lefèvre is a cruel, greedy and racist tyrant of a French colonial governor who dominates the locals of Fenua Poerava Island in French Polynesia with an iron fist. Moeata, meanwhile, considers all the French who come to the island as this (she's the daughter of a French missionary, meanwhile).
• RRR (2022)'s villains are Scott Buxton, the fictional governor of The Raj, and his wife Catherine. They wholeheartedly believe in the superiority of the British empire and don't bother to hide their apathy and disgust towards the Indians they rule over.
• The British military officers who orchestrate a fictional occupation of Mongolia in the Russian Civil War setting of Vselovod E. Pudovkin's 1928 Soviet propaganda film Storm Over Asia. They attempt to consolidate their hold on the country by proclaiming the film's fur-trapper protagonist as the direct heir of Genghis Khan and establishing a puppet monarchy.
• Andy Osnard from The Tailor of Panama is a British MI6 agent sent to Panama to recruit agents to gather intelligence and protect British trade interests through the canal. However, Andy has his own agenda and, after he discovers Harry's past, sees the perfect opportunity to recruit a new agent and extort money from the British government. In the end, he ends up fomenting a revolution that threatens to destabilise all of Panama.
• White Hunter, Black Heart: John Wilson may not be in Uganda to colonize the land, but he is definitely there to exploit the country and natives; intending to shoot an elephant and his movie (in that order) and then depart. By the end of the film, he may have changed his attitude.
• White Shadows in the South Seas: Evil white colonialists exploit the natives of Polynesia, befouling their islands with grubby trading posts, pushing the natives into making highly dangerous dives for pearls, and cheating them by giving them worthless trinkets in return for said priceless pearls.
  "But the white man, in his greedy trek across the planet, cast his withering shadow over these islands....and the business of 'civilizing' them to his interests began...."

Literature

• While George Orwell's 1934 novel Burmese Days is intended to be a round condemnation of the whole institution of British colonialism (in this case in Burma), most of the imperialists are depicted as more arrogant, indolent, or imbecilic rather than evil. The one unambiguously horrid example is the timber company manager (and very Politically Incorrect Villain) Ellis, whose every utterance is a string of vile racial slurs directed at the Burmese, and who is so consumed by hatred of them that he unceasingly expresses his desire for the opportunity to torture/slaughter them all.
• Despoilers of the Golden Empire is a story of technologically-advanced invaders arriving in big ships and brutally conquering an entire empire and subjugating its people with no ethnologists or economists to suggest softer methods of conquest. The fact that it's a retelling of the conquest of Peru disguised as a sci-fi story doesn't change anything.
• The racist, drunken, Egomaniac Hunter Míster Danger from Doña Barbara. While Bárbara, the main villain of the book, has a Freudian Excuse for her actions, he enjoys his horrible acts just because he's bored. By the end of the book, when he realizes that now he Can't Get Away with Nuthin', he just flees away from the place.
• One of the main themes in The God Eaters. The story is set in a world where the Eskarans, a major power, have conquered many nations, slowly destroying their culture and imposing Eskaran religious doctrines.
• Heart of Darkness: Kurtz — actually all the agents of the Belgians in the Congo, who are engaged in unspeakable cruelty and violence in the process of harvesting rubber from the jungle. Kurtz is special because he goes mad and starts putting heads on spikes and such.
• Also from HG Wells: the titular doctor in The Island of Doctor Moreau acts as this to his Beast Folk creations. He sets himself up as their lawgiver, educator, and parent while treating them as servants, making them live in ramshackle villages outside his mansion, and punishing them if they do wrong. In a twist on the trope, the "natives" were (as previously stated) actually created by the one exploiting them.
• Island of the Sequined Love Nun has an American set himself up as god on a South Pacific island and promise the natives medical aid... under the pretext of which he's harvesting their organs for black market trade in Japan.
• Played with in Malê Rising. The story is set in an alternate Africa with conservative and reformist ideologies taking root just before European colonization. As a result, the European colonial empires had a more nuanced view of the continent and responded accordingly, from sending good-natured officers to hiring greedy concessionaires. The African peoples themselves became influenced with the outside world in turn, with some of them creating their own empires and becoming colonial masters themselves.
• Rizal tackles this in his famous novels Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, where he brings up the ways the Spanish government and church abuse and exploit the Filipinos. Notable in that it helped influenced the Philippine revolution.
• Basil Fotherington-Thomas in Kim Newman's Alternate History novella Teddy Bears' Picnic, where he has become his world's equivalent of Colonel Kurtz.
• Deconstructed in Things Fall Apart. The book depicts the Igbo and several African tribes like them slowly having their unique cultures replaced by the encroaching European Christian colonists. Many colonists look down upon the unconverted Igbo, viewing them as savages. However, it's shown that the Igbo have just as many flaws as the Christian settlers and a great many tribespeople who convert do so willingly, unable to stomach the Igbo lifestyle anymore. The Tragic Hero, Okonkwo, refuses to accept that most colonists are simply flawed humans following their beliefs like the Igbo and also refuses to accept that the Igbo have any flaws. In the end, it becomes clear to Okonkwo that the Igbo culture he's been so obsessed with is gone and the people have moved on. Unable to comprehend or accept the changing world, he quietly goes home and hangs himself.
• The Traitor Baru Cormorant: Cairdine Farrier is introduced as a bumbling merchant trying to sell cold-weather wool on the hot, tropical island of Taranoke, a small part of the greater effort by the Imperial Republic of Falcrest to establish economic and political ties with the island and its indigenous people. One of those people, the eponymous Baru Cormorant, catches his eye when, in a conversation with him, she notes that Falcrest's traders are slowly devaluing the local currencies and replacing it with their own fiat/paper money, which will ultimately ensure that Taranoke is only capable of trading with Falcrest. It soon becomes clear Farrier is much more cunning and powerful than he seems, and for Baru symbolically becomes the face of Falcrest as it slowly conquers Taranoke with soft power, erasing its native culture and turning the people into another workforce and tax base for the empire, with the island itself becoming a naval base and renamed "Sousward".
• Tolkien's Legendarium features the Númenóreans, descendants of the heroic men who fought against Morgoth, slowly becoming this over the course of their history as the King's Men rise to power and Númenór falls under the Shadow. They start establishing colonies in Middle-Earth and demanding tribute before moving on to human sacrifice to Morgoth once Sauron gets his hooks in them, targeting both the men of Middle-Earth and the few Faithful among their own people who remain loyal to the old ways. Even after Númenór is destroyed, descendants of the King's Men become the Black Númenóreans and continue to oppose the Realms-in-Exile of Elendil and his sons.
• The War of the Worlds (1898) is a thinly veiled takedown of British imperialism, in which the Martians are the imperialists and humans are the less technologically advanced natives that the imperialists kill and oppress. Notably, the Martians are destroyed by Earth-borne diseases, just as how British colonialists in Africa and Asia and the like fell victim to diseases like malaria.
  And before we judge them [the Martians] too harshly, we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished Bison and the Dodo, but upon its own "inferior" races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?
• Out of the Silent Planet: Weston and Devine are planning to exploit the Malacandrans for their planet's natural resources. Their ideas and morals get thoroughly deconstructed when they get called to account by the good spirit who protects Malacandra.

Live-Action TV

• In Doctor Who, humans often play this role.
  • "The Savages" focuses on a race of colonists who consider themselves superior to the "savage" natives and think nothing of draining their life force to power their city.
  • In "The Mutants", an episode intended as a critique of Apartheid, the Marshal oppresses the natives of Solos, hunting them down, and intends to change the atmosphere of the planet so it is breathable to humans but not the Solonians.
  • "The Power of Kroll" features Thawn, who exploits the third moon of Delta Magna for oil and plots to wipe out the native tribe for getting in the way of the drilling.
  • "Kinda" downplays this with the human explorers being over-confident, misguided, exploitative, and finally raving nuts, but not premeditatedly evil.
  • "Planet of the Ood" shows that the humans have enslaved the Ood by placing a force field round the Hive Mind.
• The original point of Earth: Final Conflict was to show what it's like to be on the receiving end of a White Man's Burden scenario. The Taelons — and Da'an in particular — genuinely believe they can elevate mankind, and that they've conquered us for our own good. Naturally humanity doesn't see it that way. Later seasons forgot about this and made the Taelons just outright evil.
• In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine the Cardassian Union in general, and Gul Dukat in particular, were the Galactic Conqueror variant toward Bajor, who have only recently managed to drive the occupation forces off their world. Bajor's ongoing arc is that of a nation in a post-colonial period, still struggling to recover from the brutal exploitation of the Cardassian Occupation. The Cardassians, for their part, largely feel that they did nothing wrong, with Dukat in particular constantly espousing a White Man's Burden attitude toward the inexplicably ungrateful Bajorans.

Music

• Kate Bush: The Title Track of The Dreaming, a Protest Song decrying the treatment of Aboriginal Australians, is narrated by a white Aussie who proudly brags about how "the civilized keep alive the territorial war [and] erase the race that claim the place and say we dig for ore." The narrator even casually mentions remorselessly running over Aboriginal people who wander into the road.
• Queen: "White Man" is narrated by a Native American witnessing the colonization of the Americas, openly viewing the European settlers as harbingers of a hell on Earth. Among other things, the song describes how the colonists destroyed the natural landscape, massacred the indigenous population, and left the survivors in eternal shame and disgrace, all while using the Bible as a flimsy justification for their actions.

Mythology and Religion

• The Ur-Example could very well be Conquest, one of the four original Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation — making this trope Older Than Feudalism. (Depictions of the Horsemen only replaced Conquest with the more familiar figure of Pestilence starting around the time of the Black Death.) This makes sense, given the amount of oppression that Judaea had endured under Roman rule by the time the Book of Revelation was written.

Tabletop Games

• Magic: The Gathering: Ixalan is based on Mesoamerica and the age of piracy, so naturally there's a Spanish Conquistador analogue, the Legion of Dusk, which happen to be hyper-religious greedy vampires and the least sympathetic of the set's factions.
• Maztica was introduced as "the South America of the Forgotten Realms"... complete with Conquistador expies running roughshod over the continent in the name of conquering and exploiting it for their patron nation of Amn. Making things more egregious, the Flaming Fist mercenaries (the aforementioned not!Conquistadors) are devoted worshippers of Helm, the Lawful Neutral god of guardians and watchmen; their actions ruined Helmite reputations so badly that Helm's faithful founded entirely new paladin orders just to try and prove they weren't all like those Helmites.
• Pathfinder has an Infernal Duke nicknamed "the Vicious Guest" who is the patron of colonists and explorers, and whose sacred animal, symbolic of his attitudes, is a parasitic cuckoo bird.
  • Among the Hellknight orders, the Order of the Coil take cultural supremacism to such an extent that they don't just oppress the local native peoples, but also try to murder visiting explorers and scholars to keep information about the indigenous cultures they're trying to suppress from reaching the outside world.
• Rocket Age: A major theme is the damage Earthlings have been doing to the other planets and peoples of the solar system. The Nazis and their Italian allies might be the most obvious with their death camps, but it is undeniable that every super power and even independent group is doing the same to some degree.
• Warhammer 40,000: Many Rogue Traders aren't above ruthlessly exploiting whichever frontier planet they've come across and found an opportunity for making great profits from, with little to no disregard for the native population, even if said natives are fellow humans. After all, their Warrants of Trade only forbid them from preying upon Imperial planets; those that aren't controlled by the Imperium have no such protection.
• Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: While Cities of Sigmar, and the Dawnbringer Crusades that found said cities, are supposed to liberate and protect native populations they encounter from the Chaos Gods (as until recently, the overwhelming majority of reality was under their uncontested control) and unfortunately large number these aren't above exploiting and mistreating these newly freed, or "Reclaimed" as they're commonly called, subjects. How common this attitude is varies Depending on the Writer.

Theatre

• Brutus Jones in Eugene O'Neill's play The Emperor Jones is a rare dark-skinned example. He goes from stowaway to Emperor in two years and puts on the "fuss and glory part" of being Emperor while ruthlessly robbing the natives of their wealth. He intends to flee by the time the natives are ready to overthrow him, which comes sooner than he expected.
• The Mrs. Hawking play series: in part IV, Gilded Cages, the presence of the English in Singapore is depicted this way.

Video Games

• The main theme of the Reaver culture in Age of Wonders 4: Empires & Ashes. The Reavers are musket-wielding industrialists in an otherwise High Fantasy world, with spike-covered helmets and comparitively limited diplomacy options. Even if a Reaver faction is customized to lean good-aligned, their advantages and abilities encourage them to be aggressive about it.
• Handsome Jack in Borderlands 2 runs a megacorporation that wants to strip-mine the hell out of Pandora, and contemptuously dismisses its residents (who are technically also colonists, but probably multi-generational ones; Pandora's natives are long gone) as "bandits". In fairness to Jack, much of Pandora's human population are violent psychotic killers who have no lives outside of literally preying on anyone they judge as weak... but that's mostly due to being stranded on a Death World with lots of contaminated supplies.
• Civilization V has two scenarios where European civilizations are encouraged to play in this way while also being portrayed as greedy imperialistic invaders, which is noticeably emphasized in both cases by the difference in goals they and the civilizations of the scenario's setting continent pursue:
  • In the Conquest of the New World scenario, European nations^note England, France, The Netherlands, Portugal, Spain get most of their points by delivering Treasures to their capital, which they obtain primarily through the capture/raze of Native American civs' cities, though after researching the Piracy tech, they can seize each other's cities for this same purpose as well. In contrast, Native American civilizations^note The Aztecs, The Inca, The Iroquois, The Maya, The Shoshone are expected to play defensively by gaining points for Faith.
    • A similar scenario appeared in Civilization III, where European civs got their points primarily by snatching and exploiting the natural resources of America and bringing the treasures back to Europe (and removing any Natives who stand in their way), while the Native Americans got points primarily through culture (though the Mesoamerican civs could get extra culture points by sacrificing captured enemy workers).
  • In the Scramble for Africa scenario, European empires^note Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal compete for territory, artifacts, population, and the longest railroad between two cities, which, given that wars between Europeans are prohibited by the rules of the scenario, guarantees that North African and Sub-Saharan civs will be the targets for conquest. In contrast, North African^note Egypt, Morocco, The Ottomans and Sub-Saharan^note The Boers, Ethiopia, The Zulus civilizations should focus on internal development and receive points for Gold and Culture, respectively.
• Caesar puts a post-apocalyptic spin on this trope in Fallout: New Vegas. Coming from the New California Republic (the setting's closest equivalent to a modern civilization), he settles among the primitive tribes east of the Colorado River and uses his superior education in military tactics, marksmanship, political science, and chemistry to conquer them and forge them into a personal army.
  • Invoked with the Sneering Imperialist perk, which gives you a damage bonus to tribals, raiders and other lowly characters as well as giving you some unique dialog options in the Honest Hearts DLC, most prominently the chance to get Joshua Graham to execute Salt-Upon-Wounds.
    Courier: Joshua, put a cap in General Gobbledigook here.
• A good number of villains in the Far Cry series are implied to fit the bill.
  • Hoyt Volker in Far Cry 3 is a South African who runs slave trafficking on the Rook Islands, even providing backing for the local pirates.
  • Pagan Min in Far Cry 4 is an Eurasian gangster who moved into Kyrat and profited off the raging civil war in order to gradually install himself as a brutal dictator. Ironically, having grown up in British-occupied Hong Kong, Min's upbringing is also the product of colonialism.
• In Fate/Grand Order, Christopher Columbus is given a Historical Villain Upgrade as the antagonist Rider of the Resistance. He's portrayed as a ruthless, greedy pirate that loves colonialism and the slave trade specifically because of all of the pillaging, profiteering, and subjugation he can do, and longs for those days to return. Even when he can be summoned to your party, few other Servants can stand him.
• Sir Roderick Ponce Von Fontlebottom the "Magnificent Bastard" (self-proclaimed), from Jade Empire, otherwise known as "The Outlander". He probably would be one if he wasn't a single individual visiting a large empire. He washed up on the coast of the empire and attempts to "educate" the "backward" culture.
  • This being Jade Empire, you get the chance to prove your culture's worth, first in a heated debate, then by kicking the living excrement out of him. He is however honorable enough that he'll acknowledge his defeat gracefully and will even offer up his rifle as a reward.
  • Also during the debate he actually makes some good points about the Jade Empire through all his ethnocentrism and logical errors. For example, why the supposed inventors of Dragon powder haven't explored the wonderful possibilities of personal firearms yet.
• Just about every Nazi Reichskommissar from The New Order Last Days Of Europe counts, but special mention goes to Hans Hüttig, the Reichskommissar of Ostafrika. Hüttig serves as the Arc Villain of the South African war and is noted among Reichskommissars for his absolutely fanatical devotion to Nazi ideology. He enslaves the entire native population of his colony and puts them through brutal forced labor all the while trying to "Aryanize" the continent.
• The Royal Deadfire Company and Vailian Trading Company in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire are seen as this by the Huana, though it's a bit more complicated than all that. Still, hard not to see where the Huana are coming from. Rautai's Royal Deadfire Company is an arm of the empire looking to "civilize" the Huana, erasing their culture entirely (though some low-caste Huana consider this a boon). The Vailian Trading Company openly wants to mine the Deadfire's resources for science and profit — some Vailians are Corrupt Corporate Executives making manipulative contracts and buying slaves, others are Honest Corporate Executives who happily share the profits with the native Huana.
• The Valuan Empire from Skies of Arcadia are clearly meant to be an amalgamated stand-in for the European powers during the Imperialist era, particularly taking after the Spanish Empire in naming conventions, imperialistic policies, and reliance on foreign resources. The objective of the Valuans is to conquer all other lands (Nasr, Yafutoma and Ixa'Taka) and drain them for their resources and anything else of value. The situation in Ixa'Taka is perhaps the most striking example with the primitive natives being slaved by foreign invaders and forced to work in dangerous mines excavating for precious stones.
• Captain Ozzik Sturn from Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is the commanding officer of the Imperial Garrison on Kashyyyk. At the time the game takes place, the Imperials under his command are capturing the native Wookiees and using them as slave labor to build The Death Star. On his way to rescue Princess Leia, Starkiller visits Sturn’s private quarters, wherein he finds a Wookiee in a cage and a Gungan encased in carbonite.
• The Skaarj in Unreal have nearly conquered the planet of Na Pali and enslaved the peaceful Nali race, and kill them in horrible ways if they ever try to escape or fight back. Fortunately, the Player Character crash-landed on Na Pali and ends up liberating the planet.
• Several quests from World of Warcraft shows the Dwarven Explorer's league coming to occupied tauren land, dismissing the natives as stupid bullmen, and killing them so as excavate their land. Perhaps the most notable was in Bael Modan in the Barrens.

Webcomics

• Latchkey Kingdom: The "History of Hilla" comic depicts the arrival of colonialists:
  Narrator: In 11344 Angelonian colonists arrived in Lagland keen to 'help' its residents
  Colonist leader: Hello we've come to civilize you!
  Lag peasant: We kind of invented civilization so thanks but no—
  Colonist leader: (reveals armed guard) You guys are really going to love monotheism.
• Polandball has Reichtangle. It is an enigmatic figure that’s only motivation is to ANSCHLUSS (annex) every other country.

Western Animation

• Parodied in a Family Guy Flashback Twist where Peter becomes one for a group of Mexican mice.
  • What's even stranger is that he demands the wife of one of the mice in a Scarpia Ultimatum.
• The Family Guy parody listed above was surely a reference to a Looney Tunes classic where Daffy Duck plays this imperialist role to Speedy Gonzales and some other Mexican mice.
• Love, Death & Robots: The short "Good Hunting" is set in an Alternate History version of 19th Century Qing Dynasty China where the British colonial governor is a power-hungry, depraved and insatiable Dirty Old Man. Even the "nicer" British characters are still condescending racists. The British are even responsible for the magic going away (the short omits a detail from the original story where they are explained as Flat Earth Atheists and the railroads they lay down across the country are disrupting chi leylines).
• In The Owl House, Philip Wittebane is a 17th century English colonist who has nothing but contempt for the native witches and demons of the Boiling Isles. He eventually rises to power as Emperor Belos thanks to a series of False Flag Operations as part of a centuries-long plan to enact genocide on the entire population.
• In Pachamama, the main villains are the conquistadores, which are rightfully portrayed as blood-crazed, greedy maniacs.
• In one episode of Peter Pan & the Pirates, Captain Hook, in an attempt to attract sufficient "civilization" to Neverland (to ease his ongoing ennui as a man of culture exiled to a wilderness by his obsession with remaining there until Pan is killed), declares Neverland to be annexed to The British Empire and attempts to literally crown himself its viceroy. This is not particularly outrageous considering all the technical pirates, from Sir Francis Drake to "Rajah" Brooke of Sarawak, who were regarded as servants of the British crown and who on occasion personally annexed territories on its behalf. Of course Hook's heavily armed crew are on standby in the event of anyone raising objections to his decree.
• Though the actual show never revealed it, Word of God for Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM) explains that Dr. Robotnik was originally a space colonist who landed on the planet Mobius. This probably explains why he views all the people of Mobius as little more than either resources to exploit or pests to exterminate.
• Parodied in the South Park episode "Red Man's Greed" by having the Native Americans take the place of the Europeans, stealing the land of the majority white South Park residents, and when they refuse to move, giving them disease-ridden blankets (with a 2% death rate!). Hell, even the title is a pun.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: The Mewmans in are this. Originally humans from Earth, they crossed through a realm of pure magic and into a world full of monsters, demons, and other supernatural creatures. Upon arriving they were given a magic wand that allowed them to access the realm of magic's power from anywhere. They used it to subjugate their new world and hoard its resources.

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