MIGRANT-COLONIALISM aims to change the way we understand the spaces, actors, and practices of modern imperialism. The project defines migrant colonialism as a set of schemes in which South American policies of nation-state formation became entangled with the imperial interests of foreign powers, together sustaining a policy of conquest on state frontiers using migrants as settlers in newly established farming colonies. Migrant colonialization initially developed as a racialized form of internal state building aimed at channelling European migrants into frontier conquest; in the early 1900s, it became a tool of Italian, German,and Japanese global expansionism, a way for them to assert ‘great power’ status using migrants to create zones of trade preference and political influence. MIGRANT-COLONIALISM analyses the imperial asymmetries of power made by these policies and created by the migrant settlements, but it situates this distinctive strategy outside the spaces of formal imperial governance and within an interdependent process of South American state-building and informal imperial ambitions. The project explores migrant colonialism as a factor in relations between South American states and Italy, Germany, and Japan, and it considers the trajectories that tied migrant colonial practices and knowledge to global interests elsewhere. The central concerns of the project are with the specific sites of migrant colonialism: the actors and practices of colonialism; the inter-connections between public and private interests in colonising processes; the creation of migrant communities; the use of different farming models. In distinction to the settler colonial framework, migrant colonialism is conceptualized not as a completed structure, but as an unstable, precarious process involving regular, often violent, renegotiation between migrants and Indigenous groups.