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I'm defining colonial war strictly as one colonial power attacking another's colony, not colonial power versus the natives.

The US actually made the most blatant mugging of another imperial power. All imperial powers stole from the natives, but there seemed to be an etiquette and order to the colonial acquisition process in the 19th century that had been lacking in the 1500s, 1600s and 1700s when the British stole from the Dutch who stole from the Swedes or Portuguese and the British stole from the French who had stolen from the Spanish, etc. In the second half of the 19th century colonial powers didn’t often steal from other colonial powers. The exception was the Japanese stealing from the Russians and the Americans stealing from the Spanish. Countries did not out of the blue seize the colonial territory of another European power or conquer the surviving non-European states like Ethiopia, Siam, Japan, the Nejd, Afghanistan and Liberia. They spent decades building up a context for their territorial seizures. France or Germany or the UK or Japan did not just go grabbing the Nejd or Siam or the Philippines because they woke up and decided they wanted a colony. The Russo-Japanese struggle over Korea was more than just colonial, it was close to home for both, especially Japan. The most whimsical and out-of-context acquisitions in the colonial era were the US acquisitions of Guam and the Philippines, a random side effect of the more long-term hankering to either acquire Cuba or at least take charge of its future. Actually the Belgian Congo almost matches it for randomness. The Boer Wars were blatant aggression but they were not random, the British had ruled the republics decades earlier. Even in Africa, which was carved up like a gameboard, most of the colonies stemmed from decades-old coastal trading posts.

So, the challenge is to have more wars like the Spanish-American war, with colonial powers fighting one on one for a colonial rip-off, and more purchasing and trading of colonies, a la the Alaska purchase.
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