One of the ways to examine the consequences of cultural collision is to attempt to evaluate it through the eyes of the participants. These kinds of situations are thus harder to understand, especially when the winner's culture comes to dominate and obscure the other.
Colonial imposition can manifest itself in myriad ways.
Most commonly, the colonizer brings economic, legal, and social orders that benefit them at the expense of the colonized. While they may rationalize their actions by arguing that they are enlightening colonized people by their examples, they are in fact demonstrating to all that the road to success in the colony is not through the traditional culture of the colonized, but rather through the imposed culture of the ruler. To the extent that colonialism is associated with ethnic and economic distinctions, the boundary between these two classes is uncrossable. Hence there is no road to success for the Other in a colonized social system. Such analyses seek to explain the consequences of the inevitable collision between colonizer and colonized.