At one level there was a cosmopolitanism in Mongol imperial ideology. Officers and advisors were drawn from different parts of the known world, including, by some accounts, Marco Polo.  However, they also had very draconic ideas about colonial transformation. For instance, they initially planned to transform the agricultural lands of north China into pasturelands, which would have involved eliminating the entire peasant population of the region. However, they were persuaded by a Chinese advisor that this would not suit their interests and so they desisted. They also evolved an elaborate hierarchy of ethnic or ‘racial’ relationships through which they kept the Chinese in the empire at a subordinate level. Obviously, here we see a rigorous colonial ideology of exclusion which did not require capitalism and other modern elements. Indeed, later non-Chinese conquerors of the Chinese empire, such as the Manchus, also developed the system of exclusions and hierarchy that the Mongols initiated. They classified the different peoples of the empire into different groups and treated them in accordance with the prescribed ideology. Later when the Japanese constructed a puppet-state in Manchuria called Manchukuo, they too tried to adapt the Manchu division of different peoples as a means of ruling them. Although they claimed that this division was a modern and egalitarian one, they sought to secure Japanese superiority through it. 

Of course, it is well known that the Mongols were a short-lived dynasty in China and the Manchus became absorbed by the Chinese people and Confucian institutions. What does this tell us about the lasting power of colonial ideology when it is not founded on a powerful economic system and technology like capitalism? Before we hasten to conclude that pre-modern imperial ideology was typically much weaker than modern imperialism, we should also take many countervailing factors into account. For instance, it is now becoming clearer that the Mongol and Manchu institutions were not simply absorbed by a superior Confucian system. Rather they combined with Confucian institutions to evolve into hybrid and independent ones. In other words, they did not merely fail or become absorbed but became something else. Moreover, in modern empires, the subject peoples can also ultimately use the same capitalist methods, technologies and modern political ideas to challenge and weaken colonialism as well.