A common theme for most of the Third World is that the majority of the territories within it have been subject to control by European countries for some part of the past 500 years. Only Iran, Afghanistan, parts of Arabia, Liberia, China and Thailand had never been under formal European government. Nevertheless, European expansion affected them all, and when European empires came to an end, the Third World still bore the legacies of the preceding five centuries. It inherited political, economic and social structures that, even after the dissolution of formal empires, were still influenced by the forces of modern imperialism.