Imperialism

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  , is "the creation and maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural and territorial relationship, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." Imperialism has been described as a primarily western concept that employs "expansionist ± mercantilist and latterly communist ± systems." geographical domain such as the Persian Empire, the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Portuguese Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Dutch Empire, the French Empire the Russian Empire, the Chinese Empire, the British Empire, or the American Empire, but the term can equally be applied to domains of knowledge, beliefs, values and expertise, such as the empires of Christianity (see Christendom) or Islam (see Caliphate). Imperialism is usually autocratic, and also sometimes monolithic in character. 3c   ccc Imperialism is found in the ancient histories of Assyrian Empire, Chinese Empire, Roman Empire, Greece, the Persian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire (Ottoman wars in Europe), ancient Egypt, and India and a basic component to the conquests of Genghis Khan and other warlords. Although imperialist practices have existed for thousands of years, the term "Age of Imperialism" generally refers to the activities of nations such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United States in the late 19th through the middle 20th centuries, e.g. the "Scramble for Africa" and the "Open Door Policy" in China. The word itself is derived from the Latin verb 

(to command) and the Roman concept of imperium, while the actual term 'Imperialism' was coined in the 16th century, reflecting what are now seen as the imperial policies of Belgium, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Imperialism not only describes colonial, territorial policies, but also economic and/or military dominance and influence. The ideas of imperialism put forward by historians John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson during 19th century European imperialism were

influential. They rejected the notion that "imperialism" required formal, legal control by one government over another country. "In their view, historians have been mesmerized by formal empire and maps of the world with regions colored red. The bulk of British emigration, trade, and capital went to areas outside the formal British Empire. A key to the thought of Robinson and Gallagher is the idea of empire 'informally if possible and formally if necessary.'" The term imperialism should not be confused with µcolonialism¶ as it often is. Edward Said suggests that imperialism involved ³the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory¶´. He goes on to say colonialism refers to the ³implanting of settlements on a distant territory´. Robert Young supports this thinking as he puts forward that imperialism operates from the centre, it is a state policy, and is developed for ideological as well as financial reasons whereas colonialism is nothing more than development for settlement or commercial intentions. Europe¶s expansion into territorial imperialism had much to do with the great economic benefit from collecting resources from colonies, in combination with assuming political control often by military means. Most notably, the ³British exploited the political weakness of the Mughal state, and, while military activity was important at various times, the economic and administrative incorporation of local elites was also of crucial significance´. Although a substantial number of colonies had been designed or subject to provide economic profit (mostly through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), Fieldhouse suggests that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in places such as Africa and Asia, this idea is not necessarily valid. Modern empires were not artificially constructed economic machines. The second expansion of Europe was a complex historical process in which political, social and emotional forces in Europe and on the periphery were more influential than calculated imperialism. Individual colonies might serve an economic purpose; collectively no empire had any definable function, economic or otherwise. Empires represented only a particular phase in the ever-changing relationship of Europe with the rest of the world: analogies with industrial systems or investment in real estate were simply misleading.

This form of economic imperialism described above was an early form of capitalism, as European merchants had the ability to ³roam the high seas and appropriate surpluses from around the world (sometimes peaceably, sometimes violently) and to concentrate them in Europe.´ Although commonly used to imply forcible imposition of a government control by an outside country, especially in a new, unconnected territory, the term is sometimes also used to describe loose or indirect political or economic influence or control of weak states by more powerful ones. If the dominant country's influence is felt in social and cultural circles, such as "foreign" music being popular with young people, it may be described as cultural imperialism. c 3   ccc European intellectuals have contributed to formal theories of imperialism. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), V.I. Lenin said capitalism necessarily induced monopoly capitalism as imperialism to find new business and resources, representing the last and highest stage of capitalism.The necessary expansion of capitalism beyond the boundaries of nation-states ² a foundation of Leninism ² was shared by Rosa Luxemburg (The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism) and liberal philosopher Hannah Arendt. Since then, Marxist scholars extended Lenin's theory to be synonymous with capitalist international trade and banking. Although Karl Marx did not publish a theory of imperialism, he identified colonialism (cf. Das Kapital) as an aspect of the prehistory of the capitalist mode of production. Lenin's definition: "the highest stage of capitalism" addressed the time when monopoly finance capital was dominant, forcing nations and private corporations to compete to control the world's natural resources and markets. c c Marxist imperialism theory, and the related dependency theory, emphasise the economic relationships among countries (and within countries), rather than formal political and military relationships. Thus, imperialism is not necessarily direct formal control of one country by another, but the economic exploitation of one by another. This Marxism contrasts with the

popular conception of imperialism, as directly-controlled colonial and neocolonial empires. c  c  c Per Lenin, Imperialism is Capitalism, with five simultaneous features: (1) Concentration of production and capital led to the creation of national and multinational monopolies ² not as in liberal economics, but as de facto power over their markets ² while "free competition" remains the domain of local and niche markets: Free competition is the basic feature of capitalism, and of commodity production generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale industry and forcing out small industry, replacing large-scale by still larger-scale industry, and carrying concentration of production and capital to the point where out of it has grown and is growing monopoly: cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks, which manipulate thousands of millions. At the same time the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system. [Following Marx's value theory, Lenin saw monopoly capitalism limited by the law of falling profit, as the ratio of constant capital to variable capital increased. Per Marx, only living labour (variable capital) creates profit in the form of surplus-value. As the ratio of surplus value to the sum of constant and variable capital falls, so does the rate of profit on invested capital.] (2) Finance capital replaces industrial capital (the dominant capital), (reiterating Rudolf Hilferding's point in Finance Capital), as industrial capitalists rely more upon bank-generated finance capital. (3) Finance capital exportation replaces the exportation of goods (though they continue in production). (4) The economic division of the world, by multi-national enterprises via international cartels.

(5) The political division of the world by the great powers, wherein exporting finance capital to their colonies allows their exploitation for resources and continued investment. This superexploitation of poor countries allows the capitalist industrial nations to keep some of their own workers content with slightly higher living standards. (cf. labor aristocracy; globalization). Claiming to be Leninist, the U.S.S.R. proclaimed itself foremost enemy of imperialism, supporting armed, national independence or communist movements in the Third World while simultaneously dominating Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Marxists and Maoists to the left of Trotsky, such as Tony Cliff, claim the Soviet Union was imperialist. Maoists claim it occurred after Khrushchev's ascension in 1956; Cliff says it occurred under Stalin in the 1940s (see Soviet occupations). Harry Magdoff's Age of Imperialism (1954) discusses Marxism and imperialism. c cc

c 3   Lenin's theory of imperialism has been critiqued by many scholars. One problem with Lenin's theory concerns the measured volumes of trade and capital flow among European capitalist societies and between European capitalist societies and poor Third World societies. European capitalist systems since the nineteenth century have always done the vast bulk of their trading among themselves, with a relative sliver of trade and capital flow going out to non-developed societies in comparison with trade and capital flow within the great European systems. Lenin's theory also contradicts Marx's doctrine of the reserved army of the unemployed (i.e. the lumpen proletariat), which holds that capitalism, for systemic reasons, cannot generate enough capital to employ all those who want to work. Lenin failed to see the contradiction, between the claim that capitalism builds up so much capital that it must send the excess overseas to "exploit" less developed societies, and the claim that capitalism cannot generate enough capital to sustain full employment. The aforementioned contradiction can be seen as a distortion of MarxistLeninist Theory. It is true that Marx uncovered systematic failures inherent to capitalism such as the inability of capitalism to provide work for all people. For instance, many modern Nations have an unemployment rate significantly greater than zero. However, Marx attributed such a failure to

the dynamics of capitalist production. Capitalists, in general, own the means of production (e.g. factories) and make profit. What is important here is how the profit is re-invested into the capitalist system. Rather than pay their workers higher wages or hire a larger work force, capitalists spend a significant portion of their profits on technological development. For example, the modern assembly line relies heavily on machinery. These machines take away the jobs of human workers. At the same time, capitalists are able to churn out more products using such machinery. Capital, then, can be increased (at least for a short time). In terms of imperialism, Lenin's theory does not contradict Marx's analysis of capitalism. Both men believed in and witnessed the formation of monopolies. Both men also stressed the insatiable appetite of capitalism to search for new markets that can increase profit. Since the bottom line for monopolies is to increase profit, Lenin was right insofar as imperialism is caused by the search for new markets. Currently, Marxists view globalization as imperialism's latest incarnation. è  cc c  controversial aspect of imperialism is the imperial power¶s defence and justification of such actions. Most controversial of all is the justification of imperialism done on scientific grounds. J. A. Hobson identifies this justification: ³It is desirable that the earth should be peopled, governed, and developed, as far as possible, by the races which can do this work best, i.e. by the races of highest 'social efficiency'.´ This is clearly the racial argument, which pays heed to other ideas such as the ³White Man¶s Burden´ prevalent at the turn of the nineteenth century. The principles of imperialism are often deeply connected to the policies and practices of British Imperialism "during the last generation, and proceeds rather by diagnosis than by historical description."British Imperialist strategy centred on the fundamental concept of 


 (Latin expression which stems from Roman law meaning µempty land¶). The country of Australia serves as a case study in relation to British imperialism. British settlement and colonial rule of the island of Australia in the eighteenth century was premised on 


, for it was seen as a land that was not µempty¶ of inhabitants. Despite British claims, an estimated 350,000 indigenous peoples were already living in Australia in the era of British conquest. The indigenous population suffered through years of political, social, and territorial oppression, however Aborigines were granted the right to vote comparatively early in Commonwealth elections, depending on whether their state allowed it. An example is in 1856, in NSW, where Aborigines were granted equal voting rights. It should be noted that the 1968 referendum only allowed the Commonwealth to count and administer Aborigines. This form of imperialism can also be seen in British Columbia, Canada. In the 1840¶s, the territory of British Columbia was divided into two regions, one space for the native

population, and the other for non-natives. The indigenous peoples were often forcibly removed from their homes onto reserves. These actions were ³justified by a dominant belief among British colonial officials that land occupied by Native people was not being used efficiently and productively.´The abovementioned examples of imperialism are consistently racially motivated, and it is, undoubtedly, a driving force behind the concept of imperialism in this era.

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 is the practice of promoting, distinguishing, separating, or artificially injecting the culture of one society into another. It is usually the case that the former belongs to a large, economically or militarily powerful nation and the latter belongs to a smaller, less important one.  
  can take the form of an active, formal policy or a general attitude. A metaphor of colonialism is employed: the cultural products of the first world "invade" the third-world and "conquer" local culture.In the stronger variants of the term, world domination (in a cultural sense) is the explicit goal of the nation-states or corporations that export the culture.The term is usually used in a pejorative sense, usually in conjunction with a call to reject foreign influence. 0  The term appears to have emerged in the 1960s.and has been a focus of research since at least the 1970s.Terms such as "media imperialism", "structural imperialism", "cultural dependency and domination", "cultural synchronization", "electronic colonialism", "ideological imperialism", and "economic imperialism" have all been used to describe the same basic notion of cultural imperialism. Various academics give various definitions of the term. American media criticHerbert Schiller wrote: "The concept of cultural imperialism today [1975] best describes the sum of the processes by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominating centre of the system. The public media are the foremost example of operating enterprises that are used in the penetrative process. For penetration

on a significant scale the media themselves must be captured by the dominating/penetrating power. This occurs largely through the commercialization of broadcasting" Tom McPhail defined "Electronic colonialism as the dependency relationship established by the importation of communication hardware, foreign-produced software, along with engineers, technicians, and related information protocols, that vicariously establish a set of foreign norms, values, and expectations which, in varying degrees, may alter the domestic cultures and socialization processes."Sui-Nam Lee observed that "communication imperialism can be defined as the process in which the ownership and control over the hardware and software of mass media as well as other major forms of communication in one country are singly or together subjugated to the domination of another country with deleterious effects on the indigenous values, norms and culture."Ogan saw "media imperialism often described as a process whereby the United States and Western Europe produce most of the media products, make the first profits from domestic sales, and then market the products in Third World countries at costs considerably lower than those the countries would have to bear to produce similar products at home." Downing and Sreberny-Mohammadi state: "Imperialism is the conquest and control of one country by a more powerful one. Cultural imperialism signifies the dimensions of the process that go beyond economic exploitation or military force. In the history of colonialism, (i.e., the form of imperialism in which the government of the colony is run directly by foreigners), the educational and media systems of many Third World countries have been set up as replicas of those in Britain, France, or the United States and carry their values. Western advertising has made further inroads, as have architectural and fashion styles. Subtly but powerfully, the message has often been insinuated that Western cultures are superior to the cultures of the Third World." The issue of cultural imperialism emerged largely from communication studies.However, cultural imperialism has been used as a framework by scholars to explain phenomena in the areas of international relations, anthropology, education, sciences, history, literature, and sports.[4] 3  

It can refer to either the forced acculturation of a subject population, or to the voluntary embracing of a foreign culture by individuals who do so of their own free will. Since these are two very different referents, the validity of the term has been called into question. Cultural influence can be seen by the "receiving" culture as either a threat to or an enrichment of its cultural identity. It seems therefore useful to distinguish between cultural imperialism as an (active or passive) attitude of superiority, and the position of a culture or group that seeks to complement its own cultural production, considered partly deficient, with imported products or values. The imported products or services can themselves represent, or be associated with, certain values (such as consumerism). According to one argument, the "receiving" culture does not necessarily perceive this link, but instead absorbs the foreign culture passively through the use of the foreign goods and services. Due to its somewhat concealed, but very potent nature, this hypothetical idea is described by some experts as "’  
 ." Some believe that the newly globalised economy of the late 20th and early 21st century has facilitated this process through the use of new information technology. This kind of cultural imperialism is derived from what is called "soft power." The theory of electronic colonialism extends the issue to global cultural issues and the impact of major multi-media conglomerates, ranging from Time-Warner, Disney, News Corp, Sony, to Google and Microsoft with the focus on the hegemonic power of these mainly US-based communication giants.    cc  One of the reasons often given for opposing any form of cultural imperialism, voluntary or otherwise, is the preservation of cultural diversity, a goal seen by some as analogous to the preservation of ecological diversity. Proponents of this idea argue either that such diversity is valuable in itself, or instrumentally valuable because it makes available more ways of solving problems and responding to catastrophes, natural or otherwise. Opponents of this idea deny the validity of the analogy to biodiversity, and/or the validity of the arguments for preserving biodiversity itself. Trinidad-born writer V. S. Naipaul presents Islam as a form of cultural imperialism, a foreign ideology smothering cultural diversity, in two of his

works: Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981) and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998).  
  
 Palestinian writer, philosopher, and literary theorist, Edward Said, who was one of the founders of the field of post-colonial study, wrote extensively on the subject of cultural imperialism. His work attempts to highlight the inaccuracies of many assumptions about cultures and societies, and is largely informed by Michel Foucault's concepts of discourse and power. The relatively new academic field of post-colonial theory has been the source for most of the in-depth work on the idea of discursive and other non-military mechanisms of imperialism, and its validity is disputed by those who deny that these forms are genuinely imperialistic. !"
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   V David Rothkopf, managing director of Kissinger Associates and an adjunct professor of international affairs at Columbia University (who also served as a senior US Commerce Department official in the Clinton Administration), wrote about cultural imperialism in his provocatively titled c 
   c
 in the summer 1997 issue of 
 magazine. Rothkopf says that the US should embrace "cultural imperialism" as in its self interest. But his definition of cultural imperialism stresses spreading the values of tolerance and openness to cultural change in order to avoid war and conflict between cultures as well as expanding accepted technological and legal standards to provide free traders with enough security to do business with more countries. Rothkopf's definition almost exclusively involves allowing individuals in other nations to accept or reject foreign cultural influences. He also mentions, but only in passing, the use of the English language and consumption of news and popular music and film as cultural dominance that he supports. Rothkopf additionally makes the point that globalization and the Internet are accelerating the process of cultural influence. Culture is used by the organizers of society ² politicians, theologians, academics, and families ² to impose and ensure order, the rudiments of which change over time as need dictates. It is less often acknowledged as the means of justifying inhumanity and warfare. [...] cultural differences are often sanctified by their links to

the mystical roots of culture, be they spiritual or historical. Consequently, a threat to one's culture becomes a threat to one's God or one's ancestors and, therefore, to one's core identity. This inflammatory formula has been used to justify many of humanity's worst acts. One need only look at the 20th century's genocides. In each one, leaders used culture to fuel the passions of their armies and other minions and to justify their actions among their people. Rothkopf then cites genocide and massacres in Armenia, Russia, the Holocaust, Cambodia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda and East Timor as examples of culture (in some cases expressed in the ideology of "political culture" or religion) being used to justify violence. He also acknowledges that cultural imperialism in the past has been guilty of forcefully eliminating the cultures of natives in the Americas and in Africa, or through use of the Inquisition,   

    



 The most important way to deal with cultural influence in any nation, according to Rothkopf, is to promote tolerance and allow, or even promote, cultural diversities that are compatible with tolerance and to eliminate those cultural differences that cause violent conflict: Successful multicultural societies, be they nations, federations, or other conglomerations of closely interrelated states, discern those aspects of culture that do not threaten union, stability, or prosperity (such as food, holidays, rituals, and music) and allow them to flourish. But they counteract or eradicate the more subversive elements of culture (exclusionary aspects of religion, language, and political/ideological beliefs). History shows that bridging cultural gaps successfully and serving as a home to diverse peoples requires certain social structures, laws, and institutions that transcend culture. Furthermore, the history of a number of ongoing experiments in multiculturalism, such as in the European Union, India, South Africa, Canada and the United States, suggests that workable, if not perfected, integrative models exist. Each is built on the idea that tolerance is crucial to social well-being, and each at times has been threatened by both intolerance and a heightened emphasis on cultural distinctions. The greater public good warrants eliminating those cultural characteristics that promote conflict or prevent harmony, even as less-

divisive, more personally observed cultural distinctions are celebrated and preserved.

c ccc

 
 ! assert that direct and indirect control of world petroleum reserves is a root factor in current international politics.      c While economists and historians agree that access to and control of the access of others to important resources has throughout history been a factor in warfare and in diplomacy, oil imperialism theorists generally tend to assert that control of petroleum reserves has played an overriding role in international politics since World War I. Most critics (and some supporters) of the Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, argue that oil imperialism was a major driving force behind these conflicts. Some theories hold that access to oil defined 20th century empires and was the key to the ascendance of the United States as the world's sole superpower and explain how a transitioning country like Russia is able to obtain such rapid GDP growth (see Economy of the Soviet Union). Petrodollar theory states that the recent wars in Iraq are partly motivated by the desire to keep the US dollar as the international currency. c cc Critics of oil imperialism theories suggest that because the United States is the third largest oil producer, and that it has historically been the leading oil producer in the world, the United States would be unlikely to predicate its foreign policy on the acquisition of oil with such an undue focus. They point out that, even relative to its consumption rate, oil is not an expensive commodity in the market. c cc ccc  # 
 is a term that appears to have been coined by Dr. Ellis T. Powell when addressing the Commonwealth Club of Canada on 8 September 1920. Though he defined imperialism as "the sense of arbitrary and capricious domination over the bodies and souls of men," yet he used

the term "scientific imperialism" to mean "the subjection of all the developed and undeveloped powers of the earth to the mind of man." In modern parlance, however, scientific imperialism refers to situations in which critics perceive science to act imperiously. Philosopher of scienceJohn Dupré described it (in his 2006 paper | 
  c
 ) as "the tendency to push a good scientific idea far beyond the domain in which it was originally introduced, and often far beyond the domain in which it can provide much illumination." He also wrote that "devotees of these approaches are inclined to claim that they are in possession not just of one useful perspective on human behavior, but of the key that will open doors to the understanding of ever wider areas of human behavior." Scientific imperialism has also been charged against "those who believe that the study of politics can and should be modelled on the natural sciences, a position defended most forcibly in the United States, and those who have dissented, viewing this ambition as methodologically unjustified and ethically undesirable." c c&     Writing about scientific exploration by James Cook in the 18th century, the textbook  à

 |  defined scientific imperialism as the "pursuit of power through the pursuit of knowledge,".Arthur Peacocke wrote that its later pejorative use may reflect the frustration felt by some with "the limitations of reductive scientism (scientific imperialism)."Theologian and Christian apologistJ. P. Moreland denounces "the myth that science is the model of truth and rationality still grips the mind of much of our popular and scientific culture", stating that "though philosophers of science over the past few decades have gutted many of the claims of this scientific imperialism, many thinkers, knee-jerk agnostics, and even judges persist in the grip of this notion."He also questions the notion that "successful scientific theories are true or approximately true models of the world,"and expresses a desire to "dethrone science from an imperialistic stance over philosophy and theology."Science journalist Ted Nield believes that scientists harbor "unreal expectations and mistaken assumptions" in a hubristic and imperialistic desire to extend the methods and ideology of science into regions of human investigation for which its methods might be unsuited, such as to religions and the humanities.


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( Behavioral psychologistJ. E. R. Staddon defined scientific imperialism as "the idea that all decisions, in principle, can be made scientifically" and stated that it has become a "religion of the intellectuals".John Dupré also criticised "a natural tendency, when one has a successful scientific model, to attempt to apply it to as many problems as possible", and described these extended applications as being "dangerous".Such notions have been compared to cultural imperialism, and to a rigid and intolerant form of intellectual monotheism. c 3 Medical doctor Peter Wilmshurst has used the term to describe "poor people in developing countries...being exploited in research for the benefit of patients in the developed world", and advised that "the scientific community has a responsibility to ensure that all scientific research is conducted ethically".Another accusation lies in the alleged misappropriation of indigenous drugs in poor countries by drug companies in the developed world. Pharmacologist Elaine Elisabetsky wrote that "ethnopharmacology involves a series of sociopolitical, economic and ethical dilemmas, at various levels...frequently host country scientists, visiting scientists, and informants disagree...research efforts are (often) perceived as scientific imperialism; scientists are accused of stealing plant materials and appropriating traditional plant knowledge for financial profit and/or professional advancement. Many governments, as well as indigenous societies are increasingly reluctant to permit such research...historically neither native populations nor host countries have shared to a significant extent the financial benefits from any drug that reaches the market...unless these issues are amply discussed and fairly resolved, medicinal plant research runs the risk of serving ethically questionable purposes."   ccc 


 is a Marxist term with two possible meanings. It refers either to the

 of an imperialist great power over its weaker rivals, who then are called ’ 
 , or to a comprehensive   
above a set of (theoretically) equal-righted imperialist states. ± The latter meaning is the older one and had become rare by the middle of 20th century.

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The expression 


 first apppeared in November 1914 as an (inaccurate) translation of the newly coined German term Ñ c
 . William E. Bohn, the translator of Karl Kautsky¶s article ÃDerImperialismus (= µThe Imperialism¶) seemed to believe, that the terms  
 and Ñ c
  were not reasonable for the audience of the ÃInternational socialist review¶ ± an American Marxist journal.[2] Bohn faced a double problem: Cartels were much less familiar in the USA than the concern-like, tauter organized trusts ± and the word  , which in English means
 

 or


. Thus, he paraphrased Kautsky¶s ideas in terms more familiar to American readers,somewhat distorting Kautsky's statement.  c Together with the revival of the imperialism debates in the 1970th the term 

  recovered, but got modified in its content. It served now to describe the domination by the super-power USA within a system of imperialism, in which the other imperialist powers were set back in their abilities and thus were second-class.[3] Since the same time, the German term Ñ 
  was translated into English literally with  
  and was now used to describe a rather equal-righted interimperialist cooperation.

 ccc c   ccc The "Rise of the New Imperialism" era overlaps with the     period (18151870). The American Revolution and the collapse of the Spanish empire in the New World in the early 1810-20s, following the revolutions in the viceroyalties of New Spain, New Granada, Peru and the Río de la Plata ended the first era of European empire. Especially in the United Kingdom (UK), these revolutions helped show the deficiencies of mercantilism, the doctrine of economic competition for finite wealth which had supported earlier imperial expansion. The 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws marked the adoption of free trade by the UK. As the µworkshop of the world¶, the United Kingdom was even supplying a large share of the manufactured goods consumed by such nations as Germany, France, Belgium and the United States. The     era also saw the enforced opening of key markets to European, particularly British, commerce: Turkey and Egypt in 1838, Persia in 1841, China in 1842 with the First Opium War, and Japan in 1858 leading to the Meiji period.

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After the 1815 Congress of Vienna which established the Concert of Europe continental order, the British established what was known as the     , which lasted until the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. In the UK, the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws demonstrated the increasing appeal of Adam Smith's liberalist theories. Richard Cobden, and other disciples of Smith contended that the military and bureaucratic costs of occupation often exceeded the financial return to the taxpayer: formal empire afforded no reciprocal economic benefit when trade would continue in its absence, as instanced by the United Kingdom's lucrative commerce with the now independent United States. Official acceptance of the new doctrine was marked by the United Kingdom's adoption of free trade with the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws and the subsequent granting of internal selfgovernment to the white settler populations of the Canadian provinces and the Australasian colonies, and governments even considered the sale of some colonial outposts to lesser powers. The defeat of NapoleonicFrance led to a continental order quite favourable to the United Kingdom's interests, known as the Concert of Europe, in which Austria was a barrier to the creation of unified Italian and German nation-states until after the 1854-56 Crimean War. Territorial fragmentation at the heart of Europe kept other potential imperial powers preoccupied with Continental concerns rather than overseas expansion. The United Kingdom, an island nation with a long-standing tradition of naval and maritime superiority, could afford the luxury of developing commercial ties with overseas markets, following its policy of splendid isolation. Between the 1815 Congress of Vienna and the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, the United Kingdom reaped the benefits of being the world's sole modern, industrial power. As the µworkshop of the world,¶ the United Kingdom could produce goods manufactured so efficiently and cheaply that its goods could usually undersell comparable, locally manufactured goods in other markets. Given stable political conditions, the United Kingdom could dominate overseas markets for industrial goods through free trade alone without having to resort to formal rule. Thus, some argue that the United Kingdom's push for free trade during the mid-nineteenth century was merely a result of her economic position and was unconnected with any true philosophical commitment.

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 The decline of Pax Britannica after the Franco-Prussian War was occasioned by changes in the European and world economies and in the Continental balance of power, such as the breakdown of the Concert of Europe. The establishment of nation-states in Germany and Italy resolved two of the great territorial issues which had kept the United Kingdom's prospective rivals enmeshed in Continental affairs. These developments stimulated imperial competition, in spite of the United Kingdom's long-established naval and maritime superiority.

Economically, to the commercial competition of old rivals like France was now added that of newly industrialising powers such as Germany and the United States. All sought ways of challenging what they saw as the United Kingdom's undue dominance in world markets²the consequence of her early industrialisation and maritime supremacy.

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$ As the other powers such as Germany and the United States, began to industrialise, the United Kingdom's comparative advantage in trade in finished goods diminished. While it previously had a near monopoly over industrially-produced goods it began to encounter far stiffer competition in overseas markets from the other powers. The United Kingdom's share of world trade fell from a quarter in 1880 to a sixth in 1913. The United Kingdom was even beginning to lose its unrivalled dominance in markets such as India. To make matters worse, British manufactures in the staple industries of the Industrial Revolution were beginning to face real competition abroad. The German textile and metal industries, for example, had by the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War surpassed those of the United Kingdom in organisation and technical efficiency[ 


] and usurped British manufactures in the domestic market. A number of changes had made this possible, such as the development of new techniques to remove phosphorus from the massive iron deposits of Lorraine, which left France and Germany with cheap and plentiful sources of iron. Both Continental powers had also begun large governmentsupported railway programs, and had passed the United Kingdom in total length of track by the 1880s. The development of steam shipping had also firmly brought the United States and Japan into the European market and greatly lowered transport costs. By the turn of the century, the German metal and engineering industries would be producing heavily for the international market as well. More modern technologies such as electricity were often more advanced and widely used in Germany than in the United Kingdom, which possessed older, less-productive plants.

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 The prolonged period of price deflation and intermittent business crisis between 1873 and 1896 has been described as the µLong Depression¶, and is sometimes considered to be economically more devastating than the Great Depression of 1929-1939. It had a number of causes and was itself an important factor in the shift toward formal colonialism. Amalgamation of industry, in the forms of larger corporations and mergers and alliances of separate firms had created inefficiencies and made economies more unstable. Technological advances along with monopolistic mass-production greatly expanded output and lowered production costs. As a result, production often exceeded domestic demand. In agriculture, large-scale imports of cheaper American grain and poor harvests

drove down European producer prices and incomes and further constrained overall demand among a population which, outside the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and parts of Germany, remained predominantly rural. International liquidity was constrained by the widespread adoption of gold-based currency at a time when little new gold was being discovered. The long-term effects of the Depression were particularly evident in the United Kingdom, the forerunner of Europe's industrial states. Practically every industry suffered after 1873 from lengthy periods of low²and falling²profit rates and price deflation. The crisis brought pressure on governments to support British industry and commerce and to protect the overseas investments interests on which the country had come to rely to offset its long-standing merchandise trade deficit and more recent loss of industrial market share. The Depression also struck the powers of Continental Europe, prompting their abandonment of free trade (by Germany in 1879, by France in 1881). As domestic demand and export opportunities thus became further limited, some business and government leaders concluded that sheltered overseas markets would solve the problems of low prices and demand caused by stagnating and increasingly fragmented Continental markets.

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  The United Kingdom in the 1870s remained the world's foremost industrial power, but her share of world manufacturing output was already falling before the impact of international recession. Like the Dutch a century and a half earlier, the British coped with relative commercial and industrial decline in the latter half of the 19th century by becoming the world's preeminent bankers, and invisible exports of financial and shipping services alone kept the United Kingdom µout of the red.¶

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, During the period of µcut-throat¶ competition of the mid-Victorian era, producers became aware of the advantages (in mass production, lobbying power, and efficient union busting) of consolidation not only in the form of larger corporations but also through mergers and alliances of separate firms. To create and operate such industrial cartels required larger sums than the manufacturer could ordinarily provide, resulting, it is argued, in the displacement of industrial capital by finance capital. By the 1870s, London financial houses thus achieved an unprecedented control of industry. Close association of industry and banks enabled financiers to exert considerable influence over the British economy and politics. As a more µgentlemanly¶ pursuit than industry, finance was able to appeal to the United Kingdom's aristocracy, and the influence of London's financial interest began rising precipitously in a government bureaucracy still dominated by those with formal titles. Late Victorian political leaders, most of whom were stockholders, µshared a common culture with the financial class,¶ according to imperial historian Bernard Porter. Thus, pro-imperialists linked to the financial sector in

the 1870s would be in a far better position to influence government than industrialists in the 1850s. The enhanced power of financiers enabled them to influence policy makers in the direction of government µprotection¶ of overseas investments²particularly those in securities of foreign governments and in foreign-government-backed development activities such as railroads. Although it had been official British policy for years to support such investments, with the large expansion of these investments after about 1860 and with the economic and political instability of many areas of high investment (such as Egypt), calls upon the government for methodical protection became increasingly pronounced. This prompted imperial critic J.A. Hobson to conclude that finance was manipulating events to its own profit. For Hobson, Overseas markets, whether in colonial areas or in nominally sovereign, pre-industrial states outside Western Europe, offered a higher return on investments owing to their cheap labour, limited competition, and abundant raw materials. While not downplaying this influence of the City's financial interests, later historians such as Bernard Porter, P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins contest Hobson's conspiratorial overtones and µreductionisms¶. Nevertheless, these financial interests were often the prime movers in the drive for imperial expansion.

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 The new interest of the emergent industrial powers in colonial expansion brought them into direct competition with the United Kingdom. As Europe descended into an era of aggressive national rivalry between newly industrializing nation-states, many European statesmen and industrialists wanted to accelerate colonial expansion, securing colonies before they strictly needed them. Their reasoning was that markets might soon become glutted, and a nation's economic survival depend on its being able to offload its surplus products elsewhere.[ 


] The United Kingdom was no longer the world's sole modern, industrial nation. Pessimists inferred that unless the United Kingdom acquired secure colonial markets for its industrial products and secure sources of raw materials, the other industrial states would seize them themselves and would precipitate a more rapid decline in the growth of British business, power, and standards of living. British imperialists thus concluded that formal imperialism was necessary for the United Kingdom because of the relative decline of the British share of the world's export trade and the rise of German, American, and French economic competition and protectionism. Thus it has been argued that formal imperialism for the United Kingdom was a symptom and an effect of its relative decline in the world, and not of strength. While protectionism spread through the countries of Europe and to the United States, the only power to escape this trend was the United Kingdom, whose essential strength lay

precisely in its pre-eminence on a formerly open world market. German, American, and French imperialists, as mentioned, argued that the United Kingdom's world position gave her undue advantages on international markets, thus limiting their economic growth. Some see the root cause of the United Kingdom's adoption of the New Imperialism as primarily strategic or pre-emptive. The failure in the 1900s of Chamberlain's Tariff Reform campaign for Imperial protection illustrates the United Kingdom's underlying attachment to free trade despite her loss of international market share. The adoption of the µNew imperialism¶ can thus be seen as motivated primarily by the need to protect existing trade links and to prevent the absorption of overseas markets into the increasingly closed imperial trading blocs of rival powers.

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(1904) resolved Anglo-French animosities, laying the basis for  

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exports in that year each totaled $2.3 billion, and those of the United States exceeded $2.4 billion. More significant was the emigration of their goods and capital. As foreign trade increased, so in proportion did the amount of it going outside the Continent. In 1840, 7.7 million pounds of her export and 9.2 million pounds of her import trade was done outside Europe; in 1880, the figures were 38.4 million and 73 million. Europe's economic contacts with the wider world were multiplying, much as the United Kingdom's had been doing for years.

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The Long Depression hit France already burdened by substantial reparation payments to the new German Empire following her defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. The nation was also divided by the civil war between socialists and republicans in 1871. The French government ended free trade and began to pursue colonisation as a way to increase their power, aid their economy and restore national prestige.

  

   
 
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Just as the United States emerged as a great industrial, military and political power after the American Civil War, so would Germany following its own unification in 1871. Both countries undertook ambitious naval expansion in the 1890s. Just as Germany reacted to depression with the adoption of tariff protection in 1879, so would the United States with the landslide election victory of William McKinley, who had risen to national prominence six years earlier with the passage of the McKinley Tariff of 1890. Germany, a leading military power after unification, abandoned free trade and embraced expansionism with its adoption of a tariff in 1879, its acquisition of a colonial empire in 1884-1885, and its building of a powerful navy after 1898-1900. German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck revised his initial dislike of colonies (which he had seen as burdensome and useless) partly under pressure for colonial expansion to match that of the other European states, but also under the notion that Germany's entry into the colonial scramble could press the United Kingdom into conceding broader German strategic ambitions. United States expansionism had its roots in domestic concerns and economic conditions, as in other newly industrializing nations where government sought to accelerate internal development. The rapid turn to imperialism in the late nineteenth century can be correlated with the cyclical economic crises that adversely affected many groups. The Panic of 1893 contributed to the growing mood for expansionism. Like the post-1873 period in Europe (the Long Depression), the main features of the U.S. depression

included deflation, rural decline, and unemployment, which aggravated the bitter social protests of the µGilded Age¶²the populist movement, the free-silver crusade, and violent labour disputes such as the Pullman and Homestead strikes. The Panic of 1893 contributed to fierce competition over markets, as the long Depression two decades earlier across the Atlantic. Economic depression led some U.S. businessmen and politicians from the mid-1880s to come to the same conclusion as their European counterparts: that industry and capital had exceeded the capacity of existing markets and needed new outlets. Advocates of empire also drew upon to a tradition of westward expansion over the course of the previous century. The µclosing of the Frontier¶ identified by the 1890 Census report and publicised by historianFrederick Jackson Turner in his 1893 paper à
  
  
 
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   , contributed to fears of constrained natural resource. Influential politicians such as Henry Cabot Lodge, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt advocated a more aggressive foreign policy to pull the United States out of the depression. However, opposition to expansionism was strong and vocal in the United States. The U.S. became involved in the War with Spain only after Cubans convinced the U.S. government that Spain was brutalizing them. Whatever the causes, the result of the war was that the U.S. came into the possession of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. It was, however, only the Philippines that remained, for three decades, as a colonial possession. While Germany, the United States, Italy, and other more recently industrialised empires were under relatively less pressure to offload surplus capital than the United Kingdom, the emerging empires resorted to protectionism and formal empire in response to the United Kingdom's advantage on international markets. Although U.S. capital investments within the Philippines and Puerto Rico were relatively small (figures that would seemingly detract from the broader economic implications on first glance), these colonies were strategic outposts for expanding trade with Asia, particularly China and Latin America, enabling the United States to reap the benefit of the µOpen Door¶ in China and µDollar Diplomacy¶ in Latin America. The U.S. gradually surpassed the United Kingdom as the leading investor of capital in Latin America and East Asia²a process largely completed by the end of the Great War. Japan's development after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 followed the Western lead in industrialisation and militarism, enabling the empire to gain control of Korea in 1894 and a sphere of influence in Manchuria (1905) following its defeat of Russia. Japan was responding in part to the actions of more established powers, and her expansionism drew on the harnessing of traditional values to more modern aspirations for great power-status: not until the 1930s was Japan to become a net exporter of capital.

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  New social views of colonialism also arose. Rudyard Kipling, for instance, urged the United States to take up the µWhite Man's Burden¶ of bringing µcivilisation¶ to the other races of the world, whether they wanted such civilisation or not. Social Darwinism also became current throughout Western Europe and the United States, while the paternalistic French-style 'mission of civilisation' (  
) appealed to many on the Continent. The notion of rule over tropical lands commanded widespread acceptance among metropolitan populations: even among those who associated imperial colonisation with oppression and exploitation, the 1904 Congress of the Socialist International concluded that the colonial peoples should be taken in hand by future European socialist governments and led by them to eventual independence. Observing the rise of trade unionism, socialism, and other protest movements during an era of mass society in both Europe and later North America, elites sought to whip up imperial sentiment to enlist the support of the masses. The new mass media of the United States and the United Kingdom promoted jingoism to build their circulation during overseas adventures like the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Second Boer War of 1899-1902 and the suppression of the Chinese anti-western Boxer Rebellion (1900). Many of Europe's major elites also found some advantages in formal, overseas expansion: mammoth monopolies wanted imperial support to secure overseas investments against competition and domestic political tensions abroad; bureaucrats wanted more offices, military officers desired promotion, and the traditional but waning landed gentry wanted formal titles. In the colonies themselves, a section of the population came to terms with the new imperial administration and took part in its imposition or maintenance: the imperial rulers everywhere exploited divisions within the territories they sought to rule, enlisting chiefs or communities keen to overturn their pre-colonial status. Both traditional and emerging elites sought a place in the political framework and sent their sons to be educated in metropolitan schools and universities, though many of the professional classes came to resent the limitation of political and government opportunities, contributing to the later growth of modern colonial nationalism.

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  The accumulation theory, conceived largely by Karl Kautsky and J.A. Hobson shortly afterwards, then popularized by Lenin, centres on the accumulation of surplus capital during the Second Industrial Revolution.

Both theorists linked the problem of shrinking continental markets driving European capital overseas to an inequitable distribution of wealth in industrial Europe. They contended that the wages of workers did not represent enough purchasing power to absorb the vast amount of capital accumulated during the Second Industrial Revolution. Hobson, a British liberal writing at the time of the fierce debate on imperialism during the Second Boer War, observed the spectacle of what is popularly known as the "Scramble for Africa", and emphasized changes in European social structures and attitudes as well as capital flow (though his emphasis on the latter seems to have been the most influential and provocative). His so-called accumulation theory suggested that capitalism suffered from under-consumption due to the rise of monopoly capitalism and the resultant concentration of wealth in fewer hands, which apparently gave rise to a misdistribution of purchasing power. Logically, this argument is sound, given the huge impoverished industrial working class - then often far too poor to consume the goods produced by an industrialised economy. His analysis of capital flight and the rise of mammoth cartels later influenced Lenin in his c
 
 
 
    (1916)[1]which has become a basis for the modern neo-Marxist analysis of imperialism. Thus some have argued that the New Imperialism was caused essentially by a flight of foreign capital. New Imperialism was one way of capturing new overseas markets. By the eve of World War I, Europe, for instance, represented the largest share (27 %) of the global zones of investment, followed by North America (24 %), Latin America (19 %), Asia (16 %), Africa (9 %), and Oceania (5 %) for all industrial powers. Britain, the forerunner of Europe's capitalist powers, however, was clearly the chief world investor, though the direction of its investments underwent a striking change, becoming oriented less toward Europe, the United States, and India, and more toward the rest of the Commonwealth and Latin America. In non-industrial regions that lacked both the knowledge and the power to direct the capital flow, this investment served to colonize rather than to develop them, destroying native industries and creating dangerous political and economic pressures which would, in time, produce the so-called "north/south divide." Dependency Theory, devised largely by Latin American academics, draws on this inference. Some have criticisedJ.A. Hobson's analysis of over-accumulation and underconsumption, arguing it does not explain why less developed nations with little surplus capital, such as Italy, participated in colonial expansion. Nor does it fully explain the expansionism of the great powers of the next century ² the United States and Russia, which were in fact, net borrowers of foreign capital. Opponents of his accumulation theory also point to many instances in which foreign rulers needed and requested Western capital, such as the hapless moderniser Khedive Ismail Pasha. Since the "Scramble for Africa" was the predominant feature of New Imperialism and formal empire, opponents of Hobson's accumulation theory often point to frequent cases when military and bureaucratic costs of occupation exceeded financial returns. In Africa (exclusive of South Africa) the amount of capital investment by Europeans was relatively small before and after the 1880s, and the companies involved in tropical African commerce exerted limited political influence. First, this observation might detract from

the pro-imperialist arguments of Léopold II, Francesco Crispi, and Jules Ferry, but Hobson argued against imperialism from a slightly different standpoint. He concluded that finance was manipulating events to its own profit, but often against broader national interests. Second, any such statistics only obscure the fact that African formal control of tropical Africa had strategic implications in an era of feasible inter-capitalist competition, particularly for Britain, which was under intense economic and thus political pressure to secure lucrative markets such as India, China, and Latin America.

p  World-Systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein addresses these counterarguments without degrading Hobson's underlying inferences. Wallerstein's conception of imperialism as a part of a general, gradual extension of capital investment from the "centre" of the industrial countries to an overseas "periphery" coincides with Hobson's. According to Wallerstein, "Mercantilism became the major tool of (newly industrialising, increasingly competitive) semi-peripheral countries (i.e, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, etc.) seeking to become core countries." Wallerstein hence perceives formal empire as performing a function "analogous to that of the mercantilist drives of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England and France." Protectionism and formal empire were characteristics of this era of neomercantilism, the major tools of "semi-peripheral," newly industrialized states, such as Germany, seeking to usurp Britain's position at the "core" of the global capitalist system. The expansion of the Industrial Revolution thus contributed to the emergence of an era of aggressive national rivalry, leading to the late nineteenth century scramble for Africa and formal empire. Hobson's theory is thus useful in explaining the role of over-accumulation in overseas economic and colonial expansionism while Wallerstein perhaps better explains the dynamic of inter-capitalist geopolitical competition.



 
   
 In this sense, contemporary imperial historian Bernard Porter argues that formal imperialism for Britain was a symptom and an effect of its relative decline in the world, and not of strength. Symbolic overtures, in fact, such as Queen Victoria's grandiose title "Empress of India", celebrated during the second premiership of Benjamin Disraeli in the 1870s, helped to obscure this fact. Joseph Chamberlain thus argued that formal imperialism was necessary for Britain because of the relative decline of the British share of the world's export trade and the quick rise of German, American, and French economic competition. Porter, however, notes that Britain, "Struck with outmoded physical plants and outmoded forms of business organization... now felt the less favorable effects of being the first to modernize." He contends that "a kind of vicious circle had been set up, with domestic industry lagging because capital was going elsewhere because industry was lagging." Unlike J.A. Hobson, however, who links under-consumption to a mis distribution of

purchasing power, Porter argues that "the best thing that Britain could have done to correct [its balance of payments] would have been to make her export industry more competitive ²improve her methods of manufacturing and marketing in order to sell more abroad." As mentioned, contemporary historians, such as Bernard Porter, P.J. Cain, and A.G. Hopkins, do not downplay the influence of financial interests of "the city" either, but contest Hobson's conspiratorial overtones and "reductionisms." Nevertheless, they often acted as repositories of the surplus capital accumulated by a monopolistic system and they were therefore the prime movers in the drive for imperial expansion, their problem being to find fields for the investment of capital

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   traces its roots back to the late fifteenth century with a series of voyages that sought a sea passage to India in the hope of establishing direct trade between Europe and Asia in spices. Before 1500 European economies were largely selfsufficient, only supplemented by minor trade with Asia and Africa. Within the next century, however, European and Asian economies were slowly becoming integrated through the rise of new global trade routes; and the early thrust of European political power, commerce, and culture in Asia gave rise to a growing trade in lucrative commodities²a key development in the rise of today's modern world free market economy. In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese established a monopoly over trade between Asia and Europe by managing to prevent rival powers from using the water routes between Europe and the Indian Ocean. However, with the rise of the rival Dutch East India Company, Portuguese influence in Asia was gradually eclipsed. Dutch forces first established independent bases in the East (most significantly Batavia, the heavily fortified headquarters of the Dutch East India Company) and then between 1640 and 1660 wrestled Malacca, Ceylon, some southern Indian ports, and the lucrative Japan trade from the Portuguese. Later, the English and the French established settlements in India and established a trade with China and their own acquisitions would gradually surpass those of the Dutch. Following the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, the British eliminated French influence in India and established the British East India Company as the most important political force on the Indian Subcontinent. Before the Industrial Revolution in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, demand for oriental goods remained the driving force behind European imperialism, and (with the important exception of British East India Company rule in India) the European stake in Asia remained confined largely to trading stations and strategic outposts necessary to protect trade. Industrialisation, however, dramatically increased European demand for Asian raw materials; and the severe Long Depression of the 1870s provoked a scramble for new markets for European industrial products and financial services in Africa, the Americas, Eastern Europe, and especially in Asia. This scramble coincided with a new era in global colonial expansion known as "the New Imperialism," which saw a shift in

focus from trade and indirect rule to formal colonial control of vast overseas territories ruled as political extensions of their mother countries. Between the 1870s and the beginning of World War I in 1914, the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands ² the established colonial powers in Asia ² added to their empires vast expanses of territory in the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, and South East Asia. In the same period, the Empire of Japan, following the Meiji Restoration; the German Empire, following the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871; Tsarist Russia; and the United States, following the Spanish-American War in 1898, quickly emerged as new imperial powers in East Asia and in the Pacific Ocean area. In Asia, World War I and World War II were played out as struggles among several key imperial powers²conflicts involving the European powers along with Russia and the rising American and Japanese powers. None of the colonial powers, however, possessed the resources to withstand the strains of both world wars and maintain their direct rule in Asia. Although nationalist movements throughout the colonial world led to the political independence of nearly all of the Asia's remaining colonies, decolonisation was intercepted by the Cold War; and South East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and East Asia remained embedded in a world economic, financial, and military system in which the great powers compete to extend their influence. However, the rapid post-war economic development of the East Asian Tigers and the People's Republic of China, along with the collapse of the Soviet Union, have loosened European and North American influence in Asia, generating speculation today about the possible reemergence of China and Japan as regional powers.

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 European exploration of Asia started in ancient Roman times. Knowledge of lands as distant as China were held by the Romans. Trade with India through the Roman Egyptian Red Sea ports was significant in the first centuries of the Common Era.

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Western European rulers determined to find new trade routes of their own. The Portuguese spearheaded the drive to find oceanic routes that would provide cheaper and easier access to South and East Asian goods. This chartering of oceanic routes between East and West began with the unprecedented voyages of Portuguese and Spanish sea captains. Their voyages were influenced by medieval European adventurers, who had journeyed overland to the Far East and contributed to geographical knowledge of parts of Asia upon their return. In 1488, Bartholomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa under the sponsorship of Portugal's John II, from which point he noticed that the coast swung northeast. Although his crew forced him to turn back, he was pleased with the prospect of soon finding a sea route to India and named the tip as the Cape of Good Hope. Later, starting in 1497, Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama made the first open voyage from Europe to India. In 1520, Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese navigator in the service of Spain, found a sea route into the Pacific Ocean.


 
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, +   ! c V Early in the 16th century Afonso de Albuquerque (left) emerged as the Portuguese colonial viceroy most instrumental in consolidating Portugal's holdings in Africa and in Asia. He understood that Portugal could wrest commercial supremacy from the Arabs only by force, and therefore devised a plan to establish forts at strategic sites which would dominate the trade routes and also protect Portuguese interests on land. In 1510, he seized Goa in India, which enabled him to gradually consolidate control of most of the commercial traffic between Europe and Asia, largely through trade; Europeans started to carry on trade from forts, acting as foreign merchants rather than as settlers. In contrast, early European expansion in the "West Indies," (later known to Europeans as a separate continent from Asia that they would call the "Americas") following the 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus, involved heavy settlement in colonies that were treated as political extensions of the mother countries. Lured by the potential of high profits from another expedition, the Portuguese established a permanent base south of the Indian trade port of Calicut in the early 15th century. In 1510, the Portuguese seized Goa on the coast of India, which Portugal held until 1961. The Portuguese soon acquired a monopoly over trade in the Indian Ocean. Portuguese viceroy Afonso de Albuquerque (1509-1515) resolved to consolidate Portuguese holdings in Africa and Asia, and secure control of trade with the East Indies and China. His first objective was Malacca, which controlled the narrow strait through which most Far Eastern trade moved. Captured in 1511, Malacca became the springboard for further eastward penetration; several years later the first trading posts were established in the Moluccas, or "Spice Islands," which was the source for some of the world's most hotly demanded spices. By 1516, the first Portuguese ships had reached Canton on the southern coasts of China.

By 1557, the Portuguese gained a permanent base in China at Macau, which they held until 1999. The Portuguese, based at Goa and Malacca, had now established a lucrative maritime empire in the Indian Ocean meant to monopolise the spice trade. The Portuguese also began a channel of trade with the Japanese, becoming the first recorded Westerners to have visited Japan. This contact introduced Christianity and fire-arms into Japan. The energies of Spain, the other major colonial power of the 16th century, were largely concentrated on the Americas, not South and East Asia. But the Spanish did establish a footing in the Far East in the Philippines. After 1565, cargoes of Chinese goods were transported from the Philippines to Mexico and from there to Spain. By this long route, Spain reaped some of the profits of Far Eastern commerce. Spanish officials converted the island to Christianity and established some settlements, permanently establishing the Philippines as the area of East Asia most oriented toward the West in terms of culture and commerce.

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, The lucrative trade was vastly expanded when the Portuguese began to export slaves from Africa in 1541; however, over time, the rise of the slave trade left Portugal overextended, and vulnerable to competition from other Western European powers. Envious of Portugal's control of trade routes, other Western European nations ² mainly the Netherlands, France, and England ² began to send in rival expeditions to Asia. In 1642, the Dutch drove the Portuguese out of the Gold Coast in Africa, the source of the bulk of Portuguese slave labourers, leaving this rich slaving area to other Europeans, especially the Dutch and the English. Rival European powers began to make inroads in Asia as the Portuguese and Spanish trade in the Indian Ocean declined primarily because they had become hugely overstretched financially due to the limitations on their investment capacity and contemporary naval technology. Both of these factors worked in tandem, making control over Indian Ocean trade extremely expensive. The existing Portuguese interests in Asia proved sufficient to finance further colonial expansion and entrenchment in areas regarded as of greater strategic importance in Africa and Brazil. Portuguese maritime supremacy was lost to the Dutch in the 17th century, and with this came serious challenges for the Portuguese. However, they still clung to Macau, and settled a new colony on the island of Timor. It was as recent as the 1960s and 1970s that the Portuguese began to relinquish their colonies in Asia. Goa was invaded by India in 1961 and became an Indian state in 1987; East Timor was abandoned in 1975 and was then invaded by Indonesia. It became an independent nation in 2002; and Macau was handed over to the Chinese as per a treaty in 1999.


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 !   /   Portuguese decline in Asia was accelerated by the attacks on their commercial empire by the Dutch and the English, which began a global struggle over empire in Asia that lasted until the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763. The Netherlands revolt against Spanish rule facilitated Dutch encroachment of the Portuguese monopoly over South and East Asian trade. The Dutch looked on Spain's trade and colonies as potential spoils in war. When the two crowns of the Iberian peninsula were joined in 1581, the Dutch felt free to attack Portuguese territories in Asia. By the 1590s, a number of Dutch companies were formed to finance trading expeditions in Asia. Because competition lowered their profits, and because of the doctrines of mercantilism, in 1602 the companies united into a cartel and formed the Dutch East India Company, and received from the government the right to trade and colonise territory in the area stretching from the Cape of Good Hope eastward to the Strait of Magellan. In 1605, armed Dutch merchants captured the Portuguese fort at Amboyna in the Moluccas, which was developed into the first secure base of the company. Over time, the Dutch gradually consolidated control over the great trading ports of the East Indies. Control over the East Indies trading ports allowed the company to monopolise the world spice trade for decades. Their monopoly over the spice trade became complete after they drove the Portuguese from Malacca in 1641 and Ceylon in 1658. Dutch East India Company colonies or outposts were later established in Atjeh (Aceh), 1667; Macassar, 1669; and Bantam, 1682. The company established its headquarters at Batavia (today Jakarta) on the island of Java. Outside the East Indies, the Dutch East India Company colonies or outposts were also established in Persia (now Iran), Bengal (now Bangladesh and part of India), Mauritius (1638-1658/1664-1710), Siam (now Thailand), Guangzhou (Canton, China), Taiwan (1624-1662), and southern India (16161795). In 1662, ZhengChenggong (also known as Koxinga) expelled the Dutch from Taiwan. (

History of Taiwan) Further, the Dutch East India Company trade post on Dejima (1641- 1857), an artificial island off the coast of Nagasaki, was for a long time the only place where Europeans could trade with Japan. In 1652, Jan van Riebeeck established an outpost at the Cape of Good Hope (the southwestern tip of Africa, currently in South Africa) to restock company ships on their journey to East Asia. This post later became a fully-fledged colony, the Cape Colony (1652-1806). As Cape Colony attracted increasing Dutch and European settlement, the Dutch founded the city of Kaapstad (Cape Town). By 1669, the Dutch East India Company was the richest private company in history, with a huge fleet of merchant ships and warships, tens of thousands of employees, a private army consisting of thousands of soldiers, and a reputation on the part of its stockholders for high dividend payments.

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The company was in almost constant conflict with the English; relations were particularly tense following the Amboyna Massacre in 1623. During the eighteenth century, Dutch East India Company possessions were increasingly focused on the East Indies. After the fourth war between the United Provinces and England (1780±1784), the company suffered increasing financial difficulties. In 1799, the company was dissolved. The East Indies were awarded to The Kingdom of the Netherlands by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Dutch concentrated their colonial enterprise in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) throughout the nineteenth century. The Dutch lost control over the East Indies to the Japanese during much of World War II. Following the war, the Dutch fought Indonesian independence forces after Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945.

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  c 1-233-.245 The English sought to stake out claims in India at the expense of the Portuguese dating back to the Elizabethan era. In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I incorporated the English East India Company (later the British East India Company), granting it a monopoly of trade from the Cape of Good Hope eastward to the Strait of Magellan. In 1639 it acquired Madras on the east coast of India, where it quickly surpassed Portuguese Goa as the principal European trading centre on the Indian Subcontinent. Through bribes, diplomacy, and manipulation of weak native rulers, the company prospered in India, where it became the most powerful political force, and outrivaled its Portuguese, and French competitors. For more than one hundred years, English and French trading companies had fought one another for supremacy, and by the middle of the eighteenth century competition between the British and the French had heated up. French defeat by the British under the command of Robert Clive during the Seven Years' War (1756-1763) marked the end of the French stake in India.

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c  The British East India Company, although still in direct competition with French and Dutch interests until 1763, was able to extend its control over almost the whole of India in the century following the subjugation of Bengal at the 1757 Battle of Plassey. The British East India Company made great advances at the expense of a Mughal dynasty, seething with corruption, oppression, and revolt, that was crumbling under the despotic rule of Aurangzeb (1658-1707). The reign of Shah Jahan (1628-1658) had marked the height of Mughal power. However, the reign of Aurangzeb, a ruthless and fanatical man who intended to rid India of all views alien to the Islamic faith, was disastrous. By 1690, when Mughal territorial

expansion reached its greatest extent, Aurangzeb's Empire encompassed the entire Indian Subcontinent. But this period of power was followed by one of decline. Fifty years after the death of Aurangzeb, the great Mughalempire had crumbled. Meanwhile, marauding warlords, nobles, and others bent on gaining power left the Subcontinent increasingly anarchic. Although the Mughals kept the imperial title until 1858, the central government had collapsed, creating a power vacuum.

 
,  %V Aside from defeating the French during the Seven Years' War, Robert Clive, the leader of the Company in India, defeated a key Indian ruler of Bengal at the decisive Battle of Plassey (1757), a victory that ushered in the beginning of a new period in Indian history, that of informal British rule. While still nominally the sovereign, the Mughal Indian emperor became more and more of a puppet ruler, and anarchy spread until the company stepped into the role of policeman of India. The transition to formal imperialism, characterised by Queen Victoria being crowned "Empress of India" in the 1870s was a gradual process. The first step toward cementing formal British control extended back to the late eighteenth century. The British Parliament, disturbed by the idea that a great business concern, interested primarily in profit, was controlling the destinies of millions of people, passed acts in 1773 and 1784 that gave itself the power to control company policies and to appoint the highest company official in India, the Governor-General. (This system of dual control lasted until 1858.) By 1818 the East India Company was master of all of India. Some local rulers were forced to accept its overlordship; others were deprived of their territories. Some portions of India were administered by the British directly; in others native dynasties were retained under British supervision. Until 1858, however, much of India was still officially the dominion of the Mughal emperor. Anger among some social groups, however, was seething under the governorgeneralship of James Dalhousie (1847-1856), who annexed the Punjab (1849) after victory in the Second Sikh War, annexed seven princely states on the basis of lapse, annexed the key state of Oudh on the basis of misgovernment, and upset cultural sensibilities by banning Hindu practices such as Sati. The 1857 Sepoy Rebellion, or Indian Mutiny, an uprising initiated by Indian troops, called sepoys, who formed the bulk of the Company's armed forces, was the key turning point. Rumour had spread among them that their bullet cartridges were lubricated with pig and cow fat. The cartridges had to be bit open, so this upset the Hindu and Muslim soldiers. The Hindu religion held cows sacred, and for Muslims pork was considered Haraam. In one camp, 85 out of 90 sepoys would not accept the cartridges from their garrison officer. The British harshly punished those who would not by jailing them. The Indian people were outraged, and on May 10, 1857, sepoys marched to Delhi, and, with the help of soldiers stationed there, captured it. Fortunately for the British, many areas remained loyal and quiescent, allowing the revolt to be crushed after fierce fighting. One important consequence of the revolt was the final collapse of the Mughal dynasty. The mutiny also ended the system of dual control under which the British government and the British East India Company shared authority. The government relieved the company of its political responsibilities, and in 1858, after 258 years of existence, the company relinquished its role. Trained civil servants were

recruited from graduates of British universities, and these men set out to rule India. Lord Canning (created earl in 1859), appointed Governor-General of India in 1856, became known as "Clemency Canning" as a term of derision for his efforts to restrain revenge against the Indians during the Indian Mutiny. When the Government of India was transferred from the Company to the Crown, Canning became the first viceroy of India.

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The denial of equal status to Indians was the immediate stimulus for the formation in 1885 of the Indian National Congress, initially loyal to the Empire but committed from 1905 to increased self-government and by 1930 to outright independence. The "Home charges," payments transferred from India for administrative costs, were a lasting source of nationalist grievance, though the flow declined in relative importance over the decades to independence in 1947. Although majority Hindu and minority Muslim political leaders were able to collaborate closely in their criticism of British policy into the 1920s, British support for a distinct Muslim political organisation, the Muslim League from 1906 and insistence from the 1920s on separate electorates for religious minorities, is seen by many in India as having contributed to Hindu-Muslim discord and the country's eventual Partition.


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France, which had lost its empire to the British by the end of the eighteenth century, had little geographical or commercial basis for expansion in Southeast Asia. After the 1850s, French imperialism was initially impelled by a nationalistic need to rival the United Kingdom and was supported intellectually by the concept of the superiority of French culture and France's special   
²the civilizing of the native through assimilation to French culture. The immediate pretext for French expansionism in Indochina was the protection of French religious missions in the area, coupled with a desire to find a southern route to China through Tonkin, the European name for the northern region of northern Vietnam French religious and commercial interests were established in Indochina as early as the seventeenth century, but no concerted effort at stabilizing the French position was possible in the face of British strength in the Indian Ocean and French defeat in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. A mid-nineteenth century religious revival under the Second Empire provided the atmosphere within which interest in Indochina grew. Anti-Christian persecutions in the Far East provided the immediate cause. In 1856 the Chinese executed a French missionary in southeastern China, and in 1857 the Vietnamese emperor, faced with a domestic crisis, tried to destroy foreign influences in his country by executing the Spanish bishop of Tonkin. Under Napoleon III, France decided that Catholicism would be eliminated in the Far East if France did not go to its aid, and

accordingly the French joined the British against China in the Second Opium War from 1857 to 1860 and took action against Vietnam as well. By 1860, the French occupied Saigon. By the Treaty of Saigon in 1862, the Vietnamese emperor ceded France three provinces of southern Vietnam to form the French colony of Cochinchina; France also secured trade and religious privileges in the rest of Vietnam and a protectorate over Vietnam's foreign relations. Gradually French power spread through exploration, the establishment of protectorates, and outright annexations. Their seizure of Hanoi in 1882 led directly to war with China (1883-1885), and the French victory confirmed French supremacy in the region. France governed Cochinchina as a direct colony, and central and northern Vietnam under the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin, and Cambodia as protectorates in one degree or another. Laos too was soon brought under French "protection." By the beginning of the twentieth century, France had created an empire in Indochina nearly 50 percent larger than the mother country. A Governor-General in Hanoi ruled Cochinchina directly and the other regions through a system of residents. Theoretically, the French maintained the precolonial rulers and administrative structures in Annam, Tonkin, Cochinchina, Cambodia, and Laos, but in fact the governor-generalship was a centralised fiscal and administrative regime ruling the entire region. Although the surviving native institutions were preserved in order to make French rule more acceptable, they were almost completely deprived of any independence of action. The ethnocentric French colonial administrators sought to assimilate the upper classes into France's "superior culture." While the French improved public services and provided commercial stability, the native standard of living declined and precolonial social structures eroded. Indochina, which had a population of over eighteen million in 1914, was important to France for its tin, pepper, coal, cotton, and rice. It is still a matter of debate, however, whether the colony was commercially profitable.



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Tsarist Russia is not often regarded as a colonial power such as the United Kingdom or France because of the manner of Russian expansions: unlike the United Kingdom, which expanded overseas, the Russian empire grew from the centre outward by a process of accretion, like the United States. In the nineteenth century, Russian expansion took the form of a struggle of an effectively landlocked country for access to a warm water port. While the British were consolidating their hold on India, Russian expansion had moved steadily eastward to the Pacific, then toward the Middle East, and finally to the frontiers of Persia and Afghanistan (both territories adjacent to British holdings in India). In response, the defense of India's land frontiers and the control of all sea approaches to the Subcontinent via the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf became preoccupations of British foreign policy in the nineteenth century.

Anglo-Russian rivalry in the Middle East and Central Asia led to a brief confrontation over Afghanistan in the 1870s. In Persia (now Iran), both nations set up banks to extend their economic influence. The United Kingdom went so far as to invade Tibet, a land subordinate to the Chinese empire, in 1904, but withdrew when it became clear that Russian influence was insignificant and when Chinese resistance proved tougher than expected. In 1907, the United Kingdom and Russia signed an agreement which ² on the surface ² ended their rivalry in Central Asia. (

Anglo-Russian Entente) As part of the entente, Russia agreed to deal with the sovereign of Afghanistan only through British intermediaries. In turn, the United Kingdom would not annex or occupy Afghanistan. Chinese suzerainty over Tibet also was recognised by both Russia and the United Kingdom, since nominal control by a weak China was preferable to control by either power. Persia was divided into Russian and British spheres of influence and an intervening "neutral" zone. The United Kingdom and Russia chose to reach these uneasy compromises because of growing concern on the part of both powers over German expansion in strategic areas of China and Africa. Following the entente, Russia increasingly intervened in Persian domestic politics and suppressed nationalist movements that threatened both St. Petersburg and London. After the Russian Revolution, Russia gave up its claim to a sphere of influence, though Soviet involvement persisted alongside the United Kingdom's until the 1940s. In the Middle East, a German company built a railroad from Constantinople to Baghdad and the Persian Gulf. Germany wanted to gain economic influence in the region and then, perhaps, move on to Iran and India. This was met with bitter resistance by the United Kingdom, Russia, and France who divided the region among themselves.


 

 
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 In the early Qing Dynasty, its armies expanded into frontier areas including Xinjiang, Qinghai, Yunnan, and Taiwan. By the late nineteenth century, in response to competition with other states, the Qing government attempted to exert direct control of its frontier areas by conquest or, if already under military control, conversion into provinces. East Turkestan had long been a battleground of Chinese empires. During the Han and Tang dynasties it was known as "protectorate of the west". During the Qing Dynasty, this region saw massive ethnic genocide as the Qing armies sought to establish control as Great Britain and Russia competed in the Great Game. In 1884, the birth of a new province, Xinjiang, was declared. Indeed the name € (Xinjiang) means new (€) territory/frontier/boundary line ( ).

The Qing had also expanded into Taiwan near the beginning of its dynasty, but did not convert it into a province until 1885, after Japanese interest and French invasion had challenged Qing control. After British troops invaded Tibet in the waning days of the Qing Dynasty, the Qing responded by sending Zhao Erfeng to further integrate Tibet into China. He succeeded in abolishing the powers of the Tibetan local leaders in Kham and appointing Chinese magistrates in their places by 1909-10. Qing forces were also sent to Ü-Tsang in 1910 to establish a direct control over Tibet proper, though a province was never established in this area.

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 The process by which this occurred has been portrayed in current Chinese nationalist historiography as a process of national unification. Paradoxically Chinese nationalists, particularly those of the nineteenth century, also regarded Qing expansion as imperialist and colonial when it came the Qing rule of Han Chinese areas, but not when it came to ruling outlying regions. Other alternative readings of history particularly by Tibetan, Xinjiang, and Taiwanese advocates of independence have portrayed Qing expansion as Chinese imperialism which is not fundamentally different from European imperialism. Also some Western studies of the Qing dynasty have used the concept of colonialism as a framework to describe the expansion of the Qing into neighboring areas such as Taiwan[1]. The use of the term colonialism or imperialism to describe or not describe Qing territory expansion is highly controversial as it serves to either legitimise and delegitimise claims of current governments to rule these territories.

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 The ability of Qing China to project power into Central Asia came about because of two changes, one social and one technological. The social change was that under the Qing dynasty, from 1642, China came under the control of the Manchus who organised their military forces around cavalry which was more suited for power projection than traditional Chinese infantry. The technological change was advances in the cannon and artillery which negated the military advantage that the people of the Steppe had with their cavalry (although cannons and firearms were used in China centuries beforehand to combat similar threats, see Technology of Song Dynasty). Zunghar Khanate (Ɂԛԛɧɝɚɪɵɧɯɚɚɧɬɭɥɫ) was the last great independent nomadic power on the steppe in Central Asia. The Dzungars were deliberately exterminated in a brutal campaign of ethnic genocide. It has been estimated that more than a million people were slaughtered, and it took generations for it to recover.[2] The Manchu ruling family(Aisin Gioro) was a supporter of Tibetan Buddhism and so many of the ruling groups were linked by religion. China most of the time had little ambitions to conquer or establish colonies. There were exceptions to this, such as the ancient Han Dynasty (202 BC-220 AD) establishing control over northern Vietnam, northern Korea, and the Tarim Basin of Central Asia. The

short-lived Sui Dynasty (581-618 AD) had high imperial aims, reinvading Annam (northern Vietnam) and attacking Champa (southern Vietnam), while they also attempted to conquer Korea, which failed (see Goguryeo-Sui Wars). The later Tang Dynasty (618907) aided the Korean Silla Kingdom in defeating their two Korean rivals, yet became shortchanged when they discovered Silla was not about to allow the Tang to reclaim Goguryeo's territory (as it had been under the Chinese Han Dynasty centuries before). The Tang Dynasty established control over the Tarim Basin region as well, fighting wars with the new Tibetan Empire and stripping them of their colonies in Central Asia (which was abandoned after the An Lushan Rebellion). The Song Dynasty (960-1279), in securing maritime trade routes that ran from South East Asia into the Indian Ocean, had established fortified trade bases in the Philippines. The Mongol-lead Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) made attempts to invade Japan after securing the Korean peninsula, yet both of these military ventures failed (see Mongol Invasions of Japan). Yet even when the Chinese had established their first standing navy in the 12th century (under the Southern Song), and when they had the world's strongest and biggest naval fleet during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), their aim was not colonisation, but tribute gathering. Rather, Chinese immigrated overseas to areas outside the control of their government. For instance, numerous southern Chinese emigrants settled in areas of Southeast Asia outside Chinese political control; to this day their descendants remain an economic elite, especially in Malaysia and Singapore, and to a fair extent also in Indonesia and the Philippines.

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 # ! The 16th century brought many Jesuit missionaries to China, such as Matteo Ricci, who established missions where Western science was introduced, and where Europeans gathered knowledge of Chinese society, history, culture, and science. During the eighteenth century, merchants from Western Europe came to China in increasing numbers. However, merchants were confined to Guangzhou and the Portuguese colony of Macau, as they had been since the 16th century. European traders were increasingly irritated by what they saw as the relatively high customs duties they had to pay and by the attempts to curb the growing import trade in opium. By 1800, its importation was forbidden by the imperial government. However, the opium trade continued to boom. Early in the nineteenth century, serious internal weaknesses developed in the Qing dynasty that left China vulnerable to Western, Japanese, and Russian imperialism. In 1839, China found itself fighting the First Opium War with Britain. China was defeated, and in 1842, agreed to the provisions of the Treaty of Nanjing. Hong Kong Island was ceded to Britain, and certain ports, including Shanghai and Guangzhou, were opened to British trade and residence. In 1856, the Second Opium War broke out. The Chinese were again defeated, and now forced to the terms of the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin. The treaty opened new ports to trade and allowed foreigners to travel in the interior. Christians gained the right to propagate their religion²another means of Western penetration. The United States and Russia later obtained the same prerogatives in separate treaties.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, China appeared on the way to territorial dismemberment and economic vassalage²the fate of India¶s rulers that played out much earlier. Several provisions of these treaties caused long-standing bitterness and humiliation among the Chinese: extra-territoriality (meaning that in a dispute with a Chinese person, a Westerner had the right to be tried in a court under the laws of his own country), customs regulation, and the right to station foreign warships in Chinese waters. The rise of Japan since the Meiji Restoration as an imperial power led to further subjugation of China. In a dispute over China's longstanding claim of suzerainty in Korea, war broke out between China and Japan, resulting in humiliating defeat for the Chinese. By the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895), China was forced to recognise effective Japanese rule of Korea and Taiwan was ceded to Japan until its recovery in 1945 at the end of the WWII by the Republic of China. China's defeat at the hands of Japan was another trigger for future aggressive actions by Western powers. In 1897, Germany demanded and was given a set of exclusive mining and railroad rights in Shandong province. Russia obtained access to Dairen and Port Arthur and the right to build a railroad across Manchuria, thereby achieving complete domination over a large portion of northwestern China. The United Kingdom and France also received a number of concessions. At this time, much of China was divided up into "spheres of influence": Germany dominated Jiaozhou (Kiaochow) Bay, Shandong, and the Huang He (Hwang-Ho) valley; Russia dominated the Liaodong Peninsula and Manchuria; the United Kingdom dominated Weihaiwei and the Yangtze Valley; and France dominated the Guangzhou Bay and several other southern provinces. China continued to be divided up into these spheres until the United States, which had no sphere of influence, grew alarmed at the possibility of its businessmen being excluded from Chinese markets. In 1899, Secretary of StateJohn Hay asked the major powers to agree to a policy of equal trading privileges. In 1900, several powers agreed to the U.S.backed scheme, giving rise to the "Open Door" policy, denoting freedom of commercial access and non-annexation of Chinese territory. In any event, it was in the European powers' interest to have a weak but independent Chinese government. The privileges of the Europeans in China were guaranteed in the form of treaties with the Qing government. In the event that the Qing government totally collapsed, each power risked losing the privileges that it already had negotiated. The erosion of Chinese sovereignty contributed to a spectacular anti-foreign outbreak in June 1900, when the "Boxers" (properly the society of the "righteous and harmonious fists") attacked European legations in Beijing, provoking a rare display of unity among the powers, whose troops landed at Tianjin and marched on the capital. British and French forces looted, plundered and burned the Old Summer Palace to the ground for the second time (the first time being in 1860, following the Second Opium War), as a form of threat to force the Qing empire to give in to their demands. German forces were particularly severe in exacting revenge for the killing of their ambassador, while Russia tightened its hold on Manchuria in the northeast until its crushing defeat by Japan in the war of 1904-1905.

Although extra-territorial jurisdiction was abandoned by the United Kingdom and the United States in 1943, foreign political control of parts of China only finally ended with the incorporation of Hong Kong and the small Portuguese territory of Macau into the People's Republic of China in 1997 and 1999 respectively.

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  !  #  As the United States emerged as a new imperial power in the Pacific, one of the two oldest Western imperialist powers in the region, Spain, was finding it increasingly difficult to maintain control of territories it had held in the region since the 16th century. In 1896, a widespread revolt against Spanish rule broke out in the Philippines. Meanwhile, the recent string of U.S. territorial gains in the Pacific posed an even greater threat to Spain's remaining colonial holdings. In 1867, the Midway Islands were occupied by the U.S. and Alaska was purchased from Russia. The next advance was in the Hawaiian Islands, where Europeans had earlier set up a lucrative plantation economy exporting sugar. In the nineteenth century U.S. capital poured into the islands' sugar industry; and Hawaii came increasingly under the effective control of U.S. corporations. The U.S. consolidated its influence in Hawaii in 1893, when U.S. Marines engineered a revolt that deposed the Hawaiian queen and set up a new U.S.backed regime. Five years later, the U.S. dissolved the republic and annexed the islands. As the U.S. continued to expand its economic and military power in the Pacific, it declared war against Spain in 1898. During the Spanish-American War, U.S. Admiral Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet at Manila and U.S. troops landed in the Philippines. Spain later agreed by treaty to cede the Philippines and Guam in the Pacific. In the Caribbean, Spain ceded Puerto Rico to the U.S. The war also marked the end of Spanish rule in Cuba, which was to be granted nominal independence but in practice be treated as a de-facto U.S. colony. One year following its treaty with Spain, the U.S. occupied the small Pacific outpost of Wake Island. The Filipinos who assisted U.S. troops in fighting the Spanish wished to establish an independent state and, on June 12, 1898, declared independence from Spain. In 1899, fighting broke out; and it took the U.S. almost fifteen years to fully subdue the conflict. The U.S. sent seventy thousand troops and suffered thousands of casualties. The Filipinos, however, suffered considerably higher casualties, through fighting, extrajudicial executions and disease. U.S. attacks into the countryside often included scorched earth campaigns where entire villages were burned and destroyed, tortured, and concentrated into camps known as "protected zones." Many of these civilian casualties resulted from disease and famine. Reports of the execution of U.S. soldiers taken prisoner by the Filipinos led to disproportionate reprisals by American forces. Many U.S. officers and soldiers called the war a "nigger killing business."[3]

In 1914, Dean C. Worcester, U.S. Secretary of the Interior for the Philippines (19011913) described "the regime of civilisation and improvement which started with American occupation and resulted in developing naked savages into cultivated and educated men." Nevertheless, some Americans deeply opposed American involvement in the Philippines, leading to the abandonment of attempts to construct a permanent naval base and using it as an entry point to the Chinese market. In 1916, Congress guaranteed the independence of the Philippines by 1945.


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World War I brought about the fall of several empires in Europe. This had repercussions around the world. The defeated Central Powers included Germany and the TurkishOttoman Empire. Germany lost all of its colonies in Asia. German New Guinea, a part of Papua New Guinea, became administered by Australia. German possessions and concessions in China, including Qingdao, became the subject of a controversy during the Paris Peace Conference when the Beiyang government in China agreed to cede these interests to Japan, to the anger of many Chinese people. Although the Chinese diplomats refused to sign the agreement, these interests were ceded to Japan with the support of the United States and the United Kingdom. Turkey gave up her Arab provinces; Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia (now Iraq) came under French and British control as League of Nations Mandates. The discovery of petroleum first in Iran and then in the Arab lands in the interbellum provided a new focus for activity on the part of the United Kingdom, France, and the United States.


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In 1641, all Westerners were thrown out of Japan. For the next two centuries, Japan was free from Western influence, except for at the port of Nagasaki, which Japan allowed Dutch merchant vessels to enter on a limited basis. Japan's freedom from Western penetration ended on 8 July 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry of the U.S. Navy sailed a squadron of black-hulled warships into Edo (modern Tokyo) harbor. The Japanese told Perry to sail to Nagasaki but he refused. Perry sought to present a letter from U.S. President Millard Fillmore to the emperor which demanded concessions from Japan. Japanese authories responded by stating that they could not present the letter directly to the emperor, but scheduled a meeting on July 14 with a representative of the emperor. On 14 July, the squadron sailed towards the shore, giving a demonstration of their cannon's firepower thirteen times. Perry landed with a large detachment of Marines and presented the emperor's representative with Fillmore's letter. Perry said he would return, and did so, this time with even more war ships. The U.S. show of force led to Japan's concession to the Convention of Kanagawa on 31 March 1854. These events made Japanese authorities aware that the country was lacking

technologically and needed to industrialise in order to keep their power. This realisation eventually led to the Meiji Restoration. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 led to administrative modernisation and subsequent rapid economic development. Japan had little natural resources of her own and needed both overseas markets and sources of raw materials, fuelling a drive for imperial conquest which began with the defeat of China in 1895. Taiwan, ceded by Qing Dynasty China, became the first Japanese colony. In 1899 Japan won agreement from the great powers' to abandon extra-territoriality, and an alliance with the United Kingdom established it in 1902 as an international power. Its spectacular defeat of Russia in 1905 gave it the southern portion of the island of Sakhalin, the former Russian lease of the Liaodong Peninsula with Port Arthur (Lüshunkou), and extensive rights in Manchuria (see the Russo-Japanese War). Japan's encroachment on Korea began with the 1876 Treaty of Kanghwa with the Joseon Dynasty of Korea, increased with the 1895 assassination of Empress Myeongseong and the 1905 Eulsa Treaty, and was completed with the 1910 Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty when Korea was formally annexed to the Japanese empire, see Korea under Japanese rule. Japan was now one of the most powerful forces in the Far East, and in 1914, it entered World War I on the side of the United Kingdom, seizing German-occupied Kiaochow and subsequently demanding Chinese acceptance of Japanese political influence and territorial acquisitions (Twenty-One Demands, 1915). Mass protests in Peking in 1919 coupled with Allied (and particularly U.S.) opinion led to Japan's abandonment of most of the demands and Jiaozhou's return (1922) to China. Japan's rebuff was perceived in Tokyo as only temporary, and in 1931, Japanese army units based in Manchuria seized control of the region; full-scale war with China followed in 1937, drawing Japan toward an overambitious bid for Asian hegemony (Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere), which ultimately led to defeat and the loss of all its overseas territories after World War II (see Japanese expansionism and Japanese nationalism).


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´*   !  #    In the aftermath of World War II, European colonies, controlling more than one billion people throughout the world, still ruled most of the Middle East, South East Asia, and the Indian Subcontinent. However, the image of European pre-eminence was shattered by the wartime Japanese occupations of large portions of British, French, and Dutch territories in the Pacific. The destabilisation of European rule led to the rapid growth of nationalist movements in Asia ² especially in Indonesia, Malaya, Burma, and French Indochina.

The war, however, only accelerated forces already in existence undermining Western imperialism in Asia. Throughout the colonial world, the processes of urbanisation and capitalist investment created professional merchant classes that emerged as new Westernised elites. While imbued with Western political and economic ideas, these classes increasingly grew to resent their unequal status under European rule. ´
    
  
 

  

In India, the westward movement of Japanese forces towards Bengal during World War II had led to major concessions on the part of British authorities to Indian nationalist leaders. In 1947, the United Kingdom, devastated by war and embroiled in economic crisis at home, granted British India its independence as two nations: India and Pakistan. The following year independence was granted to Burma and Ceylon. In the Middle East, the United Kingdom granted independence to Jordan in 1946 and two years later ended its mandate of Palestine, an action that led to the creation of the state of Israel and decades of bitter wars between this new nation and the Arab world, which continues to this day. (

Arab-Israeli conflict) ´
   
 

Following the end of the war, nationalists in Indonesia demanded complete independence from the Netherlands. A brutal conflict ensued, and finally, in 1949, through United Nations mediation, the Dutch East Indies achieved independence, becoming the new nation of Indonesia. Dutch imperialism moulded this new multi-ethnic state comprising roughly 3,000 islands of the Indonesian archipelago with a population at the time of over 100 million. The end of Dutch rule opened up latent tensions between the roughly 300 distinct ethnic groups of the islands, with the major ethnic fault line being between the Javanese and the non-Javanese. ´
 
    

In the Philippines, the U.S. remained committed to its previous pledges to grant the islands their independence, and the Philippines became the first of the Western-controlled Asian colonies to be granted independence post-World War II. However, the Philippines remained under pressure to adopt a political and economic system similar to their old imperial master. This aim was greatly complicated by the rise of new political forces. During the war, the

'’   (People's Army), which had strong ties to the Communist Party of the Philippines (PKP), fought against the Japanese occupation of the Philippines and won strong popularity among many sectors of the Filipino working class and peasantry. In 1946, the PKP participated in elections as part of the Democratic Alliance. However, with the onset of the Cold War, its growing political strength drew a reaction from the

ruling government and the United States, resulting in the repression of the PKP and its associated organisations. In 1948, the PKP began organizing an armed struggle against the government and continued U.S. military presence. In 1950, the PKP created the People's Liberation Army ( '’‘       ), which mobilised thousands of troops throughout the islands. The insurgency lasted until 1956, when the PKP gave up armed struggle. In 1968, the PKP underwent a split, and in 1969 the Maoist faction of the PKP created the New People's Army. Maoist rebels re-launched an armed struggle against the government and the U.S. military presence in the Philippines, which continues to this day. ´
   
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France remained determined to retain its control of Indochina. However, in Hanoi, in 1945, a broad front of nationalists and socialists led by Ho Chi Minh established an independent Republic of Vietnam, commonly referred to as the Viet Minh regime by Western outsiders. France, seeking to regain control of Vietnam, countered with a vague offer of self-government under French rule. France's offers were unacceptable to Vietnamese nationalists; and in December 1946, war broke out between France and the Viet Minh. Meanwhile, the French managed to set up a puppet regime in Saigon in 1950. The U.S. then recognised the regime in Saigon, and provided the French military effort massive military aid. The French were also forced to deal with resistance in Cambodia. In 1945, Cambodia declared its independence as the Kingdom of Kampuchea, with Sihanouk installed as monarch and Son Ngoc Thanh acting as prime minister. The French wanted to reassert control, but were unable to act at the time. The United Kingdom supported France's efforts to reassert its control of Cambodia, but were unable to act. On October 8, 1945, the British arrived in Phnom Penh with a detachment of NepaliGurkhas. Thanh was arrested, and the government was overthrown, with the French put back in charge. Later, anti-colonial militants retreated into the countryside and formed armed groups known as the  
c ' ("Khmer Independence"). They operated initially along the border with Thailand and were assisted by the Thai government. In the countryside, French forces fought the Khmer Issarak. However, the French were not able to fully regain their control of Cambodia. On 17 April 1950, the first national conference of the Khmer resistance was held and the United Issarak Front was created, with Son Ngoc Minh at the head. Sihanouk demanded sovereignty from the French and on 9 November 1953, Cambodia was granted independence. Meanwhile, in Vietnam, the French war against the Viet Minh regime, begun in 1946, continued for nearly eight years. The French were gradually worn down by guerrilla and jungle fighting. The turning point for France occurred at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, which

resulted in the surrender of ten thousand French troops. Paris was forced to accept a political settlement that year at the Geneva Conference, which led to a precarious set of agreements regarding the future political status of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. ´
  


     

As France withdrew from Indochina, the U.S. moved into France's old role in supporting the pro-Western Saigon regime, leading to the Vietnam war. ´
  


   


The United States also became involved in Cambodia's domestic politics. The U.S. became increasingly unhappy with Sihanouk because of his non-aligned stance in the Cold War and the war between the Hanoi and Saigon regimes in Vietnam. U.S. armed forces then entered Cambodia from the Vietnam-Cambodia border. However, massive protest by students and workers in the U.S. forced the US to withdraw its land forces from Cambodia. Sihanouk declared Lon Nol's government illegitimate and formed a government-in-exile in Beijing known as the Royal Government of the National Union of Kampuchea (GRUNK) and a political coalition in Cambodia known as the National United Front of Kampuchea (FUNK), which in turn was aligned with the Cambodian People's National Liberation Armed Forces (CPNLAF). The U.S. Air Force attacked the base of the CPNLAF, the Cambodian countryside, dropping hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs, killing many people. By 1975, the CPNLAF had defeated Lon Nol's army and on 17 April 1975 the CPNLAF entered Phnom Penh and ousted Lon Nol's regime. However, the loose coalition behind CPNLAF proved unable to establish itself as a stable postcolonial regime. The ensuing Cambodian Civil War resulted in decades of political turmoil and the emergence of the Khmer Rouge, making Cambodia the stage to one of the bloodiest conflicts in the twentieth century.

ccc c c 00  c The   ' # # , also known as the   # # , resulted in occupation and annexation of African territory by European powers during the New Imperialism period, between the 1880s and the First World War in 1914. As a result of the heightened tension between European states in the last quarter of the 19th century, the partitioning of Africa may be seen as a way for the Europeans to eliminate the threat of a European-wide war over Africa.[1] Popular ideas in the 19th century also aided the partitioning of Africa. The ideas of Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution[ 


], the eugenics movement and racism, all helped to foster European expansionist policy.

The last 20 years of the nineteenth century saw transition from µinformal imperialism¶ of control through military influence and economic dominance to that of direct rule.[2] Attempts to mediate imperial competition, such as the Berlin Conference (1884 - 1885), failed to establish definitively the competing powers' claims.

c    c  European exploration and exploitation of Africa had begun in earnest at the end of the 18th century. By 1835, Europeans had mapped most of northwestern Africa. Among the most famous of the European explorers were David Livingstone and Serpa Pinto[  


] , both of whom mapped the vast interior of Southern Africa and Central Africa. Arduous expeditions in the 1850s and 1860s by Richard Burton, John Speke and James Grant located the great central lakes and the source of the Nile. By the end of the 19th century, Europeans had charted the Nile from its source, traced the courses of the Niger, Congo and Zambezi Rivers, and realized the vast resources of Africa. However, European nations controlled only 10 percent of the continent. The most important holdings were Algeria, held by France; the Cape Colony, held by the United Kingdom; and Angola and Mozambique, held by Portugal. Technological advancement facilitated overseas expansionism. Industrialisation brought about rapid advancements in transportation and communication, especially in the forms of steam navigation, railways, and telegraphs. Medical advances also were important, especially medicines for tropical diseases. The development of quinine, an effective treatment for malaria, enabled vast expanses of the tropics to be accessed by Europeans.

  #   $' " Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the last regions of the world largely untouched by 'informal imperialism', was also attractive to Europe's ruling elites for economic and racial reasons. During a time when Britain's balance of trade showed a growing deficit, with shrinking and increasingly protectionist continental markets due to the Long Depression (18731896), Africa offered Britain, Germany, France, and other countries an open market that would garner them a trade surplus: a market that bought more from the metropole than it sold overall.[2] Britain, like most other industrial countries, had long since begun to run an unfavourable balance of trade (which was increasingly offset, however, by the income from overseas investments). As Britain developed into the world's first post-industrial nation, financial services became an increasingly important sector of its economy. Invisible financial exports, as mentioned, kept Britain out of the red, especially capital investments outside Europe, particularly to the developing and open markets in Africa, predominantly white settlercolonies, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania.

In addition, surplus capital was often more profitably invested overseas, where cheap labour, limited competition, and abundant raw materials made a greater premium possible. Another inducement for imperialism arose from the demand for raw materials unavailable in Europe, especially copper, cotton, rubber, palm oil, cocoa, diamonds, tea, and tin, to which European consumers had grown accustomed and upon which European industry had grown dependent. Additionally, Britain wanted the southern and eastern coasts of Africa for stopover ports on the route to Asia and its empire in India.[3] However, in Africa ± exclusive of the area which became the Union of South Africa in 1909 ± the amount of capital investment by Europeans was relatively small, compared to other continents. Consequently, the companies involved in tropical African commerce were relatively small, apart from Cecil Rhodes's De Beers Mining Company. Rhodes had carved out Rhodesia for himself; Léopold II of Belgium later, and with considerably greater brutality, exploited the Congo Free State. These events might detract from the pro-imperialist arguments of colonial lobbies such as the |

(
’ , Francesco Crispi and Jules Ferry, who argued that sheltered overseas markets in Africa would solve the problems of low prices and over-production caused by shrinking continental markets. According to the classic thesis of John A. Hobson exposed in c
  (1902), which influenced authors such as Lenin,[4]Trotsky and Hannah Arendt,[5] this shrinking of continental markets was a main factor of the global New Imperialism period. Later historians have noted that such statistics only obscured the fact that formal control of tropical Africa had great strategic value in an era of imperial rivalry, while the Suez Canal has remained a strategic location. According to Hannah Arendt, the 1886 Witwatersrand Gold Rush, (which led to the foundation of Johannesburg and was a major factor of the Second Boer War in 1899), accounted for the "conjunction of the superfluous money and the superfluous manpower", which gave the Europeans "their hand to quit together the country". William Easterly of New York University, however, disagrees with the link made between capitalism and imperialism, arguing that colonialism is used mostly to promote state-led development rather than 'corporate' development. He has stated that "imperialism is not so clearly linked to capitalism and free markets... historically there has been a closer link between colonialism/imperialism and state-led approaches to development.´

$ +, While tropical Africa was not a large zone of investment, other regions overseas were. The vast interior ± between the gold- and diamond-rich Southern Africa and Egypt, had, however, key strategic value in securing the flow of overseas trade. Britain was thus under intense political pressure to secure lucrative markets such as British RajIndia, Qing DynastyChina, and Latin America from encroaching rivals. Thus, securing the key waterway between East and West ± the Suez Canal ± was crucial. The rivalry between the UK, France, Germany and the other European powers account for a large part of the colonization. Thus, while Germany, which had been unified under Prussia's rule only

after the 1866 Battle of Sadowa and the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, was hardly a colonial power before the New Imperialism period, it would eagerly participate in the race. A rising industrial power close on the heels of Britain, it had not yet had the chance to control overseas territories, mainly due to its late unification, its fragmentation in various states, and its absence of experience in modern navigation. This would change under Bismarck's leadership, who implemented the 
' (World Policy) and, after putting in place the basis of France's isolation with the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary and then the 1882 Triple Alliance with Italy, called for the 1884-85 Berlin Conference which set the rules of effective control of a foreign territory. Germany's expansionism would lead to the Tirpitz Plan, implemented by Admiral von Tirpitz, who would also champion the various Fleet Acts starting in 1898, thus engaging in an arms race with Britain. By 1914, they had given Germany the second largest naval force in the world (roughly 40% smaller than the Royal Navy). According to von Tirpitz, this aggressive naval policy was supported by the National Liberal Party rather than by the conservatives, thus demonstrating that the main supports of the European nation states' imperialism were the rising ’ 

classes.[7] ´
    

%

Germany began its world expansion in the 1880s under Bismarck's leadership, encouraged by the national ’ 

. Some of them, claiming themselves of Friedrich List's thought, advocated expansion in the Philippines and in Timor; others proposed to set themselves in Formosa (modern Taiwan), etc. In the end of the 1870s, these isolated voices began to be relayed by a real imperialist policy, known as the 
' (µWorld Policy¶), which was backed by mercantilist thesis. In 1881, Hübbe-Schleiden, a lawyer, published 

 , according to which the µdevelopment of national consciousness demanded an independent overseas policy¶.[8]Pan-germanism was thus linked to the young nation's imperialist drives. In the beginning of the 1880s, the 

 

 was created, and got its own magazine in 1884, the  #
. This colonial lobby was also relayed by the nationalist |

(
’ . Germany thus became the third largest colonial power in Africa. Nearly all of its overall empire of 2.6 million square kilometers and 14 million colonial subjects in 1914 was found in its African possessions of Southwest Africa, Togoland, the Cameroons, and Tanganyika. The scramble for Africa led Bismarck to propose the 1884-85 Berlin Conference. Following the 1904 &

  
between France and the UK, Germany tried to isolate France in 1905 with the First Moroccan Crisis. This led to the 1905 Algeciras Conference, in which France's influence on Morocco was compensated by the exchange of others territories, and then to the 1911 Agadir Crisis. Along with the 1898 Fashoda Incident between France and the UK, this succession of international crisis proves the bitterness of the struggle between the various imperialisms, which ultimately led to the First World War.

´
       

While de Brazza was exploring the Kongo Kingdom for France, Stanley also explored it in the early 1880s on behalf of Léopold II of Belgium, who would have his personal Congo Free State. While pretending to advocate humanitarianism and denounce slavery, Leopold II used the most inhumane tactics to exploit his newly acquired lands. His crimes were revealed by 1905, but he remained in control until 1908, when he was forced to turn over control to the Belgian government. France occupied Tunisia in May 1881 (and Guinea in 1884), which partly convinced Italy to adhere in 1882 to the German-Austrian Dual Alliance, thus forming the Triple Alliance. The same year, Britain occupied the nominally Ottoman Egypt, which in turn ruled over the Sudan and parts of Somalia. In 1870 and 1882, Italy took possession of the first parts of Eritrea, while Germany declared Togoland, the Cameroons and South West Africa to be under its protection in 1884. French West Africa (AOF) was founded in 1895, and French Equatorial Africa (AEF) in 1910. Italy continued its conquest to gain its µplace in the sun¶. Following the defeat of the First Italo±Ethiopian War (1895-96), it acquired Somaliland in 1889-90 and the whole of Eritrea (1899). In 1911, it engaged in a war with the Ottoman Empire, in which it acquired Tripolitania and Cyrenaica (modern Libya). EnricoCorradini, who fully supported the war, and later merged his group in the early fascist party (PNF), developed in 1919 the concept of  
  )  , supposed to legitimise Italy's imperialism by a surprising mixture of socialism with nationalism: µWe must start by recognizing the fact that there are proletarian nations as well as proletarian classes; that is to say, there are nations whose living conditions are subject...to the way of life of other nations, just as classes are. Once this is realised, nationalism must insist firmly on this truth: Italy is, materially and morally, a proletarian nation.¶[9] The Second ItaloAbyssinian War (1935-36), ordered by Mussolini, would actually be one of the last colonial wars (that is, intended to colonize a foreign country, opposed to wars of national liberation), occupying Ethiopia for 5 years, which had remained the last African independent territory apart from Liberia. The Spanish Civil War, marking for some the beginning of the European Civil War, would begin in 1936. On the other hand, the British abandoned their splendid isolation in 1902 with the AngloJapanese Alliance, which would enable the Empire of Japan to be victorious during the war against Russia (1904-05). The UK then signed the &

  
with France in 1904, and, in 1907, the Triple Ententewhich included Russia, thus pitted against the Triple Alliance which Bismarck had patiently assembled. ´
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The United States took part, marginally, in this enterprise, through the American Colonization Society (ACS), established in 1816 by Robert Finley. The ACS offered emigration to Liberia (µLand of the Free¶), a colony founded in 1820, to free black slaves;

emancipated slave Lott Carey actually became the first American Baptistmissionary in Africa. This colonisation attempt was resisted by the native people. The ACS was led by Southerners, and its first president was James Monroe, from Virginia, who became the fifth president of the United States from 1817 to 1825. Thus, ironically one of the main proponents of American colonisation of Africa was the same man who proclaimed, in his 1823 State of the Union address, the US opinion that European powers should no longer colonise the Americas or interfere with the affairs of sovereign nations located in the Americas. In return, the US planned to stay neutral in wars between European powers and in wars between a European power and its colonies. However, if these latter type of wars were to occur in the Americas, the U.S. would view such action as hostile toward itself. This famous statement became known as the Monroe Doctrine and was the base of United States isolationism during the nineteenth century. Although the Liberia colony never became quite as big as envisaged, it was only the first step in the American colonisation of Africa, according to its early proponents. Thus, JehudiAshmun, an early leader of the ACS, envisioned an American empire in Africa. Between 1825 and 1826, he took steps to lease, annex, or buy tribal lands along the coast and along major rivers leading inland. Like his predecessor Lt. Robert Stockton, who in 1821 established the site for Monrovia by µpersuading¶ a local chief referred to as µKing Peter¶ to sell Cape Montserado (or Cape Mesurado) by pointing a pistol at his head, Ashmun was prepared to use force to extend the colony's territory. In a May 1825 treaty, King Peter and other native kings agreed to sell land in return for 500 bars of tobacco, three barrels of rum, five casks of powder, five umbrellas, ten iron posts, and ten pairs of shoes, among other items. In March 1825, the ACS began a quarterly, à
|   *
   +  , edited by Rev. Ralph Randolph Gurley (1797-1872), who headed the Society until 1844. Conceived as the Society's propaganda organ, the Repository promoted both colonisation and Liberia. The Society controlled the colony of Liberia until 1847 when, under the perception that the British might annex the settlement, Liberia was proclaimed a free and independent state, thus becoming the first African decolonised state. By 1867, the Society had sent more than 13,000 emigrants. After the American Civil War (1861-1865), when many blacks wanted to go to Liberia, financial support for colonisation had waned. During its later years the society focused on educational and missionary efforts in Liberia rather than further emigration.


!

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´*/ # ! $ David Livingstone's explorations, carried on by Henry Morton Stanley, excited European imaginations. But at first, Stanley's grandiose's ideas for colonisation found little support owing to the problems and scale of action required, except from Léopold II of Belgium, who in 1876 had organised the International African Association. From 1869 to 1874, Stanley was secretly sent by Léopold II to the Congo region, where he made treaties with

several African chiefs along the Congo River and by 1882 had sufficient territory to form the basis of the Congo Free State. Léopold II personally owned the colony from 1885 and used it as a source of ivory and rubber. While Stanley was exploring Congo on behalf of Léopold II of Belgium, the FrancoItalian marine officer Pierre de Brazzatravelled into the western Congo basin and raised the French flag over the newly founded Brazzaville in 1881, thus occupying today's Republic of the Congo. Portugal, which also claimed the area due to old treaties with the native Kongo Empire, made a treaty with Britain on February 26, 1884 to block off the Congo Society's access to the Atlantic. By 1890 the Congo Free State had consolidated its control of its territory between Leopoldville and Stanleyville and was looking to push south down the Lualaba River from Stanleyville. At the same time the British South Africa Company of Cecil Rhodes (who once declared, µall of these stars... these vast worlds that remain out of reach. If I could, I would annex other planets¶[10]) was expanding north from the Limpopo River. Attention was drawn to the land where their expansions would meetKatanga, site of the Yeke Kingdom of Msiri. As well as being the most powerful ruler militarily in the area, Msiri traded large quantities of copper, ivory and slaves, and rumours of gold reached European ears. The scramble for Katanga was a prime example of the period. Rhodes and the BSAC sent two expeditions to Msiri in 1890 led by Alfred Sharpe, who was rebuffed, and Joseph Thomson who failed to reach Katanga. In 1891 Leopold sent four CFS expeditions. The Le Marinel Expedition could only extract a vaguely-worded letter. The Delcommune Expedition was rebuffed. The well-armed Stairs Expedition had orders to take Katanga with or without Msiri's consent; Msiri refused, was shot, and the expedition cut off his head and stuck it on a pole as a 'barbaric lesson' to the people. The Bia Expedition finished off the job of establishing an administration of sorts and a 'police presence' in Katanga. The half million square kilometres of Katanga came into Leopold's possession and brought his African realm up to 2,300,000 square kilometres (890,000 sq mi), about 75 times larger than Belgium. The Congo Free State imposed such a terror regime on the colonised people, including mass killings with millions of victims, and slave labour, that Belgium, under pressure from the Congo Reform Association, ended Leopold II's rule and annexed it in 1908 as a colony of Belgium, known as the Belgian Congo. Belgian brutality in their former colony of the Congo Free State[11][12], now the DRC, is a well documented fact as is their poor attitude toward citizens of that country. Up to 8 million of the estimated 16 million native inhabitants died between 1885 and 1908[13] According to the former British diplomat Roger Casement, this depopulation had four main causes: "indiscriminate war", starvation, reduction of births and diseases.[14]Sleeping sickness ravaged the country and must also be taken into account for the dramatic decrease in population. Estimates of the total death toll vary considerably. As the first census did not take place until 1924; it is difficult to quantify the population loss of the period. Casement's report

set it at three million, ascribing the depopulation to four main causes: indiscriminate war, starvation, reduction of births, and tropical diseases.[1] See Congo Free State for further details including numbers of victims. A similar situation occurred in the neighbouring French Congo. Most of the resource extraction was run by concession companies, whose brutal methods resulted in the loss of up to 50 percent of the indigenous population [15]. The French government appointed a commission, headed by de Brazza, in 1905 to investigate the rumoured abuses in the colony. However, de Brazza died on the return trip, and his "searingly critical" report was neither acted upon nor released to the public[16]. In the 1920's, about 20,000 forced labourers died building a railroad through the French territory[17].

´* 
/  ‘  

#   Ferdinand de Lesseps had obtained many concessions from Isma'il Pasha, the ruler of Egypt, in 1854-56, to build the Suez Canal. Some sources estimate the workforce at 30,000,[18] but others estimate that 120,000 workers died over the ten years of construction due to malnutrition, fatigue and disease, especially cholera.[19] Shortly before its completion in 1869, Isma'il Pasha, the Khedive of Egypt, borrowed enormous sums from French and English bankers at high rates of interest. By 1875, he was facing financial difficulties and was forced to sell his block of shares in the Suez Canal. The shares were snapped up by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Benjamin Disraeli, who sought to give his country practical control in the management of this strategic waterway. When Isma'il Pasha repudiated Egypt's foreign debt in 1879, Britain and France assumed joint financial control over the country, forcing the Egyptian ruler to abdicate. The Egyptian ruling classes did not relish foreign intervention. The Urabi Revolt broke out against the Khedive and European influence in 1882, a year after the Mahdist revolt. Muhammad Ahmad, who had proclaimed himself the ‘ , redeemer of Islam, in 1881, led the rebellion and was defeated only by Kitchener in 1898. Britain then assumed responsibility for the administration of the country.

´* 0 #  ‘  




 The occupation of Egypt and the acquisition of the Congo were the first major moves in what came to be a precipitous scramble for African territory. In 1884, Otto von Bismarck convened the 1884-85 Berlin Conference to discuss the Africa problem. The diplomats put on a humanitarian façade by condemning the slave trade, prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages and firearms in certain regions, and by expressing concern for missionary activities. More importantly, the diplomats in Berlin laid down the rules of competition by which the great powers were to be guided in seeking colonies. They also agreed that the area along the Congo River was to be administered by Léopold II of Belgium as a neutral area, known as the Congo Free State, in which trade and navigation

were to be free. No nation was to stake claims in Africa without notifying other powers of its intentions. No territory could be formally claimed prior to being effectively occupied. However, the competitors ignored the rules when convenient and on several occasions war was only narrowly avoided.

´* 0 

 # $,
  
! #  Britain's occupations of Egypt and the Cape Colony contributed to a preoccupation over securing the source of the Nile River. Egypt was occupied by British forces in 1882 (although not formally declared a protectorate until 1914, and never a colony proper); Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda were subjugated in the 1890s and early 1900s; and in the south, the Cape Colony (first acquired in 1795) provided a base for the subjugation of neighbouring African states and the Dutch Afrikaner settlers who had left the Cape to avoid the British and then founded their own republics. In 1877, TheophilusShepstone annexed the South African Republic (or Transvaal ± independent from 1857 to 1877) for the British. The UK consolidated its power over most of the colonies of South Africa in 1879 after the Anglo-Zulu War. The Boers protested and in December 1880 they revolted, leading to the First Boer War (1880-1881). British Prime MinisterWilliam Gladstone signed a peace treaty on March 23, 1881, giving self-government to the Boers in the Transvaal. The Second Boer War was about control of the gold and diamond industries and was fought between 1899 to 1902; the independent Boer republics of the Orange Free State and of the South African Republic (Transvaal) were this time defeated and absorbed into the British empire.

´* ! c  ‘  
   c
 The 1898 Fashoda Incident was one of the most crucial conflicts on Europe's way of consolidating holdings in the continent. It brought Britain and France to the verge of war but ended in a major strategic victory for Britain, and provided the basis for the 1904 &

  
between the two rival countries. It stemmed from battles over control of the Nile headwaters, which caused Britain to expand in the Sudan. The French thrust into the African interior was mainly from West Africa (modern day Senegal) eastward, through the Sahel along the southern border of the Sahara, a territory covering modern day Senegal, Mali, Niger, and Chad. Their ultimate aim was to have an uninterrupted link between the Niger River and the Nile, thus controlling all trade to and from the Sahel region, by virtue of their existing control over the Caravan routes through the Sahara. The British, on the other hand, wanted to link their possessions in Southern Africa (modern South Africa, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Zambia), with their territories in East Africa (modern Kenya), and these two areas with the Nile basin. Sudan (which in those days included modern day Uganda) was obviously key to the fulfilment of these ambitions, especially since Egypt was already under British control. This 'red line' through Africa is made most famous by Cecil Rhodes. Along with Lord Milner (the British colonial minister in South Africa), Rhodes advocated such a

µCape to Cairo¶ empire linking by rail the Suez Canal to the mineral-rich Southern part of the continent. Though hampered by German occupation of Tanganyika until the end of the First World War, Rhodes successfully lobbied on behalf of such a sprawling East African empire. If one draws a line from Cape Town to Cairo (Rhodes' dream), and one from Dakar to the Horn of Africa (now Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Somalia), (the French ambition), these two lines intersect somewhere in eastern Sudan near Fashoda, explaining its strategic importance. In short, Britain had sought to extend its East African empire contiguously from Cairo to the Cape of Good Hope, while France had sought to extend its own holdings from Dakar to the Sudan, which would enable its empire to span the entire continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea. A French force under Jean-BaptisteMarchand arrived first at the strategically located fort at Fashoda soon followed by a British force under Lord Kitchener, commander in chief of the British army since 1892. The French withdrew after a standoff, and continued to press claims to other posts in the region. In March 1899 the French and British agreed that the source of the Nile and Congo Rivers should mark the frontier between their spheres of influence.

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Although the 1884-85 Berlin Conference had set the rules for the scramble for Africa, it hadn't weakened the rival imperialisms. The 1898 Fashoda Incident, which had seen France and the UK on the brink of war, ultimately led to the signature of the 1904 &

  
, which reversed the influence of the various European powers. As a result, the new German power decided to test the solidity of the influence, using the contested territory of Morocco as a battlefield. Thus, on 31 March 1905 Kaiser Wilhelm II visited Tangiers and made a speech in favor of Moroccan independence, challenging French influence in Morocco. France's influence in Morocco had been reaffirmed by Britain and Spain in 1904. The Kaiser's speech bolstered French nationalism and with British support the French foreign minister, ThéophileDelcassé, took a defiant line. The crisis peaked in mid-June 1905, when Delcassé was forced out of the ministry by the more conciliation minded premier Maurice Rouvier. But by July 1905 Germany was becoming isolated and the French agreed to a conference to solve the crisis. Both France and Germany continued to posture up to the conference, with Germany mobilizing reserve army units in late December and France actually moving troops to the border in January 1906. The 1906 Algeciras Conference was called to settle the dispute. Of the thirteen nations present the German representatives found their only supporter was Austria-Hungary. France had firm support from Britain, Russia, Italy, Spain, and the U.S. The Germans

eventually accepted an agreement, signed on May 31, 1906, where France yielded certain domestic changes in Morocco but retained control of key areas. However, five years later the second Moroccan crisis (or Agadir Crisis) was sparked by the deployment of the German gunboat  
, to the port of Agadir on July 1, 1911. Germany had started to attempt to surpass Britain'snaval supremacy ± the British navy had a policy of remaining larger than the next two naval fleets in the world combined. When the British heard of the  
,s arrival in Morocco, they wrongly believed that the Germans meant to turn Agadir into a naval base on the Atlantic. The German move was aimed at reinforcing claims for compensation for acceptance of effective French control of the North African kingdom, where France's pre-eminence had been upheld by the 1906 Algeciras Conference. In November 1911 a convention was signed under which Germany accepted France's position in Morocco in return for territory in the French Equatorial African colony of Middle Congo (now the Republic of the Congo). France subsequently established a full protectorate over Morocco (March 30, 1912), ending what remained of the country's formal independence. Furthermore, British backing for France during the two Moroccan crises reinforced the Entente between the two countries and added to Anglo-German estrangement, deepening the divisions which would culminate in the First World War.


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In its earlier stages imperialism was generally the act of individual explorers as well as some adventurous merchantmen. The metropoles were a long way from approving without any dissent the expensive adventures carried out abroad. Various important political leaders such as Gladstone opposed colonisation in its first years. However, during his second premiership in 1880±1885 he could not resist the colonial lobby in his cabinet, and thus did not execute his electoral promise to disengage from Egypt. Although Gladstone was personally opposed to imperialism, the social tensions caused by the Long Depression pushed him to favor jingoism: the imperialists had become the µparasites of patriotism¶ (Hobson[20]). In France, then Radical politician Georges Clemenceau also adamantly opposed himself to it: he thought colonisation was a diversion from the µblue line of the Vosges¶ mountains, that is revanchism and the patriotic urge to reclaim the Alsace-Lorraine region which had been annexed by the 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt. Clemenceau actually made Jules Ferry's cabinet fall after the 1885 Tonkin disaster. According to Hannah Arendt's classic à
-  à    (1951), this unlimited expansion of national sovereignty on overseas territories contradicted the unity of the nation state which provided citizenship to its population. Thus, a tension between the universalist will to respect human rights of the colonised

people, as they may be considered as µcitizens¶ of the nation state, and the imperialist drives to cynically exploit populations deemed inferior began to surface. Some rare voices in the metropoles opposed what they saw as unnecessary evils of the colonial administration, left to itself and described in Joseph Conrad's
  '
 (1899) ± contemporary of Kipling's à
 
‘ , 
 ± or in Louis-Ferdinand Céline's+ 

& 
)  (1932). Thus, colonial lobbies were progressively set up to legitimise the Scramble for Africa and other expensive overseas adventures. In Germany, in France, in Britain, the bourgeoisie began to claim strong overseas policies to insure the market's growth. In 1916, Lenin would publish his famous c
 
 
 
    to explain this phenomenon. Even in lesser powers, voices like Corradini began to claim a µplace in the sun¶ for so-called µproletarian nations¶, bolstering nationalism and militarism in an early prototype of fascism. ´
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However, by the end of the First World War the colonial empires had become very popular almost everywhere: public opinion had been convinced of the needs of a colonial empire, although most of the metropolitans would never see a piece of it. Colonial exhibitions had been instrumental in this change of popular mentalities brought about by the colonial propaganda, supported by the colonial lobby and by various scientists. Thus, the conquest of territories were inevitably followed by public displays of the indigenous people for scientific and leisure purposes. Karl Hagenbeck, a German merchant in wild animals and future entrepreneur of most Europeans zoos, thus decided in 1874 to exhibit Samoa and Sami people as µpurely natural¶ populations. In 1876, he sent one of his collaborators to the newly conquered Egyptian Sudan to bring back some wild beasts and Nubians. Presented in Paris, London and Berlin, these Nubians were very successful. Such µhuman zoos¶ could be found in Hamburg, Antwerp, Barcelona, London, Milan, New York, Warsaw, etc., with 200,000 to 300,000 visitors attending each exhibition. Tuaregs were exhibited after the French conquest of Timbuktu (discovered by René Caillé, disguised as a Muslim, in 1828, who thus won the prize offered by the French ..
.  
); Malagasy after the occupation of Madagascar; Amazons of Abomey after Behanzin'smediatic defeat against the French in 1894... Not used to the climatic conditions, some of the indigenous exposed died, such as some Galibis in Paris in 1892.[21] Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire, director of the Parisian Jardind'acclimatation, decided in 1877 to organise two µethnological spectacles¶, presenting Nubians and Inuit. The public of the Jardind'acclimatation doubled, with a million paying entrances that year, a huge success for these times. Between 1877 and 1912, approximatively thirty µethnological exhibitions¶ were presented at the Jardinzoologiqued'acclimatation.[22] µNegro villages¶ would be presented in Paris's 1878 and 1879 World's Fair; the 1900 World's Fair presented the famous diorama µliving¶ in Madagascar, while the Colonial Exhibitions in Marseilles (1906 and 1922) and in Paris (1907 and 1931) would also display human

beings in cages, often nudes or quasi-nudes.[23] Nomadic µSenegalese villages¶ were also created, thus displaying the power of the colonial empire to all the population. In the U.S., Madison Grant, head of the New York Zoological Society, exposed PygmyOta Benga in the Bronx Zoo alongside the apes and others in 1906. At the behest of Grant, a prominent scientific racist and eugenicist, zoo director Hornaday, placed Ota Benga in a cage with an orangutan and labeled him µThe Missing Link¶ in an attempt to illustrate Darwinism, and in particular that Africans like Ota Benga are closer to apes than were Europeans. Such colonial exhibitions, which include the 1924 British Empire Exhibition and the successful 1931 Paris & 
, were doubtlessly a key element of the colonisation project and legitimised the ruthless Scramble for Africa, in the same way that the popular comic-strip à
|

 à, full of clichés, were obviously carrier of an ethnocentric and racistideology which was the condition of the masses' consent to the imperialist phenomenon. Hergé's work attained summits with à
  (1930-31) or à
 '
& (1935). While comic-strips played the same role as westerns to legitimise the Indian Wars in the United States, colonial exhibitions were both popular  scientific, being an interface between the crowds and serious scientific research. Thus, anthropologists such as Madison Grant or Alexis Carrel built their pseudo-scientific racism, inspired by Gobineau's|& 
c
/  
  * 
 (1853-55). Human zoos provided both a real-size laboratory for these racial hypothesis and a demonstration of their validity: by labellingOta Benga as the µmissing link¶ between apes and Europeans, as was done in the Bronx Zoo, social Darwinism and the pseudo-hierarchy of races, grounded in the biologisation of the notion of µrace¶, were simultaneously µproved¶, and the layman could observe this µscientific truth.¶ ´
 

Anthropology, the daughter of colonisation, participated in this so-called scientific racism based on social Darwinism by supporting, along with social positivism and scientism, the claims of the superiority of the Western civilisation over µprimitive cultures¶. However, the discovery of ancient cultures would dialectically lead anthropology to criticise itself and revalue the importance of foreign cultures. Thus, the 1897 
&
 led by the British Admiral Harry Rawson captured, burned, and looted the city of Benin, incidentally bringing to an end the highly sophisticated West AfricanKingdom of Benin. However, the sack of Benin distributed the famous Benin bronzes and other works of art into the European art market, as the British Admiralty auctioned off the confiscated patrimony to defray costs of the Expedition. Most of the great Benin bronzes went first to purchasers in Germany, though a sizable group remain in the British Museum. The Benin bronzes then catalysed the beginnings of a long reassessment of the value of West African culture, which had strong influences on the formation of modernism.

Several contemporary studies have thus focused on the construction of the racist discourse in the nineteenth century and its propaganda as a precondition of the colonisation project and of the Scramble of Africa, made with total disconcern for the local population, as exemplified by Stanley, according to whom µthe savage only respects force, power, boldness, and decision.¶ Anthropology, which was related to criminology, thrived on these explorations, as had geography before them and ethnology ± which, along with Claude Lévi-Strauss' studies, would theorise the ethnocentric illusion ± afterwards. According to several historians, the formulation of this racist discourse and practices would also be a precondition of µstate racism¶ (Michel Foucault) as incarnated by the Holocaust (see also Olivier LeCourGrandmaison's description of the conquest of Algeria and Sven Lindqvist, as well as Hannah Arendt).

´*)  # !  6
  ! 3 United Nations' Whitaker Report recognised Germany's turn of the century attempt to exterminate the Herero and Namaqua peoples of South-West Africa as one of the earliest attempts at genocide in the 20th century. In total, some 65,000 Herero (80 percent of the total Herero population), and 10,000 Namaqua (50 percent of the total Namaqua population) were killed between 1904 and 1907. Characteristic of this genocide was death by starvation and the poisoning of wells for the Herero and Namaqua population who were trapped in the Namib Desert.


! 
  During the New Imperialism period, by the end of the century, Europe added almost 9,000,000 square miles (23,000,000 km2) ± one-fifth of the land area of the globe ± to its overseas colonial possessions. Europe's formal holdings now included the entire African continent except Ethiopia, Liberia, and Saguia el-Hamra, the latter of which would be integrated into Spanish Sahara. Between 1885 and 1914 Britain took nearly 30% of Africa's population under its control, to 15% for France, 11% for Portugal, 9% for Germany, 7% for Belgium and only 1% for Italy[ 


]. Nigeria alone contributed 15 million subjects, more than in the whole of French West Africa or the entire German colonial empire. It was paradoxical that Britain, the staunch advocate of free trade, emerged in 1914 with not only the largest overseas empire thanks to its long-standing presence in India, but also the greatest gains in the µscramble for Africa¶, reflecting its advantageous position at its inception. In terms of surface area occupied, the French were the marginal victors but much of their territory consisted of the sparsely-populatedSahara. The political imperialism followed the economic expansion, with the µcolonial lobbies¶ bolstering chauvinism and jingoism at each crisis in order to legitimise the colonial enterprise. The tensions between the imperial powers led to a succession of crises, which finally exploded in August 1914, when previous rivalries and alliances created a domino situation that drew the major European nations into the war. Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia to avenge the murder by Serbian agents of Austrian crown prince Francis Ferdinand, Russia would mobilise to assist its Slavic brothers in Serbia, Germany would intervene to support Austria-Hungary against Russia. Since Russia had a military alliance

with France against Germany, the German General Staff, led by General von Moltke decided to realise the well prepared Schlieffen Plan to invade France and quickly knock her out of the war before turning against Russia in what was expected to be a long campaign. This required an invasion of Belgium which brought Britain into the war against Germany, Austria-Hungary and their allies. German U-Boat campaigns against ships bound for Britain eventually drew the United States into what had become the First World War. Moreover, using the Anglo-Japanese Alliance as an excuse, Japan leaped onto this opportunity to conquer German interests in China and the Pacific to become the dominating power in Western Pacific, setting the stage for the Second Sino-Japanese War (starting in 1937) and eventually the Second World War.