c
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cc 

c
 , defined by à


  

 , 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

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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.

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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 Marxist-

Leninist 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.

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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.

c 

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   ccc



 
 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.

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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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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."

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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.

cc
 3 
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 inter-
imperialist cooperation.

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The "Rise of the New Imperialism" era overlaps with the  
  period (1815-
1870). 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.

0
 0
  ccc
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 self-
government 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 government-
supported 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.

!    


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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British colonial activity was motivated in part by fear of Russia's centuries-old southward
expansion: in 1878 the United Kingdom took control of Cyprus as a base for action
against a Russian attack on the Ottoman Empire, and invaded Afghanistan to forestall an
increase in Russian influence there. British Conservatives in particular feared that Russia
would continue to expand southwards into Ottoman Empire territory and acquire a base
on the Mediterranean or even Constantinople.

As British Viceroy in India, Lord Curzon urged a strong hand against the un-subjugated
peoples of India's north-west frontier areas to prevent any destabilisation which might
weaken India's forward defenses against a possible Russian move. The µGreat Game¶ in
Asia ended with the furthest projection of Curzon's policy in a bloody and wholly
unnecessary British expedition against Tibet in 1903-04.

British statesmen long feared that the United Kingdom's colonies remained vulnerable to
a land attack by Russia combined with a naval assault by Russia's ally France, prompting
in part Anglo-German consultations (1898 and 1901) and the Anglo-Japanese alliance of
1902, before the &


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



 with Russia.

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New Imperialism, economic and strategic in its inception and political in its expression,
had a complex relationship with the development of capitalism on a world scale. Foreign
trade tripled in volume between 1870 and 1914, although (again) most of the activity
occurred among the industrialised countries, or between them and their suppliers of
primary goods or their new markets.

In 1913, only 11 percent of the world's trade took place between primary producers
themselves. The United Kingdom ranked as the world's largest trading nation in 1860, but
by 1913 it had lost ground to both the United States and Germany: British and German
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
 





|

  
, 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.
p





   


 

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.

3
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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 under-

consumption, 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 neo-
mercantilism, 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

ccc c c

c
   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 self-
sufficient, 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 re-
emergence of China and Japan as regional powers.

Ê
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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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In the 13th and 14th centuries, a number of Europeans, many of them Christian
missionaries, had sought to penetrate China. The most famous of these travelers was
Marco Polo. But these journeys had little permanent effect on East-West trade because of
a series of political developments in Asia in the last decades of the fourteenth century,
which put an end to further European exploration of Asia. The Yuan dynasty in China,
which had been receptive to European missionaries and merchants, was overthrown, and
the new Ming rulers were found to be inward oriented and unreceptive to foreign
religious proselytism. Meanwhile, The Turks consolidated control over the eastern
Mediterranean, closing off key overland trade routes. Thus, until the fifteenth century,
only minor trade and cultural exchanges between Europe and Asia continued at certain
terminals controlled by Muslim traders.

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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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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 over-
extended, 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 over-
stretched 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 (1616-
1795). 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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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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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.

 
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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 governor-
generalship 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 (618-
907) 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, extra-
judicial 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 (1901-
1913) 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.



"!

 


 
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.


#


$
+, 


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).


$



´*   !  #   

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.

´
  
 

´

 
   

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 (1873-
1896), 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 Italo-
Abyssinian 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 Anglo-
Japanese 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.

´
   !  " 

#$  

$
-

(  .  
 /


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.


!

„



´*/ # ! $

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 Franco-
Italian 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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„
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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.

´
   % 
 
&%



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.