Assignment: Chapter Review 

                                        Chapter: Eight 

                 Title of the Chapter: The Age of Imperialism and the Scramble for Africa

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                                             Word limit 700-1000

THE MOTIVATIONS FOR IMPERIALISM

In order to get around this, "sheltered markets" were pursued by European states free of
certain trade controls and found in the colonies they founded in Africa and Asia. The military
and political rivalries of the great powers in Europe were in part motivated by both the Great
Game of global rivalry in the Middle East and the Scramble for Africa. Britain and France had
long been competitors on the European continent, and these two nations were both pulled into
the fight for power and control with the union of Germany and Italy in the 1860s and 1870s.
Many Europeans believed that their presence in the colonies would help to uplift and
modernize the African and Asian populations.

THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA

In certain areas of Africa, long before the arrival of the Europeans, there was a high degree of
socioeconomic, political and cultural maturity. Outsiders had scarcely reached the interior of
Africa before the nineteenth century, and most contact between Africans and Europeans was
along the coasts. After the construction in 1869 of the Suez Canal, which linked the
Mediterranean and Red Seas, European interest in Africa, especially North Africa, grew. The
German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck convened the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 in some
concern at this unexpected conquest of African land by a European rival to determine certain
laws for how Europeans might break up the African continent. A crazy scramble for land in
Africa was set off by the Berlin Summit, with each European state terrified of being beaten to
the punch by others. The whole continent had been carved up by European interests within
fifteen years, by 1900. South Africa, at the southern tip of the continent, was a major reward in
the Scramble for Africa. The subsequent defeat of the Boers led to the foundation in 1910 of
the British Union of South Africa.

THE COLONIZATION OF ASIA

Although European colonization was most frenetic in Africa in the nineteenth century, it spread
all over the globe. The European powers have divided up much of Asia, with only Japan being
fully independent. China had a longstanding hegemony of its own, but there was no organized
European imperialism there.

PATTERNS OF COLONIAL RULE

Initially, the European states depended largely on chartered trade firms to discover and
establish colonial lands, allowing the resultant colonies to pay for themselves in essence.
However, the administration of these regions was eventually taken over by European
governments.
THE LEGACY AND CONSEQUENCES OF EUROPEAN IMPERIALISM

The European dominance in Africa, Asia and the Middle East had a positive as well as a
negative effect on the people concerned. For better or worse, in the nineteenth century,
European language, culture, and technologies expanded across the Southern Hemisphere.
There was a growing market for European items such as bicycles, radios, and clothes among
the inhabitants of the colonies. A European system of education, both secular and religious,
stimulated literacy and the development of an educated middle class.

Seventeen colonies achieved their independence from European states in just one year in
Africa, in 1960, and practically the entire continent became independent over the next two
decades. In South- and Southeast Asia and the Middle East, the same was true in European
colonies.

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