Download New Imperialism in Asia and Africa

Imperialism occurs when a strong nation takes over a weaker nation or region and dominates its
economic, political, or cultural life.
This type of foreign policy was practiced by European nations and Japan throughout the 1800s and
early 1900s. In every case, a nation would experience industrialization prior to practicing
imperialism on a foreign nation or region. This was due to the nearly insatiable demand for cheap raw
materials and the need for markets to buy manufactured goods.
Industrial Roots
Abundant raw materials and vast markets are needed in order to maintain an industrialized economy.
Raw materials such as iron and cotton can be turned
into products such as steel and textiles. Finally,
these products need to be sold to a market in order
to realize a profit.
The forces of industrialization caused nations to
begin looking outside of their borders for cheaper
and more abundant raw materials. Foreign
populations were also viewed as vast markets where
goods produced in domestic factories could be sold.
Other Causes
Nationalism, or pride in one’s country, also contributed to the growth of imperialism. Citizens were
proud of their country’s accomplishments, which sometimes included taking over foreign areas. As
European nations became competitive with one another, there was an increased pressure to practice
imperialism in order to maintain a balance of power in Europe.
As Europeans took over foreign lands, they viewed the culture of the native population to be inferior to
their own. This concept became know as “The White Man’s Burden” after a popular poem by the
same name was published by Rudyard Kipling in 1899. Some interpreted this poem to mean that it
was the duty of imperializing nations to bring western culture and sensibility to the savage native
populations that were encountered in far off lands. This is sometimes referred to as Social Darwinism,
or the belief that all human groups compete for survival, and that the stronger groups will replace the
weaker groups. Others saw it as a warning to western nations to stop the harmful practice of
imperialism.
Causes of Imperialism
Economic
Motives
The Industrial Revolution created an insatiable
demand for raw materials and new markets.
Nationalism
European nations wanted to demonstrate their
power and prestige to the world.
Balance of
Power
European nations were forced to acquire new
colonies to achieve a balance with their neighbors
and competitors.
White
Man's
Burden
The Europeans’ sense of superiority made them
feel obligated to “civilize the heathen savages”
they encountered.
Results
In the short-term, imperialism was a very profitable foreign policy which came at the expense of the
foreign regions where it was being practiced. Cultural diffusion also occurred, leading to an
exchange of ideas between the West and the East. For example, European methods of education were
adopted, leading foreigners to study ideas of liberty and democracy embraced during the
Enlightenment and various political revolutions. This exchange eventually led to the demise of
imperialism and colonialism throughout the world after World War Two.
Rise of New Imperialism
The American Revolution and the collapse of the Spanish empire in the New World in the early 181020s, following the revolutions in the viceroyalties of New Spain, New Granada, Peru, and the Rio de la
Plata ended the first era of European imperialism. 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. In 1846, The Corn Laws, which were the
regulations governing the import and export of grain, were repealed after a great deal of protesting
from the middle class. Because of the repeal, manufacturers were faced with a tremendous benefit,
seeing that the regulations enforced by the Corn Laws had slowed their businesses. With the repeal in
place, the manufacturers were then able to trade more freely. Thus, the UK began to adopt the concept
of free trade.[1] The Pax era also saw the enforced opening of key markets to European, particularly
British, commerce. This activity followed the erosion of Pax Britannica, during which British
industrial and naval supremacy underpinned an informal empire of free trade and commercial
hegemony.
The Congress of Vienna by Jean-Baptiste
Isabey, (1819). The congress was actually a
series of face-to-face meetings between
colonial powers. It served to divide and
reappropriate imperial holdings.
During this period, between the 1815 Congress of Vienna (after the defeat of Napoleonic France) and
the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1871), Britain reaped the benefits of being the world's sole
modern, industrial power. As the "workshop of the world", the United Kingdom could produce
finished goods so efficiently that they could usually undersell comparable, locally manufactured goods
in foreign markets, even supplying a large share of the manufactured goods consumed by such nations
as Germany, France, Belgium and the United States.
The erosion of British hegemony after the Franco-Prussian War, in which a coalition of German states
led by Prussia defeated France, was occasioned by changes in the European and world economies and
in the continental balance of power following the breakdown of the Concert of Europe, established by
the Congress of Vienna. The establishment of nation-states in Germany and Italy resolved territorial
issues that had kept potential rivals embroiled in internal affairs at the heart of Europe (to Britain's
advantage). The years from 1871 to 1914 would be marked by an extremely unstable peace. France’s
determination to recover Alsace-Lorraine, a territory located in France that was created by Germany,
and Germany’s mounting imperialist ambitions would kept the two nations constantly poised for
conflict.
Economically, adding to the commercial competition of old rivals like France were now the newly
industrializing powers, such as Germany and the United States. Needing external markets for their
manufactured goods, all sought ways to challenge Britain's dominance in world trade – the
consequence of its early industrialization.
This competition was sharpened by the Long Depression of 1873-1896, a prolonged period of price
deflation punctuated by severe business downturns, which put pressure on governments to promote
home industry, leading to the widespread abandonment of free trade among Europe's powers (in
Germany from 1879 and in France from 1881).
The resulting limitation of both domestic markets and export opportunities led government and
business leaders in Europe, and later the U.S., to see the solution in sheltered overseas markets
attached to the home country by imperial tariff barriers: new overseas colonies would provide export
markets free of foreign competition, while supplying cheap raw materials for their mother country to
use as they saw fit.
The revival of working-class militancy and emergence of socialist parties during the Depression
decades led conservative governments to view colonialism as a force for national cohesion in support
of the domestic status quo. Also, in Italy, and to a lesser extent in Germany and Britain, tropical
empires in India and Burma were seen as outlets for what was deemed a surplus home population.
Britain during the era of New Imperialism
British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli
and Queen Victoria
In Britain, the latter half of the 19th century has been seen as the period of displacement of industrial
capitalism by finance capitalism. As the country's relative commercial and industrial lag encouraged
the creation of larger corporations and combines, close association of industry and banks added to the
influence of financiers over the British economy and politics.
Britain's lag in other fields deepened her reliance on invisible exports (such as banking, insurance and
shipping services) to offset a merchandise trade deficit dating from the beginning of commercial
liberalization in 1813, and thereby keep her "out of the red." Although it had been official British
policy for years to support such investments, the large expansion of these investments after about 1860
and the economic and political instability in many areas of high investment such as Egypt, brought
increased pressure for their systematic protection.
Britain's entry into the old imperial age is often dated to 1875, when the government of Benjamin
Disraeli bought the indebted Egyptian ruler Ismail's shareholding in the Suez Canal to secure control
of this waterway, deemed a strategic holding since its opening six years earlier as a shipping lane
between Britain and India. Joint Anglo-French financial control over Egypt ended in outright British
occupation in 1882.
Fear of Russia's centuries-old southward expansion was a further factor in British policy: in 1878,
Britain 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. The Great Game in Inner
Asia ended with a bloody and wholly unnecessary British assault against Tibet in 1903-1904.
At the same time, some powerful industrial lobbies and government leaders in Britain, exemplified by
Joseph Chamberlain, came to view a formal empire as necessary to arrest Britain's relative decline in
world markets. Britain's adoption of New Imperialism in the 1890s followed by its quick emergence as
the front-runner in the scramble for African territories may be seen as a quest for captive markets or
fields for investment of surplus capital, or (somewhat more cynically) as a primarily strategic or
preemptive attempt to protect existing trade links and to prevent the absorption of its overseas markets
into the imperial trading blocs of rival powers. The failure in the 1900s of Chamberlain's campaign for
imperial tariffs illustrates the strength of a free trade movement even in the face of loss of international
market share.
France during the era of Old Imperialism
Government leaders, such as Jules Ferry of France, concluded that sheltered overseas markets would
solve the problems of low prices and over-accumulation of surplus capital caused by their shrinking
continental markets.
The expansion of the French colonial empire was also seen as a method of 'rejuvenating' the country
after its humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871; the military actions needed to secure
empire were seen by colonial enthusiasts as 'the first, faltering steps of convalescence'. This plan,
however, did meet with some popular resistance, and Ferry himself was removed from office twice
over colonial disputes.
The New Imperialism era and the newly-industrialized countries
Just as the U.S. emerged as one of the world's leading industrial, military and political powers after the
Civil War, so would Germany, following its own unification in 1871. Both countries undertook
ambitious naval expansion in the 1890s. And just as Germany reacted to economic depression with the
adoption of tariff protection in 1879 and colonial expansion in 1884-85, so would the U.S., the
landslide election (1896) of William McKinley, would soon be associated with the high McKinley
Tariff of 1890.
United States colonial expansionism had its roots in domestic concerns and economic conditions,
much like other newly industrializing nations whose governments sought to accelerate internal
development. Advocates of the imperial system also drew upon a tradition of westward expansion over
the course of the previous century. 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. The "closing of the
Frontier" identified by the 1890 Census report and publicized by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in
his 1893 paper The Significance of the Frontier in American History, contributed to fears of
constrained natural resource.
Like the Long Depression in Europe, the main features of the U.S. depression included deflation, rural
decline, and unemployment, which aggravated the bitter social protests of the "Gilded Age"—the
Populist movement, the free-silver crusade, and violent labor disputes such as the Pullman and
Homestead strikes.
The Panic of 1893 contributed to the growing mood for expansionism. 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. Whatever the causes, the result of the 1898 Spanish-American 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.
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),
"imperialism" for the United States, formalized in 1904 by the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe
Doctrine, would also spur its displacement of Britain as the predominant investor in Latin America—a
process largely completed by the end of the Great War.
In Germany, Imperial Chancellor Otto von Bismarck revised his initial dislike of colonies (which he
had seen as burdensome and useless), partly because he was under pressure for colonial expansion
matching that of the other European states, but also under the mistaken notion that Germany's entry
into the colonial scramble could press Britain into conceding to broader German strategic ambitions.
Japan's development after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 followed the Western lead in industrialization
and militarism, enabling her to gain control of Taiwan in 1895, Korea in 1910 and then a sphere of
influence in Manchuria (1905), following the defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. Japan's
colonial boom was in part a response to the actions of more established powers, and her expansionism
drew on the harnessing of traditional Japanese values to more modern aspirations for great-power
status; not until the 1930s was Japan to become a net exporter of capital.
Social implications of the New Imperialism Era
The New Imperialism gave rise to new social views of colonialism. Rudyard Kipling, for instance,
urged the United States to "Take up the White Man's burden" of bringing European civilization to the
other peoples of the world, regardless of whether these "other peoples" wanted this civilization or not.
This part of the white mans burden truly exemplifies Britain's colonization's of other countries, "Take
up the White Man's burden, In patience to abide, To veil the threat of terror, And check the show of
pride; By open speech and simple, An hundred times made plain To seek another's profit, And work
another's gain." It shows Britain's pride when it invaded other countries and how after they took over,
Britain used up all of the natural resources to benefit them and not the other country. While Social
Darwinism became popular throughout western Europe and the United States, the paternalistic Frenchstyle "civilizing mission" (In French: mission civilisatrice) appealed to many European statesmen both
in and outside of France. Despite apparent benevolence existing in the notion of the "White Man's
Burden", the unintended consequences of imperialism might greatly outweigh the potential benefits.
Governments become increasingly paternalistic at home and neglected the individual liberties of their
citizens. Military spending expanded, usually leading to an "imperial overreach", and mperialism
created clients of ruling elites abroad that were brutal and corrupt. Consequently, the corrupt elites
were then able to consolidate power through imperial rents and impede social change and economic
development that ran against their ambitions. Furthermore, "nation building" oftentimes can create
cultural sentiments of racism and xenophobia.[6]
Many of Europe's major elites also found advantages in formal, overseas expansion: large financial
and industrial monopolies wanted imperial support to protect their overseas investments against
competition and domestic political tensions abroad; bureaucrats wanted and sought government
offices; military officers desired promotion; and the traditional but waning landed gentries sought
increased profits for their investments, formal titles, and high office. Such special interests perpetuate
empire building today and throughout history.[6]
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 use imperial jingoism to co-opt the
support of part of the industrial working class. The new mass media promoted jingoism in the SpanishAmerican War (1898), the Second Boer War (1899–1902), and the Boxer Rebellion (1900).
The notion of rule over tropical lands commanded widespread acceptance among metropolitan
populations: even among those who associated imperial colonization with oppression and exploitation.
For example, 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 into eventual
independence.
New Imperialism in Asia and Africa
New Imperialism In Asia
In the 17th century, the expanding British arrive in India and there, after taking a small portion of land,
are known a the British East India Company. Slowly, the British completely took over the country of
India and by 1757, had started the job of unifying the country to suit their needs because for the British
to truly prosper from having control of India, they had to first modernize it. Soon enough, Britain
began to realize that communication was going to be a problem. They first made sure that
communication was good enough for the country to prosper, and they decided to make additional
changes and modernize it so that it was safer and faster. Kinds of ships called clipper ships were
engineered and their larger sails were able to catch the wind and cut the trip to India from Europe in
half from 6 months to 3 months. To communicate even faster, the British also laid cables on the floor
of the ocean allowing telegrams to be sent from India and China. After all of these changes were made,
it was clear that the British had made progress because at the beginning of the 1800s, it took more than
a year for a letter to be sent and answered from England to India and by 1870, communication only
took two months depending on urgency and if the matter was urgent, it took mere hours. In 1818, the
British controlled most of India and began imposing their ideas and ways on India but it wasn’t really a
kind of take over. The British were also working together with Indian officials. A few of these new
impositions were different property laws that covered the jobs of armies so that the British were able to
break up the Indian armies and giving high officials more power including religious leaders. The
British also seemed to make the society of India a better place to live by outlawing slavery and helped
stop crime. After making so many different changes to India, the chances of everyone being happy
with how the British are running things are many of them are slim to none. The different Hindu and
Muslim Sepoys caused the Indian Mutiny also known as the Sepoy Rebellion or Sepoy Mutiny and
following this rebellion, the transfer of administrative functions from the chartered British East India
Company to the British government in 1858 occurred.
After this revolt is taken care of by the British, the Queen of England is crowned empress of India
which is symbolic of Britain’s control over India. After the British had gained more control over India,
they began changing around the financial state of India in many different ways, one of which was
expanding India’s exports like crops and eventually, caused India to even become the main source of
tea into Europe. The British also began modernizing the largest of India’s cities by connecting them by
railroad and telegraph to make travel and communication easier for the British in India and by building
upon its irrigation system so that by 1900, India had the most comprehensive one in the world. There
were also some negative effects to the society from all the modernization such as the fact that Indian
weavers and such were replaced by new spinning and weaving machines and that the extensive travel
capabilities were spreading disease quickly. When Western education was introduced in India, Indians
were quite influenced by it, but they eventually began feeling like they weren’t equal to the white
westerners because of the ratio of Indian’s to whites that were actually able to study and take necessary
tests. Not only did they feel unequal, but they were actually considered unequal in the eyes of the
white British because soon enough, they began to hold jobs exclusively for whites. In response to such
treatment, the educated Indians and the ones that knew such inequality was occurring decided to
establish the Indian National Congress that demanded that Indians be recognized as equals with the
British and that they have the right to govern themselves. After taking over most of India, the British
expanded even more and took Burma and Malaya (modern day Malaysia) and these two countries
became major exporters of fine British goods.
British Colonies in Asia
The new administrative arrangement, crowned with Queen Victoria's proclamation as Empress of India
in 1876, effectively replaced the rule of a monopolistic enterprise with that of a trained civil service
headed by graduates of Britain's top universities. conquest of Burma.
French Colonies in Asia
France's took overVietnam and Cambodia in the 1880s; during the following decade France completed
her Indochinese empire with the annexation of Laos, leaving the kingdom of Siam (now Thailand)
with an uneasy independence as a neutral buffer between British and French-ruled lands.
China and New Imperialism
Imperialist ambitions and rivalries in East Asia inevitably came to focus on the vast empire of China,
with more than a quarter of the world's population. China survived as a more-or-less independent state
due to the resilience of her social and administrative structures, but can also be seen as a reflection of
the limitations to which imperialist governments were willing to press their ambitions in the face of
similar competing claims.
Lord Kitchener, one of the most distinguished British military commanders in India, once said: It is
this consciousness of the inherit superiority of European which has won for us India. However well
educated and clever a native may be, and however brave he may prove himself, I believe that no rank
we can bestow on him would cause him to be considered and equal of the British officer.
On one hand, it is suggested that rather than being a backward country unable to secure the
prerequisite stability and security for western-style commerce, China's institutions and level of
economic development rendered her capable of providing a secure market in the absence of direct rule
by the developed powers, despite her past unwillingness to admit western commerce (which had often
taken the form of drug-pushing).
Western powers did intervene militarily in China to quell domestic chaos, such as the epic Taiping
Rebellion of 1850-1864, against which General Gordon (later the imperialist 'martyr' in the Sudan) is
often credited with having saved the Qing Dynasty.
China's size and cohesion compared to pre-colonial societies of Africa also made any formal
subjugation too difficult for any but the broadest coalition of colonial powers, however, these power's
rivalries would ironically preclude such an outcome. When such a coalition did materialize in 1900, its
objective was limited to suppression of the anti-imperialist Boxer Rebellion, A peasant rebellion in
china by the peasants in an attempt to drive everyone out of china, because of the irreconcilability of
Anglo-American and Russo-German aims within China.
New Imperialism in Africa
Between 1885 and 1914, Britain brought nearly 30% of Africa's population under its control, to 15%
for France, 9% for Germany, 7% for Belgium and 1% for Italy: Nigeria alone contributed 15 million
subjects to Britain, more than in the whole of French West Africa, or the entire German colonial
empire. The only regions not under European control in 1914 were Liberia and Ethiopia
British Colonies in Africa
Britain's 1882 formal occupation of Egypt (triggered by concern over the Suez Canal) contributed to a
preoccupation over securing control of Nile valley, leading to the conquest of neighboring Sudan in
1896-1898, which in turn led to confrontation with a French military expedition at Fashoda in
September 1898. In 1899, Britain set out to complete its takeover of the future South Africa, which it
had begun in 1814 with the annexation of the Cape Colony, by invading the gold-rich Afrikaner
republics of Transvaal and the neighboring Orange Free State. The chartered British South Africa
Company had already seized the land to the north, renamed Rhodesia after its head, the Cape tycoon
Cecil Rhodes.
British gains in southern and East Africa prompted Rhodes and Alfred Milner, Britain's High
Commissioner in South Africa, to urge a "Cape to Cairo" empire: linked by rail, the strategically
important Canal would be firmly connected to the mineral-rich South, though Belgian control of the
Belgian Congo Free State and German control of German East Africa prevented such an outcome until
the end of World War I, when Great Britain acquired the latter territory.
Britain's quest for southern Africa and their diamonds led to complicated social complications and
fallouts that lasted for years. To work for their prosperous company, British businessmen hired both
white and black South Africans. But when it came to jobs the white South Africans received the higher
paid and less dangerous ones, leaving the black South Africans to risk their lives down in the mines for
limited pay. This process of separating the two groups of South Africans, whites and blacks, was the
beginning of segregation between the two that lasted until 1989.
Paradoxically, the United Kingdom, a 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 conquest of Africa, reflecting its advantageous position at its inception.
Belgian Colonies in Africa
Up until 1876, Belgium had no colonial presence in Africa. It was then that its king, Leopold II created
the International African Society. Under the façade of being an international scientific and
philanthropic association, it was actually a private holding company of Leopold’s. He hired Henry
Morton Stanley to explore and colonize the Congo River basin area of equatorial Africa in order to
capitalize on the plentiful resources such as ivory, rubber, diamonds, and other valuable metals. Up
until this point, the Congo was known as “the Dark Continent” due to the fact that rapids on the Congo
River had previously made exploration of this area impossible. Over the next few years, Stanley
overpowered and made treaties with over 450 native tribes, acquiring him over 905,000 square miles
of land, nearly 67 times the size of Belgium, in the sovereignty of King Leopold II.
Neither the Belgian government, nor the Belgian people had any interest in imperialism at the time,
and the land came to be personally owned by King Leopold II. At the Berlin Conference in 1884, he
was allowed to have land his own personal nation, called the Congo Free State. The other European
countries at the conference allowed this to happen on the conditions that he suppress the East African
slave trade, promote humanitarian policies, guarantee free trade, and encourage missions to
Christianize and educate the people of the Congo. However, Leopold II’s primary focus was to make a
large profit on the natural resources particularly ivory and rubber. In order to make this profit, he
passed several cruel decrees that can be considered to be genocide. He forced the natives to supply him
with rubber and ivory without any sort of payment in return. Their wives and children were held
hostage until the workers returned with enough rubber or ivory to fill their quota, and if they couldn’t,
their family would be killed. The workers themselves also might be tortured, flogged, or mutilated.
When villages refused, they were burned down, the children of the village murdered and the men had
their hands cut off. These policies led to uprisings that were feeble compared to the European military
and technological might. They opposed the forced labor in other ways, by fleeing into the forests to
seek refuge or setting the rubber forests on fire preventing the Europeans from harvesting the rubber.
These rebellions were brutally crushed by the FP (Force Publique) which was composed of all whites;
a mixture of Belgian soldiers and mercenaries. They went into the forests where refugees had escaped
and killed them mercilessly. In fact, they would bring back a hand for every man they killed to show
they were not wasting ammunition. If the FP missed a shot or hunted game, they would cut the hands
of innocent living people in order to match the number of bullets used to the number of hands brought
back. This genocide was so widespread and effervescent, that the population of the area actually
decreased from approximately 20-30 million people to 9 million people during his reign. It is estimated
that 10-15 million people lost their lives. King Leopold II sure did make his profits and had a 700%
profit ratio for the rubber he took from Congo and exported. He used propaganda to keep the other
European nations at bay, for he broke almost all of the parts of the agreement he made at the Berlin
Conference. For example, he had some Congolese pygmies sing and dance at the 1897 World Fair in
Belgium, showing how he was supposedly civilizing and educating the natives of the Congo. After the
Belgian government found out about the atrocities that were being committed in the Congo, they
annexed the land and renamed it Belgian Congo, removing it from the personal power of their king,
Leopold II. Of all the colonies that were conquered during the wave of New Imperialism, the people of
the Congo River Basin suffered the worst treatment by their oppressors compared to other colonized
peoples.