Study Guide
Bentley, chapter 32
The Building of Global Empires
1. The New Imperialism: In 1876 no more than 10 percent of Africa was under
European rule. By 1900 more than 90 percent was colonized. Britain, France and
Belgium had divided the continent between them, leaving small slices for Germany and
Italy. In the same period Britain, France, Russia and Germany established wide spheres
of influence extending from their colonial enclaves in China; Japan took over Korea and
Taiwan; France conquered all of Indochina; the US seized Puerto Rico and the
Philippines from Spain; and Britain and Russia agreed to an informal partitioning of Iran.
Even the smaller islands of the Pacific and Indian oceans were subject to the dictates of
London or Paris. The number of genuinely independent states outside Europe and the
Americas could be counted on the fingers of one hand—the remains of the Ottoman
Empire, Thailand, Ethiopia and Afghanistan.
2. Industrialization and the new imperialism: The carve-up of the world cannot be
understood without looking at what was happening to the capitalism of the West in this
period. The 1870s and 1880s were a period—often called ‘the Great Depression’— of
depressed markets, falling prices, and low profits and dividends, especially in Britain. To
British investors there seemed one way to maintain their incomes—investment abroad.
The money went mainly in ‘stocks’—fixed interest investments for the construction of
railways, bridges, harbors, docks and waterways, or for the financing of government
bodies. Whatever the investments were for, they promised a level of profitability higher
than that to be obtained at home. They also provided a market for domestic industrial
output (such as steel rails, locomotives and bridge girders) and led to an increased flow of
cheap raw materials. In this way they helped pull British capitalism into a new period of
expansion. Such investments required a means to stop foreign borrowers defaulting on
their payments. Colonialism provided this through the armed force of the state.
3. Motives for imperialism: The New Imperialism was not simply intended to add vast
territories to national boundaries. Euro-Americans used economics and technology to
create a new global economy, with peoples in newly conquered lands supplying raw
materials as well as new markets for manufactured goods. Copper for electrical wiring,
cotton for textile mills, rubber for transportation, and especially gold and diamonds all
brought great new wealth to the United States and Europe. Because of the large amounts
of capital needed and the increased risks of overseas investment, businessmen sought the
backing of their governments and the military. Political motives were as varied as the
different nations involved. Examples include the attempt by France to avenge the
humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War, the desire of the British to protect its Indian
colony, and the eagerness of the new German state to become a global power. Cultural
motives included the Christian revival in late-nineteenth-century Europe and America.
Missionaries and missionary societies wanted not only to spread the influence of their
respective religions around the globe but also to abolish slavery and bring monogamy,
modern medicine, hygiene, and education to the “heathen.”
4. Missionary activity: Religious enthusiasm helped bring “civilization” in the form of
technical progress and also negatively enforced stereotypes about what constituted true
“civilization.” Christianizing missionaries, particularly in Africa, were given broad
latitude to travel in these regions in the hopes of gaining converts to the colonial
administration, but also to gain religious converts from polytheism or Islam. If this made
colonial administration easier, so much the better. Missionaries built schools and medical
clinics and trained indigenous populations to adapt to the “new” technology and to
modernize. At the same time, they reinforced stereotypes about the inferiority of native
religions and traditions. In other areas, such as Egypt, local religions such as Islam were
offended by the behavior of Europeans, who drank alcohol and had different standards of
freedom for women. In southern and Central Africa, there was more fusion of
Christianity to African values and customs in the formation of “Ethiopian” churches.
Little success was made in converting Islamic populations, since the work of Islamic
missionaries long predated Christian arrival in Africa and offered the same skills.
Furthermore, Islam was seen as a universal religion without the “taint” of colonialism
from Europe, and thus it gained more adherents than Christianity in the nineteenth
century.
5. Social Darwinism and the “white man’s burden” (Kipling): The mythology conveyed
by children’s stories and the novels for their parents was of intrepid white explorers
subduing ignorant but subsequently grateful ‘natives’—people who were “half-devil and
half-child,” according to Kipling in a poem urging the Americans to emulate the glories
of British colonialism. This mythology depicted the peoples of Africa and the islands of
the Indian and Pacific oceans as uniformly ‘primitive’, characterized by cannibalism and
witchcraft.
6. “Progress”
7. Technological innovation and the “firepower gap”: Euro-American domination of the
oceans was perhaps most important. The Suez Canal was central to the extension of rapid
transport. Steel ships grew in size, and improvements in engines allowed ships to travel
farther with less coal. Submarine telegraph cables speeded up communication. Gunboats
extended possibilities for river travel not available to sailing ships. The discovery and use
of quinine reduced malaria-related deaths to levels that stimulated European expansion.
Weapons technology included breech-loading repeating rifles, smokeless powder, and
machine guns—innovations that indigenous peoples could not reproduce. The Sudanese
defeat at Omdurman ended the century with a clear illustration of the domination of
modern Western firearms technology. New weapons—breech-loading rifles, steel-plated
steamships capable of navigating far up-river and, most notoriously, the Gatling machine
gun—gave European armies the decisive edge in most battles for the first time. The
Europeans claimed to be fighting against ‘savagery’, but their methods were barbaric.
When the British army of Lord Kitchener finally conquered Sudan at the Battle of
Omdurman in 1898, his machine-gunners killed 10,000 Sudanese troops with the loss of
only 48 men. The many thousands of Mahdists dying and wounded on the battlefield
received no aid from the British, who simply turned their backs and marched away.
They called for water and “they called for our aid, but our officers spurned them,” a
British soldier wrote in his diary. Lord Kitchener had the skull of their leader, the Mahdi,
turned into an inkstand. Just as brutal was Lord Lugard’s expedition against the
rebellious village of Satiru in Nigeria. He estimated that his men killed 2,000 rebels
without loss. Prisoners were executed and their heads put on spikes.
8. The tools of the imperialists: steamships, communications, medicines, machine gun:
9. Colonial administration: Fiscal restraints had an enormous impact on the
administration of European colonies, which were expected to support themselves and
earn a profit for their home governments if possible. Where it existed, local trade was
taxed toward those ends. In most places, local economies underwent drastic
restructuring to pay expenses and earn profits. The amount of control exerted by
European home governments varied widely. For instance, regions with large numbers
of Europeans, such as Australia and Canada, had more autonomy. Protectorates
retained their traditional governments, but Europeans oversaw and advised them.
Many local government schemes involved the cooperation of local elites. In colonies
administered by Europeans directly, local people trained or educated in Europe were
also used to assist the government.
10. The Ottoman Empire
11. The Russian Empire
12. The Ming Empire
13. China’s “just say no to drugs” policy: In 1838 Qing emperor sent Lin Zexu to
Guangzhou to put an end to imports of opium into China. A leading Confucian scholar,
Lin worked to persuade Chinese and foreigners alike that opium was a harmful and evil
drug. In 1839 he composed a letter to Great Britain’s Queen Victoria seeking her support
in halting the fl ow of opium. Although never delivered, the letter illustrates Lin’s efforts
to stem the flow of opium by reason and negotiation before he resorted to sterner
measures.
14. The British Empire
15. The Opium Wars
16. The Boxer Rebellion
17. The American Empire
18. The Commodore Perry Expedition: In 1853 when a Commander Perry of the US
Navy arrived off the coast with four warships to demand the Japanese government
opened the country to foreign trade. The whole ruling layer in society was thrown into
turmoil. The Tokugawa government looked at the balance of military weaponry and
decided things could no longer continue in the old way—it had to make concessions if it
was to avoid the sort of defeats China had just suffered in the Opium Wars.
19. The scramble for Africa: Within ten years, most of Africa was invaded and divided
among European colonial powers. Egypt, the wealthiest and most heavily populated
African nation, fell into heavy debt as a result of attempts to win independence from
the Ottoman Empire. That debt allowed Great Britain to assert control over the
Egyptian government, and especially over the Suez Canal. In West Africa, the French
extended the railroad system inland to open trading opportunities for French
merchants. King Leopold of Belgium invested heavily in the establishment of trading
posts in the Congo. Consequently, German chancellor Bismarck convened the Berlin
Conference of 1884 and 1885, and Europeans decided that the former loose trading
empires in Africa would be replaced by “effective occupation.” Effective occupation
meant that national military forces would be required to establish an acknowledged
colonial presence. The division of the continent after the Berlin Conference, resulted
in economic by different European powers throughout Africa.
20. Basil Davidson
21. Britain and Suez: Before 1869, much of East Asia had already been claimed by
colonial powers. Britain controlled most of India and Burma, Spain occupied the
Philippines, the Netherlands colonized the East Indies, and France had settled parts of
Indochina. Students should acknowledge that the presence of the Suez Canal did not
encourage Asian colonization; rather, it was because of those colonies that the canal
was built. After 1869, the British assumed control over the remainder of Burma and
Malaya, and the Dutch consolidated control of the East Indies. The only independent
state in the region was Siam. The region was important to Europeans because it had
fertile soil and a history of intensive agriculture. For Europeans, it was ideal for
growing products that could thrive only in tropical areas—such as tobacco,
chinchona, rubber, sugar, tea, and coffee. Population in those colonies grew, and
intensive agriculture replaced hunting and gathering and subsistence agriculture.
Christian missionaries and Western education also had important effects on
indigenous peoples. Large numbers of Chinese and Indians were brought into those
colonies to fill shortages of labor. During a war with Spain, the United States annexed
Hawaii; in the aftermath of that war, it purchased the Philippines. Sugar plantations in
both territories brought profits to U.S. business. However, the United States fought a
longer and far bloodier war against the Filipino people than it had against the
Spanish.
22. King Leopold II and “that magnificent African cake” (Congo): The Belgian king,
Leopold, was in the forefront of pushing for a Western crusade in Africa, claiming it
would bring ‘civilization’ and stamp out slavery. He carved out the huge territory of
Congo as a personal empire, and used methods notorious even among other colonial
powers. In an official report to the British foreign office, Roger Casement told of a
visit to a rubber-producing region where ‘whole villages and districts I knew well and
visited as flourishing communities…are today without human beings.’ He learned
that Belgian soldiers who looted and burned villages then collected basket-loads of
severed hands hacked from victims to prove they had not wasted ammunition
23. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness
24. South Africa and Afrikaners
25. Cecil Rhodes
26. Boer War 1899-1902
27. Union of South Africa
28. Zulu people
29. Was the New Imperialism Profitable? The capitalist powers certainly did not expend
money and effort conquering the rest of the world out of philanthropy. But they were
not led to do so simply by racism either, however much they saw this as justifying
their mission. The motive was profit. There has been much argument among
historians as to whether the colonial powers were right to believe that empires would
make them richer. But, like the similar argument about the economics of the slave
trade in the 18th century, it is misplaced. The great powers thought empires would
make them richer. Those in the forefront of imperial expansion were hard-faced men
who understood only too well that it was money which made the world go round.
People like King Leopold or the British adventurer Cecil Rhodes might have
considered themselves idealists, but they were out to enrich themselves. As Leopold
wrote to the Belgian ambassador in London, ‘I do not want to miss a chance of
getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake’
30. Ethiopia defeats Italy, 1886
31. French Indochina (rubber, tea, sugar, coffee and palm oil --- also cheap labor for
textiles mills)
32. Ho Chi Minh
33. Mohandas K. Gandhi
34. U.S. imperialism
35. A.T. Mahan
36. Theodore Roosevelt
37. Spanish American War, 1898
38. U.S. Philippines War 1899-1902
39. Emilio Aguinaldo
40. Anti-Imperialist League
41. Free-trade imperialism in Latin America: As Europe and America industrialized, the
Latin American economy became increasingly focused on exporting raw materials,
especially agricultural goods. Latin American countries were not colonized during
this period—in part because of the Monroe Doctrine—but the nature of their
economies left them prey to a form of economic imperialism often referred to as
“free-trade imperialism.” Europe and the United States invested heavily in South
American railroads, which used U.S. and European equipment and expertise.
Imported equipment ensured that Latin American steel and machine industries had no
chance to develop. Nations regularly fell into debt as a result of those internal
improvement schemes and often failed to repay their loans. European and U.S. banks
frequently requested their governments' assistance to coerce repayment. The United
States sent troops to Latin America to ensure repayment of loans. It also began a
revolution in Colombia in order to build the Panama Canal, and it intervened
militarily in Cuba, particularly after the Spanish-American War. In addition, the
United States acquired Puerto Rico from the Spanish government after that war.
42. Railroads and capital
43. Roosevelt and Panama Canal
44. Interventionism in Caribbean and Central America: The Banana Wars
45. Augusto Sandino
46. Smedley Butler