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Imperialism developed in the early 19th century after the Industrial Revolution when the
western nations began to take control of other non-industrialized nations and colonies.
The "Age of Imperialism" usually refers to the Old Imperialism period starting from
1860, when major European states started colonizing the other continents. The term
'Imperialism' was initially coined in the mid to late 1500s to reflect the policies of
countries such as Britain and France's expansion into Africa, and the Americas.
In nineteenth century Britain the word "imperialism" came to be used in a polemical
fashion to deride the foreign and domestic policies of the French emperor Napoleon III.
Britons, in a longstanding tradition to distinguish themselves from the European
mainland, did not consider their own policies to be "imperialist". They did speak of
"colonization", the migration of people from British descent to other continents, giving
rise to a greater Britain of English speaking peoples. Colonization was not yet
associated with the rule of non-western peoples. India, which Britain acquired from the
East India Trading Company, was widely regarded as an exception.
It was a very important exception, which nonetheless gave Britain cause for
embarrassment. Benjamin Disraeli's move to make Queen Victoria "Empress of India"
was even criticized as a dangerous act of (continental) imperialism. Critics feared this
would have negative repercussions on British freedom and the rule of Parliament. When
the subordination of non-Western peoples by European powers resumed with greater
vigor in the late 19th century, the term became commonplace among liberal and Marxist
critics alike.
Europeans also took control of regions of China. Each region that was seized was known
as a sphere of influence, an area where Europeans from a certain country had economic
privileges. Europeans controlled the government in their spheres of influences and
Europeans forced the Chinese government to give them favorable treatment.
In the twentieth century the term "imperialism" also grew to apply to any historical or
contemporary instance of a greater power acting, or being perceived to be acting, at the
expense of a lesser power. Imperialism is therefore not only used to describe frank
empire-building policies, such as those of the Romans, the Spanish or the British, but is
also used controversially and/or disparagingly, for example by both sides in communist
and anti-communist propaganda, or to describe actions of the United States since the
American Presidency's acquisition of overseas territory during the Spanish-American
War, or in relation to the United States' present-day position as the world's only
superpower.
This map of the world in 1914 shows the large colonial empires that
powerful nations established across the globe
Britain's entry into the new 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 strategic waterway, since its opening six years earlier as a
channel for shipping 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 expedition 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 formal empire as necessary to arrest
Britain's relative decline in world markets. During the 1890s, Britain adopted the new
policy wholeheartedly, quickly emerging as the front-runner in the scramble for tropical
African territories.
Britain's adoption of the New Imperialism may be seen as a quest for captive markets or
fields for investment of surplus capital, or as a primarily strategic or pre-emptive attempt
to protect existing trade links and to prevent the absorption of overseas markets into the
increasingly closed imperial trading blocs of rival powers. The failure in the 1900s of
Chamberlain's campaign for Imperial tariffs illustrates the strength of free trade feeling
even in the face of loss of international market share.
expansion to match 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 a sphere of influence in Manchuria (1905), following her defeat of Russia in the
Russo-Japanese War. Japan was responding in part 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.
Imperialism in Asia
The transition to formal imperialism in India was effectively accomplished with the
transfer of administrative functions from the chartered British East India Company to the
British government in 1858, following the Indian Mutiny of the previous year. Acts in
1773 and 1784 had already empowered the government to control Company policies and
to appoint the Governor-General, the highest Company official in India.
The new administrative arrangement, crowned with Queen Victoria's proclamation as
Empress of India in 1876, replaced the rule of a monopolistic enterprise with that of a
trained civil service headed by graduates of Britain's top universities. India's princely
states (with about a quarter of the country's population) retained their quasi-autonomous
status, subject to British overlordship and official "advice."
In South-East Asia, the 1880s saw the completion of Britain's conquest of Burma and
France's takeover of Vietnam and Cambodia; 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.
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.
On the 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 drugpushing).
This may explain the West's contentment with informal "spheres of influence". Western
powers did intervene militarily 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.
But China's size and cohesion compared to pre-colonial societies of Africa also made
formal subjugation too difficult for any but the broadest coalition of colonialist powers,
whose own rivalries would preclude such an outcome. When such a coalition did
materialize in 1900, its objective was limited to suppression of the anti-imperialist Boxer
Rebellion because of the irreconcilability of Anglo-American and Russo-German aims.
Paradoxically Britain, the staunch advocate of free trade, emerged in 1914 with, not only
the largest overseas empire, thanks to her long-standing presence in India, but also the
greatest gains in the "scramble for Africa," reflecting her advantageous position at its
inception. Between 1885 and 1914, Britain took nearly 30% of Africa's population under
her control, to 15% for France, 9% for Germany, 7% for Belgium and only 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.
World map of colonialism at the end of the Second World War in 1945.
Imperial rivalry
The extension of European control over Africa and Asia added a further dimension to the
rivalry and mutual suspicion which characterized international diplomacy in the decades
preceding World War I. France's seizure of Tunisia (1881) initiated fifteen years of
tension with Italy, which had hoped to take the country and which retaliated by allying
with Germany and waging a decade-long tariff war with France. Britain's takeover of
Egypt a year later caused a marked cooling of her relations with France.
The most striking conflicts of the era were the Spanish American War of 1898 and the
Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, each signaling the advent of a new imperial great
power, the United States and Japan, respectively. The Fashoda incident of 1898
represented the worst Anglo-French crisis in decades, but France's climbdown in the face
of British demands foreshadowed improved relations as the two countries set about
resolving their overseas claims.
British policy in South Africa and German actions in the Far East contributed to the
dramatic policy shift, which in the 1900s, aligned hitherto isolationist Britain first with
Japan as an ally, and then with France and Russia in the looser Entente. German efforts to
break the Entente by challenging French hegemony in Morocco resulted in the Tangier
Crisis of 1905 and the Agadir Crisis of 1911, adding to tension in the years preceding
World War I.
Decline of colonialism:
As a self-conscious political movement, anti-imperialism originated in Europe in the late
19th and early 20th centuries, in opposition to the growing European colonial empires
and the US takeover of the Philippines. However, it reached its highest level of popular
support in the colonies themselves, where it formed the basis for a wide variety of
national liberation movements during the mid-20th century and later. These movements,
and their anti-imperialist ideas, were instrumental in the decolonization process of the
1950s and 1960s, which saw most Western colonies in Asia and Africa achieving their
independence.India also gained its independence after National Movement in 1947.