IMPERIALISM

SUBMITTED TO:
SIR SAHIB KHANA CHAN
GROUP MEMBERS:
MEESAM ABBASI

Contents
IMPERIALISM:.................................................................................................... 2
DEFINITION:................................................................................................... 2
HISTORY OF IMPERIALISM:.........................................................................2
LENINS THEORY OF IMPERIALISM:.............................................................4
MARXIST VIEW:.............................................................................................. 4
LENIN POINT OF VIEW:.................................................................................. 4
CRITICISM TO LENINS THEORY:.................................................................5
NEW IMPERIALISM............................................................................................ 6
RISE OF NEW IMPERIALISM............................................................................6
BACKGROUND BEFORE NEW IMPERIALISM....................................................7
The Long Depression..................................................................................... 7
United Kingdom And The New Imperialism...................................................8
The UK's Increased Competition................................................................8
France and the New Imperialism...................................................................9
New Imperialism And The Emerging Empires................................................9
Social Implications Of New Imperialism......................................................11
THEORIES OF NEW IMPERIALISM:...................................................................12
Hobson's Accumulation Theory...................................................................12
World Systems Theory................................................................................ 13
IMPERIALISM IN ASIA:..................................................................................... 14
Early European Exploration Of Asia.............................................................15
Medieval European Exploration Of Asia.......................................................15
Oceanic Voyages To Asia.............................................................................15
THE BRITISH IN INDIA..................................................................................... 16
Portuguese, French, and British competition in India (1600-1763)..........16
The Collapse of Mughal India......................................................................16
From Company to Crown............................................................................. 17
Russia and "The Great Game"........................................................................18
IMPERIALISM IN AFRICA.................................................................................. 19
Scramble Of Africa:..................................................................................... 19
OPENING OF CONTINENT............................................................................ 20
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CAUSES.......................................................................................................... 20
Africa And Global Markets...........................................................................20
Strategic Rivalry............................................................................................. 22
Clash of Rival Imperialisms.........................................................................22
American Colonization Society and Foundation Of Liberia.............................23
Crises Prior To The First World War.................................................................24
Colonization of the Congo...........................................................................24
Suez Canal.................................................................................................. 26
Berlin Conference........................................................................................ 26
Britain's occupation of Egypt and South Africa...............................................27
Morocco Crisis............................................................................................. 27
Conclusions.................................................................................................... 28
Bibliography:............................................................................................ 29

IMPERIALISM:
DEFINITION:
Imperialism 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
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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.

HISTORY OF IMPERIALISM:
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 word 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 colonialism as it often is. Edward
Said suggests that imperialism involved the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a
dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory. He goes on to say colonialism
refers to the implanting 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.

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Europes 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 British 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 roam 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.

LENINS THEORY OF IMPERIALISM:

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 a foundation of Leninism 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.

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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.

MARXIST VIEW:
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.

LENIN POINT OF VIEW:

Per Lenin, Imperialism is Capitalism, with five simultaneous features:
(1) Concentration of production and capital led to the creation of national and
multinational monopolies not as in liberal economics, but as de facto power over their
markets 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.]

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(2) Finance capital replaces industrial capital (the dominant capital), (reiterating Rudolf
Hilferding's point in Finance Capital), as industrial capitalists rely more upon bankgenerated 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.

CRITICISM TO LENINS THEORY:

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 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.

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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.

NEW IMPERIALISM:
RISE OF NEW IMPERIALISM:
The "Rise of the New Imperialism" era overlaps with the Pax Britannica period (18151870). 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 Ro 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 workshop 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 Pax Britannica 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.

BACKGROUND BEFORE NEW IMPERIALISM:

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After the 1815 Congress of Vienna which established the Concert of Europe continental
order, the British established what was known as the Pax Britannica, 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 selfgovernment 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
workshop 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.

The Long Depression

The prolonged period of price deflation and intermittent business crisis between 1873 and
1896 has been described as the Long 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.
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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 lowand fallingprofit 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.

United Kingdom And The New Imperialism

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 out of the red.

The UK's Increased Competition

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.[citation needed]
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
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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
New 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.

France and the New Imperialism.

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.

New Imperialism And The Emerging Empires

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
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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 Gilded Agethe 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 closing of the Frontier identified by the 1890 Census report
and publicised by historianFrederick Jackson Turner in his 1893 paper The Significance
of the Frontier in American History, 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,
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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 Open Door in China and Dollar Diplomacy in Latin America. The U.S. gradually
surpassed the United Kingdom as the leading investor of capital in Latin America and
East Asiaa 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.

Social Implications Of New Imperialism

New social views of colonialism also arose. Rudyard Kipling, for instance, urged the
United States to take up the White Man's Burden of bringing civilisation 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' (mission civilatrice) 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
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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.

THEORIES OF NEW IMPERIALISM:

Hobson's Accumulation Theory
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 Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (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.

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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 underconsumption, 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 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 Lopold 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.

World Systems Theory

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"
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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 neomercantilism, 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.

IMPERIALISM IN ASIA:
Imperialism in Asia 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 selfsufficient, 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
commoditiesa 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.

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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
the established colonial powers in Asia 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 powersconflicts 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 reemergence of China and Japan as regional powers.

Early European Exploration Of Asia

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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Medieval European Exploration Of Asia

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.

Oceanic Voyages To Asia

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.

THE BRITISH IN INDIA

Portuguese, French, and British competition in India (1600-1763)

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.

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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.

The Collapse of Mughal India

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 Mughal empire 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.

From Company to Crown

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
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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 governorgeneralship 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.

Russia and "The Great Game"

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
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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 on the surface
ended their rivalry in Central Asia. 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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IMPERIALISM IN AFRICA

Scramble Of Africa:
The Scramble for Africa, also known as the Race for Africa, 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.

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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.
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 informal 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.

OPENING OF CONTINENT:
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.

CAUSES
Africa And Global Markets
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
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and increasingly protectionist continental markets due to the Long Depression (18731896), 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 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 settler
colonies, 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.
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; Lopold 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 AlldeutscherVerband, 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 Imperialism (1902), which
influenced authors such as Lenin, 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".
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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.

Strategic Rivalry
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 Weltpolitik (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 bourgeoisie classes.[7]
.

Clash of Rival Imperialisms

While de Brazza was exploring the Kongo Kingdom for France, Stanley also explored it
in the early 1880s on behalf of Lopold 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
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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 place in the sun. Following the defeat of the First
ItaloEthiopian 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). Enrico Corradini, who fully
supported the war, and later merged his group in the early fascist party (PNF), developed
in 1919 the concept of Proletarian Nationalism, supposed to legitimise Italy's
imperialism by a surprising mixture of socialism with nationalism: We 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 ItaloAbyssinian 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 AngloJapanese Alliance, which would enable the Empire of Japan to be victorious during the
war against Russia (1904-05). The UK then signed the Entente cordiale with France in
1904, and, in 1907, the Triple Entente which included Russia, thus pitted against the
Triple Alliance which Bismarck had patiently assembled.

American Colonization Society and Foundation

Of Liberia
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 (Land of the Free), a colony founded in 1820, to free black slaves;
25 | P a g e

emancipated slave Lott Carey actually became the first American Baptist missionary 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 persuading a local chief referred to as King
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, The African
Repository and Colonial Journal, 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.

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Crises Prior To The First World War

Colonization of the Congo
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 Lopold II of Belgium,
who in 1876 had organised the International African Association. From 1869 to 1874,
Stanley was secretly sent by Lopold 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. Lopold 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 Lopold II of Belgium, the FrancoItalian marine officer Pierre de Brazza travelled 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, all 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
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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].

Suez Canal
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
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Revolt broke out against the Khedive and European influence in 1882, a year after the
Mahdist revolt. Muhammad Ahmad, who had proclaimed himself the Mahdi, 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.

Berlin Conference
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 faade 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 Lopold 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.

Britain's occupation of Egypt and South Africa

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
neighboring African states and the Dutch Afrikaner settlers who had left the Cape to
avoid the British and then founded their own republics. In 1877, Theophilus Shepstone
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.

Morocco Crisis
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
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Entente cordiale, 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,
Thophile Delcass, took a defiant line. The crisis peaked in mid-June 1905, when
Delcass 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 Panther, 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 Panther'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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Conclusions
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[citation needed]. 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 scramble 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-populated
Sahara.
The political imperialism followed the economic expansion, with the colonial 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.

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Bibliography:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/
http://www.ffyh.unc.edu.ar/posgrado/cursos/rufer/wolfe.pdf
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pol116/imperial.htm
http://www.marxmail.org/archives/June99/lenins_theory_of_imperialism.htm
http://mclane.fresno.k12.ca.us/wilson98/assigments/impch11.html
http://www2.newcanaan.k12.ct.us/education/components/scrapbook/default.php?
sectiondetailid=5501&linkid=nav-menu-container-4-171
http://www.socialistworld.net/doc/456

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