European Imperialism and Colonialism (1870-1914)

Introduction

Between 1870 and 1914, the nations of Europe engaged in an unprecedented territorial expansion that reshaped the political geography of the entire world. In the space of roughly four decades, European powers claimed sovereignty over territories stretching from the rain forests of central Africa to the archipelagos of the Pacific Ocean, from the arid steppes of Central Asia to the river deltas of Southeast Asia. By the time the First World War shattered the optimism of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, European powers and their offshoots in North America and Japan controlled approximately 84 percent of the earth's land surface. This astonishing concentration of global power in the hands of a handful of industrialized nations represents one of the most consequential developments in modern history, one whose political, economic, cultural, and demographic effects continue to shape the world in the twenty-first century.

This article surveys the period of the "New Imperialism" that historians conventionally date from roughly 1870 to 1914, examining the causes that drove European expansion, the mechanisms by which it was accomplished, the forms it took across different regions of the world, the resistance it encountered, the ideologies that justified it, and the legacies it left behind. For students of AP European History, understanding this period is essential not only because it was a defining feature of the late nineteenth-century world that European states inhabited, but because the tensions generated by imperial competition contributed directly to the outbreak of the First World War and set in motion political and social forces that would dominate the twentieth century.

Defining Imperialism and Colonialism

Before examining the specific events and processes of the New Imperialism, it is important to establish clear definitions of the key terms involved, since historians use them with varying degrees of precision and the distinctions among them carry real analytical weight.

The word "imperialism" derives from the Latin imperium, meaning sovereign power or command, and in its broadest sense it refers to the extension of a nation's power over other peoples or territories. In the context of the late nineteenth century, historians typically distinguish among several overlapping but distinct phenomena. Colonialism refers specifically to the practice of settling migrants from a dominant state in a foreign territory and establishing direct political control over that territory and its indigenous inhabitants. The word carries connotations of physical occupation, of the transplanting of populations, and of the formal replacement of indigenous political structures with colonial administrations. The British settlement of Australia, the French settlement of Algeria, and the earlier Spanish conquest and settlement of Latin America are all paradigmatic examples of colonialism in this strict sense.

Imperialism in the narrower sense refers to the exercise of political and economic domination over other territories and peoples without necessarily implying large-scale European settlement. Under this formulation, a European power might govern a large subject population through a thin stratum of colonial administrators and military forces, extracting economic value through taxation, forced labor, cash crop production, or the export of raw materials, without any significant migration of European settlers to the colony. The British administration of India, with its vast population of hundreds of millions governed by a relative handful of British civil servants and sustained by an Indian Army officered primarily by Britons, exemplifies this form of imperial control. The same pattern obtained in much of tropical Africa, where the climate was inhospitable to European settlement but natural resources and strategic location made territorial control valuable.