By 1815 the world had known some four hundred years of continuous
European imperialism. In a sense this was the outward expansion
of European power over other continents. Spanish, Portuguese,
Dutch, French, British colonial empires had followed one another
throughout these four centuries. Always these extensions of control
over non-European territories had involved, in varying proportions,
trading, missionizing, adventure, settlement, loot, national pride,
conquests, and wars between rival powers. The very list of countries
emphasizes the lead taken in this expansion by the western, maritime
peoples.
But it is not necessary to cross sea, rather than land, to become
an imperial power. The creation of the great dynastic empires
of the Habsburgs and the Ottoman Turks, the traditional drive
eastward (Drag nach Osten) of the Germans in quest of lands for
settlement and trade, the continental conquests of Napoleon, the
rapid advance of Russia into southern and central Asia during
the nineteenth century, even the expansion westward of the United
States during the same period, are all examples of the same process
carried out, it so happened, within continental land areas rather
than across oceans.
In 1870 there was, therefore, nothing whatever new about the extension
of European control and power over other parts of the earth. Yet
the very word "imperialism," was, it seems, a mid-nineteenth-century
invention, and the generation after 1870 has come to be known,
in some specially significant and discreditable sense, as "the
age of imperialism." In what sense can these decades between
1870 and 1914 be so described?
A famous British economist, J. A. Hobson-and following him,
Lenin-attributed the colonial expansions of these years to special
new economic forces at work in the most industrialized nations
of western and central Europe. This economic explanation of the
urge to imperialism is usually taken to mean that the basic motives
were also the basest motives and that, whatever political, religious,
or more idealistic excuses might be made, the real impulse was
always one of capitalistic greed for cheap raw materials, advantageous
markets, good investments, and fresh fields of exploitation.
The argument has commonly been used, therefore, to denounce the
events, and to attack the men, parties, and nations that took
part in them. The argument, in brief, is that what Hobson called
"the economic taproot of imperialism" was "excessive
capital in search of investment," and that this excessive
capital came from oversaving made possible by the unequal distribution
of wealth. The remedy, he maintained, was internal social reform
and a more equal distribution of wealth. "If the consuming
public in this country raised its standard of consumption to keep
pace with every rise of productive powers, there could be no excess
of goods or capital clamorous to use imperialism in order to find
markets." It is undeniable that the search for lucrative
yet secure overseas investment played a very great part in the
European urge to acquire colonies at the end of the nineteenth
century.
Lenin elaborated the argument, in his pamphlet on Imperialism
the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), to emphasize the current
importance of finance capital rather than industrial, and the
priority of the desire to find new outlets for investment rather
than new markets. His thesis was that imperialism was "a
direct continuation of the fundamental properties of capitalism
in general," and that "the war of 1914 was on both sides
imperialist." He used this thesis to explain the fact, which
Marx and Engels had declared to be normally impossible in a capitalist
society, that there was a conspicuous general improvement in the
economic condition of workers in the more advanced countries.
In the backward colonial peoples, argued Lenin, capitalism had
found a new proletariat to exploit; and from the enhanced profits
of such imperialism it was able to bribe at least the "aristocracy
of labor" at home into renouncing its revolutionary fervor
and collaborating with the bourgeoisie. But such improvement could
only be temporary, and since imperialist rivalries must lead to
war, all workers alike must eventually suffer from it.
This argument ignored the awkward facts that much of the foreign
investment of the European powers was not in colonial territories
at all but in countries such as South America and Russia, and
that the standard of living of the working classes was high in
countries like Denmark and Sweden which had no colonies, but low
in France and Belgium which had large colonial territories. Nor,
of course, could it be a general explanation of imperialism, which
had existed centuries before there was a "glut of capital"
and before finance capital was as plentiful or as well organized
as it was in the later nineteenth century. But it was a convenient
and persuasive enough case, at the time, for explaining the First
World War in exclusively economic terms, and for presenting it
as the result of capitalist activities and the maldistribution
of wealth.
What made it seem particularly necessary to find some special
reason for modern imperialism was both the dramatic suddenness
of its reappearance and its pre-eminence in the policies of the
powers during the last quarter of the century. Until after 1870
national policies, and even more national public opinion, in most
European countries had been hostile to colonies. By the 1820's
several countries, after having long colonial connections, had
lost these connections without suffering any apparent economic
deprivation. By 1815 France had lost most of her colonial possessions
in America and in the east, and Spain had lost her vast South
American territories. Before that the thirteen colonies in America
had broken away from Britain, and by 1822 Portugal lost Brazil.
Advanced opinion everywhere welcomed these events. Adam Smith
had argued that the burdens of colonialism outweighed its alleged
benefits; radicalism favored laissez faire; Bentham urged France
to ''Emancipate your Colonies''; Cobdenism preached free trade
and the abolition of all commercial privileges; and in 1861 France
opened to all nations the trade of her colonies. Gladstone expected
the whole British Empire to dissolve in the end, and in 1852 Disraeli,
who agreed with Gladstone in little else, made his famous declaration
that "These wretched colonies will all be independent in
a few years and are millstones around our necks."
As late as 1868 Bismarck, who until a decade later was opposed
to colonial aspirations for Germany, held that "All the advantages
claimed for the mother country are for the most part illusory,"
adding that "England is abandoning her colonial policy: she
finds it too costly." But he was wrong, and only four years
later Disraeli announced his conversion to a policy of imperial
consolidation and expansion. The tide of opinion turned abruptly.
The chorus of anticolonialism before 1870 was so strange a prelude
to an era of especially hectic colonial scramble that some extraordinary
explanation seems to be called for.
It is improbable that this explanation can be entirely, or even
"basically," economic. However important the economic
forces were, they cannot explain why France, one of the least
fully industrialized of the northwestern European nations, was
the one which had already set the pace of expansion by more than
doubling her colonial possessions between 1815 and 1870, when
she gained firm footholds in Algeria, Senegal, and Indochina;
nor why after 1870 it was the political republican leaders, Jules
Ferry and Leon Gambetta, who took the initiative in further colonial
expansion in Tunisia and Tonnin, despite the great unpopularity
of such expansion with public opinion in France.
It is not a mere thirst for exporting surplus capital which can
explain the new shape given to the British Empire by the invention
of ''dominion status'' and the readiness with which complete political
independence was granted first to Canada, and later to Australia,
New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa. British commercial
and capitalist interests knew that trade with the United States
had increased after it won political independence; that migration
to the independent United States had been greater than to any
of the territories which had remained under British control; and
that Argentine railways had offered opportunities to British investors
no less attractive than had Indian railways. German economic penetration
of eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Ottoman Empire was remarkably
effective without any of these territories becoming German colonies.
What was most strikingly novel about the new imperialism was
its intense concentration upon two continents: Africa and eastern
Asia. These were the only two important areas of the globe still
not brought under European influence before 1870. The decades
between 1870 and 1914 speedily completed the expansion of European
influence and civilization over the whole of the earth; and it
was accomplished in an era when the realism, ruthlessness, and
rivalries of European national governments were exceptionally
great. It therefore had a temper uniquely masterful and remorseless,
brooking no obstacles and pushfully self-assertive. This quality
came as much from the nature of European politics as from the
urges of European economic development.
There was no international organization fitted to exercise any
kind of control or regulation over the scramble for territories
in which the great powers now indulged. The naked power politics
of the new colonialism were the projection, onto an overseas screen,
of the interstate frictions and rivalries of Europe. It was this
combination of novel economic conditions with anarchic political
relations which explained the nature of the new imperialism.
Among the economic forces behind it, the urge to find new outlets
for the "glut of capital" and fresh markets for industrial
output were in general more important than either the quest for
raw materials or the factor of overpopulation. The special attraction
of Africa and Asia were, indeed, that they offered many of the
raw materials needed by the multiplying factories of Europe: including
cotton, silk, rubber, vegetable oils, and the rarer minerals.
The products of the tropics were especially welcome to Europe.
But many of these raw materials could be, and were, got by trading
without political control.
The pressure of population in Europe was becoming great by the
early twentieth century, but it still found free outlet in migration
to the traditional areas of reception in the United States and
Australasia. Neither Africa nor eastern Asia offered climatic
or economic conditions inviting enough to attract large-scale
white settlements, and the pressure of population within Japan,
China, and India was now itself so great as to exert a steady
demand for fresh outlets. It was against Asiatic immigrants, not
European, that the main barriers began to be raised.
Chinese were excluded from the United States after 1882, from
Hawaii after 1898, from the Philippines after 1902. The United
States excluded Japanese laborers in 1907, and by the Immigration
Act of 1917 barred the entry of other non-Europeans, especially
Indians and inhabitants of the East Indies. Canada took similar
action against the Chinese after 1885, and against the Japanese
after 1908. New Zealand restricted Chinese, and in 1901 Australia
passed a federal Immigration Restriction Act with the same purpose.
The Union of South Africa barred Chinese in 1913, and some South
American states followed suit. The main impediments to European
migration came only after 1918, and the nineteenth-century flow
out of Europe actually reached its peak in 1914.
The quest for markets in which to sell manufactured goods was
more important. But here, again, the political factor was no less
important than the purely economic. Until 1870 British manufacturers
of textiles, machinery, and hardware had found good markets in
other European lands. After 1870 Germany, France, Belgium, and
other nations were able to satisfy their own home markets, which
they began to protect against imports from Britain by tariff barriers.
They even began to produce a surplus for which they sought markets
abroad. With increasing saturation of European markets, all tended
to look for more open markets overseas, and in the competitive,
protectionist mood of European politics they found governments
responsive enough to national needs to undertake the political
conquest of undeveloped territories.
For this purpose, Africa and Asia served admirably. It was in
these economic and political circumstances that the urge to exploit
backward territories by the investment of surplus capital could
make so much headway. It began especially after 1880, and gained
rapidly in momentum until 1914. (Of the annual investment of British
capital between 1909 and 1913, 36 per cent went into British overseas
territories.) By then the main industrial countries had equipped
themselves with an abundance of manufacturing plant, and the openings
for capital investment at home were more meager.
The vast undeveloped realm of Africa and Asia offered the most
inviting opportunities, provided that they could be made safe
enough for investment and there seemed no better guarantee of
security than the appropriation of these lands. Again governments
were responsive, for reasons that were not exclusively economic.
The ports of Africa and the Far East were invaluable as naval
bases and ports of call, no less than as inroads for trade and
investment. Given the tangle of international fears and distrusts
in Europe during these years, and the everpresent menace of war,
no possible strategic or prestige-giving advantage could be forfeited.
Once the scramble for partitioning Africa had begun, the powers
were confronted with the choice of grabbing such advantages for
themselves or seeing them snatched by potential enemies. The "international
anarchy," contributed an impetus of its own to the general
race for colonies. To say, as it was often said after 1918, that
imperialism had led to war, was only half the story; it was also
true that the menace of war had led to imperialism.
It was normally the coexistence of economic interests with political
aims which made a country imperialistic; and in some, such as
Italy or Russia, political considerations predominated. With nations
as with men, it is what they aspire to become and to have, not
only what they already are or have, that governs their behavior.
There was no irresistible compulsion or determinism, and no country
acquired colonies unless at least a very active and influential
group of its political leaders wanted to acquire them. Britain
had long had all the economic urges of surplus population, exports,
and capital, but they did not drive her to scramble for colonies
during the 1860's as much as during the 1870's and after. Neither
Italy nor Russia had a surplus of manufactures or capital to export,
yet both joined in the scramble; Norway, although she had a large
merchant fleet which was second only to that of Britain and Germany,
did not. Germany, whose industrial development greatly outpaced
that of France, was very much slower than France to embark on
colonialism. The Dutch were active in colonialism long before
the more industrialized Belgians.
What determined whether or not a country became imperialistic
was more the activity of small groups of people, often intellectuals,
economists, or patriotic publicists and politicians anxious to
ensure national security and self-sufficiency, than the economic
conditions of the country itself. And, as the examples of the
British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese show, nations that had
traditions of colonialism were more prompt to seek colonies than
were nations, such as Germany and Italy, that had no such traditions.
Besides the direct political motives of imperialism-the desire
to strengthen national security by strategic naval bases such
as Cyprus and the Cape, or to secure additional sources of manpower
as the French sought in Africa, or to enhance national prestige
as the Italians did in Libya there was a medley of other considerations
which, in varying proportions, entered into the desire for colonies.
One was the activities of explorers and adventurers, men like
the Frenchmen, Du Chaillu and De Brazza, in equatorial Africa;
Or the Welshman, Henry Morton Stanley, in the Congo basin; or
the German Karl Peters in east Africa. Prompted by a genuine devotion
to scientific discovery, or a taste for adventure, or a buccaneering
love of money and power as was Cecil Rhodes in South Africa-men
of initiative and energetic enterprise played an important personal
part in the whole story.
Christian missionaries played their part too in the spread of
colonialism. The most famous was the Scot, David Livingstone.
A medical missionary originally sent to Africa by the London Missionary
Society, he later returned under government auspices as an explorer
"to open a path for commerce and Christianity." When
he had disappeared for some years in quest of the source of the
Nile, Stanley was sent to find him, and duly met him in 1872 on
the shores of Lake Tanganyika. When Livingstone died in Africa
in 1873, his body was taken to London under naval escort, to be
buried in Westminster Abbey as a great national hero. But Livingstone
was only one among many, and France, even more than Britain, sent
organized missions into Africa to convert the heathen to Christianity.
The Catholic missions of France under the Third Republic were
exceptionally active, and provided two thirds (some forty thousand)
of all Catholic missionaries. They were spread all over the world,
including the Near and Far East; and in 1869 Cardinal Lavigerie,
installed only the year before in the see of Algiers, founded
the Society of African Missionaries, soon to be known because
of their Arab dress as the ''White Fathers.'' By 1875 they spread
from Algeria into Tunisia, and set up a religious protectorate
that preceded the political protectorate. Gambetta said of Lavigerie,
''His presence in Tunisia is worth an army for France." Other
French missions penetrated into all parts of Africa, setting up
schools and medical services, often in the footsteps of the explorers
and adventurers. Belgian missionaries were active in the Congo
as early as 1878.
Yet another element in the growth of imperialism was the administrator
and soldier the man with a mission, who was not a missionary but
who welcomed an opportunity to bring order and efficient administration
out of muddle. Such men became the great colonial proconsuls Lord
Cromer in Egypt, Lord Lugard in Nigeria, Lord Milner at the Cape,
Marshal Lyautey in Morocco, Karl Peters in German East Africa.
Without such men the extent and the consolidation of European
control over Africa would have been impossible. The sources and
the nature of the urge to imperialism were multiple, and varied
considerably from one country to another. It was not just that
trade followed the flag, but that the flag accompanied the botanist
and buccaneer, the Bible and the bureaucrat, along with the banker
and the businessman. The unexplored and unexploited parts of the
earth offered a host of possible advantages which, in the competitive
world of the later century, few could resist seizing; they were
seized, amid the enthusiastic approval of the newly literate nationalist-minded
masses in Britain and Germany, or amid the sullen resentments
of the French and Belgians.
In 1875 less than one tenth of Africa had been turned into European
colonies; by 1895, only one tenth remained unappropriated. In
the generation between 1871 and 1900 Britain added 4.25 million
square miles and 66 million people to her empire; France added
3.5 million square miles and 26 million people; Russia in Asia
added half a million square miles and 6.5 million people. In the
same decades Germany, Belgium, and Italy each acquired a new colonial
empire: Germany, of one million square miles and 13 million people;
Belgium (or, until 1908, Leopold II, King of the Belgians), of
900,000 square miles and 8.5 million inhabitants; and Italy, a
relatively meager acquisition of 185,000 square miles and 750,000
people. The old colonial empires of Portugal and the Netherlands
survived intact and assumed increasing importance. It was a historical
novelty that most of the world should now belong to a handful
of great European powers.
These immense acquisitions had no close correlation with the ascendancy
of one political party. In Belgium they were originally an almost
personal achievement of the king; in Britain and Germany they
were mainly the work of conservative governments which had turned
empire-minded, though in Britain former radicals like Joseph Chamberlain
and liberals like Lord Rosebery supported them; in France they
were the work of radical republicans like Jules Ferry and Leon
Gambetta, and in Italy, of liberals like Depretis; in Russia they
were mainly the work of the official military class and bureaucracy.
The beneficiaries of imperialism were not always the initiators
of it; and although King Leopold, Cecil Rhodes, and many of the
other empire builders amassed great personal fortunes and powers,
so too did many who merely stepped in later to reap the rewards
of high administrative offices and rich concessions for trading
and investment.
On the other hand some of the initiators; such as Ferry in
France and Crispi in Italy, earned only disrepute and violent
hatreds for their achievements. Wherever there was any considerable
section of public opinion generally in support of imperialism,
it tended to be canalized into active propagandist associations
and pressure groups, often distinct from any one political party.
In Britain, Disraeli committed the Conservative party to a general
policy of imperialism in 1872, backed by the purchase of shares
in the Suez Canal in 1875 and by the conferring of the title "Empress
of India" upon Queen victoria in 1877. In 1882 a Colonial
Society was formed in Germany, and in 1883, a Society for German
Colonization. In the same year the British conservative imperialists
founded the Primrose League, and the liberals soon followed suit
with the Imperial Federation League.
The British Navy League of 1894 was followed in 1898 by the corresponding
German Flottenverein-incidents in the naval rivalry of the two
powers. They championed the rapidly increasing naval expenditures
of their respective governments. The more explicit arguments for
colonialism, and for the sea power which it necessitated, were
as much expressions as causes of the expansion.
By no means all the acquisitions of colonies caused disputes
among the powers. Some of the earliest, like the. French conquest
of Algeria in the earlier years of the century or of Annam in
1874, and even some later acquisitions, like the British conquests
of Nigeria and Ashanti in the 1890's, aroused little or no opposition
from other European powers. Occasionally one power made pins with
the encouragement or assent of others: Bismarck encouraged France
to expand into Tunisia as a diversion from continental affairs
that was likely to embroil her with Italy. Bismarck and Jules
Ferry co-operated in 1884 to summon an international conference
at Berlin to settle amicably the future of the Congo in central
tropical Africa.
To the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 came representatives from
fourteen states-roughly all the states of Europe except Switzerland.
It was occasioned mainly by the activities of the International
African Association, which had been formed in 1876 by King Leopold
II of Belgium. This Association had sent J. M. Stanley on explorations
into the Congo between 1879 and 1884, where he made treaties with
the native chiefs and established Leopold's influence over vast
areas of the interior. By the beginning of 1884 Britain and Portugal,
apprehensive of this development, set up a joint commission to
control navigation of the whole river. The colony of Angola south
of the Congo mouth had been held by Portugal since the fifteenth
century, and now Britain recognized Portugal's claim to control
the whole mouth of the river. It looked like an alliance of the
older colonial powers to strangle the expansion of the new; for
France was increasingly interested in the tropical belt north
of the Congo River, and Germany, in the Cameroon still further
north. Leopold therefore looked to France and Germany for help,
and the result was the Berlin Conference.
It was concerned with defining "spheres of influence,"
the significant new term first used in the ensuing Treaty of Berlin
of 1885. It was agreed that in future any power that effectively
occupied African territory and duly notified the other powers
could thereby establish pos. session of it. This gave the signal
for the rapid partition of Africa among all the colonial powers,
and inaugurated the new era of colonialism. In the treaty it was
agreed that Leopold's African Association would have full rights
over most of the Congo basin, including its outlet to the Atlantic,
under international warrantee of neutrality and free trade. Slavery
was to be made illegal. Both the Niger and the Congo were to be
opened on equal terms to the trade of all nations. The treaty
was, in short, a compact among the powers to pursue the further
partition of Africa as amicably as possible; and an attempt to
separate colonial competition from European rivalries.
For a decade after the Berlin Conference, imperialistic conservative
governments ruled in Britain and Germany and anticolonialist protests
subsided in France and Italy. Their policies of mercantilism and
protection, the popular mood of assertive nationalism in all four
countries, favored colonialism. Expansion into Africa was unbridled.
In 1885 the African Association converted itself into the Congo
Free State, with Leopold as its absolute sovereign. The success
prompted other powers to set up chartered companies to develop
other African areas. Such companies, granted by their governments
monopoly rights in the exploitation of various territories, became
the general media of colonial commerce and appropriation in the
subsequent decade. The German and British East African Companies
were set up by 1888, the South Africa Chartered Company of Cecil
Rhodes to develop the valley of the Zambezi in 1889, the Italian
Benadir Company to develop Italian Somaliland in 1892, the Royal
Niger Company in 1896.
By these and every other means each power established protectorates
or outright possessions, and made their resources available for
home markets. Germany enlarged and consolidated her four protectorates
of Togoland and the Cameroons, German Southwest Africa and German
East Africa. France took Dahomey, and by pressing inland from
Algeria, Senegal, Guinea, and the Ivory Coast, she linked up her
west African territories into one vast bloc of French West Africa.
She drove inland along the north bank of the Congo to consolidate
French Equatorial Africa. On the east coast she established her
claim to part of Somaliland and by 1896 conquered the island of
Madagascar.
Great Britain was already firmly based on the Cape, and began
to push northward. She appropriated Bechuanaland in 1885, Rhodesia
in 1889, Nyasaland in 1893, so driving a broad wedge between German
Southwest Africa and German East Africa and approaching the southern
borders of the Congo Free State. This expansion, largely the work
of Cecil Rhodes, involved her in constant conflicts with the Dutch
Boer farmers, who set up, in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal,
two republics of their own. The Boer War of 1899 was the direct
result. From the Indian Ocean she also pressed westward inland,
founding British East Africa by 1888 and taking Uganda by 1894.
In West Africa, Nigeria was acquired by the activities of the
Royal Niger Company between 1886 and 1899. Italy, indignant at
the French occupation of Tunisia, had laid the basis of an Italian
East African Empire in Eritrea by 1885, and added Asmara in 1889.
In the same year she appropriated the large southern coastal strip
of Somaliland and claimed a protectorate Over the African kingdom
of Abyssinia. But in 1896 her expeditionary forces were routed
by Abyssinian forces at Adowa, and she was obliged to recognize
Abyssinian independence.
By 1898 the map of the African continent resembled a patchwork
quilt of European acquisitions, and south of the Sahara the only
independent states were Liberia and Abyssinia, and the two small
Dutch Boer republics. The North African coastline, especially
the provinces of Morocco in the west and Libya and Egypt in the
east, remained a troublesome source of great power rivalries.