In the 1880s, European states embarked on an intense scramble for overseas territory. This “new imperialism,” as some have called it, led Europeans to carve up Asia and Africa. What explains the mad scramble for colonies after 1880?
The existence of competitive nation-states and growing nationalism after 1870 was undoubtedly a major determinant in the growth of the new imperialism. As European affairs grew tense, heightened competition spurred European states to acquire colonies abroad that provided ports and coaling stations for their navies. Great Britain, for example, often expanded into new regions not for economic reasons but to keep the French, Germans, or Russians from setting up bases that could harm British interests. Colonies were also a source of international prestige. Once the scramble for colonies began, failure to enter the race was perceived as a sign of weakness, totally unacceptable to an aspiring great power. As a British foreign minister wrote, “When I left the Foreign office in 1880, nobody thought about Africa. When I returned to it in 1885, the nations of Europe were almost quarreling with each other as to the various portions of Africa which they should obtain.” Late-nineteenth-century imperialism was closely tied to nationalism.
Patriotic fervor was often used to arouse interest in imperialism. Schools used maps of colonial territories in teaching geography. Newspapers and magazines often featured soldiers’ letters that made imperialism seem a heroic adventure on behalf of one’s country. Volunteer groups, such as geographic societies and naval leagues, fostered enthusiasm for imperial adventures. Plays were even written to excite people about expansion abroad.
THE ROLE OF SOCIAL DARWINISM AND RACISM Imperialism was also tied to social Darwinism and racism. As noted earlier, social Darwinists believed that in the struggle between nations, the fit are victorious and survive. Superior races must dominate inferior races by military force to show how strong and virile they are. As British professor of mathematics Karl Pearson argued in 1900, “The path of progress is strewn with the wrecks of nations; traces are everywhere to be seen of the [slaughtered remains] of inferior races .... Yet these dead people are, in very truth, the stepping stones on which mankind has arisen to the higher intellectual and deeper emotional life of today.” Others were equally blunt. One Englishman wrote, “To the development of the White Man, the Black Man and the Yellow must ever remain inferior, and as the former raised itself higher and yet higher, so did these latter seem to shrink out of humanity and appear nearer and nearer to the brutes.”
RELIGIOUS MOTIVES Some Europeans took a more religious or humanitarian approach to imperialism, arguing that Europeans had a moral responsibility to civilize ignorant peoples. This notion of the “white man’s burden” (see the box on p. 746) helped at least the more idealistic individuals rationalize imperialism in their own minds. One British official declared that the British Empire “was under Providence, the greatest instrument for good that the world has seen.” Thousands of Catholic and Protestant missionaries went abroad to seek converts to their faith. Nevertheless, the belief that the superiority of their civilization obligated them to impose modern industries and new medicines on supposedly primitive nonwhites was yet another form of racism.
THE ECONOMIC MOTIVE Some historians have emphasized an economic motivation for imperialism. There was a great demand for natural resources and products not found in Western countries, such as rubber, oil, and tin. Instead of just trading for these products, European investors advocated direct control of the areas where the raw materials were found. The large surpluses of capital that bankers and industrialists were accumulating often encouraged them to seek higher rates of profit in underdeveloped areas. All of these factors combined to create an economic imperialism whereby European finance dominated the economic activity of a large part of the world.
This economic imperialism, however, was not necessarily the same thing as colonial expansion. Businesses invested where it was most profitable, not necessarily where their own countries had colonial empires. For example, less than 10 percent of French foreign investments before 1914 went to French colonies; most of the rest went to Latin American and European countries. Even the British had more trade with Belgium than with all of Africa in the 1890s. It should also be remembered that much of the colonial territory that was acquired was mere wasteland from the perspective of industrialized Europe and cost more to administer than it produced economically. Only the search for national prestige could justify such losses.
Followers of Karl Marx were especially eager to argue that imperialism was economically motivated because they associated imperialism with the ultimate demise of the capitalist system. Marx had hinted at this argument, but it was one of his followers, the Russian V.I. Lenin (see Chapter 25), who in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of World Capitalism developed the idea that capitalism leads to imperialism. According to Lenin, as the capitalist system concentrates more wealth in ever-fewer hands, the possibility for investment at home is exhausted, and capitalists are forced to invest abroad, establish colonies, and exploit small, weak nations. In his view, then, the only cure for imperialism was the destruction of capitalism.
Before 1880, Europeans controlled relatively little of the African continent. In 1875, Europeans ruled 11 percent of Africa; by 1902, 90 percent. Earlier, when their economic interests were more limited (in the case of Africa, primarily the slave trade), European states had generally been satisfied to deal with existing independent states rather than attempting to establish direct control over vast territories. For the most part, the Western presence in Africa had been limited to controlling the regional trade network and establishing a few footholds where the foreigners could carry on trade and missionary activity. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, however, the quest for colonies became a scramble as all of the major European states engaged in a land grab (see Map 24.1). This new imperialism employed European military strength and industrial technology to control new territories, using locally trained military to carry out the oppression of local populations.
SOUTH AFRICA During the Napoleonic wars, the British had established themselves in South Africa by taking control of Cape Town, originally founded by the Dutch. After the wars, the British encouraged settlers to come to what they called the Cape Colony. British policies disgusted the Boers (BOORS or BORS) or Afrikaners (ah-fri-KAH-nurz), as the descendants of the Dutch colonists were called, and in 1835 led them to migrate north on the Great Trek to the region between the Orange and Vaal Rivers (later known as the Orange Free State) and north of the Vaal River (the Transvaal). Hostilities between the British and the Boers continued, however. In 1877, the British governor of the Cape Colony seized the Transvaal (trans-VAHL), but a Boer revolt led the British government to recognize Transvaal as the independent South African Republic. These struggles between the British and the Boers did not prevent either white group from massacring and subjugating the Zulu (ZOO-loo) and Xhosa (KHOH-suh) peoples of the region.
In the 1880s, British policy in South Africa was largely determined by Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902). Rhodes founded both diamond and gold companies that monopolized production of these precious commodities and enabled him to gain control of a territory north of Transvaal that he named Rhodesia after himself. Rhodes was a great champion of British expansion. He said once, “If there be a God, I think what he would like me to do is to paint as much of Africa British red as possible.” One of his goals was to create a series of British colonies “from the Cape to Cairo,” all linked by a railroad. His imperialist ambitions led to his downfall in 1896, however, when the British government forced him to resign as prime minister of the Cape Colony after he conspired to overthrow the Boer government of the South African Republic without British approval. Although the British government had hoped to avoid war with the Boers, it could not stop extremists on both sides from precipitating a conflict.
THE BOER WAR The Boer War began in 1899 and dragged on until 1902 as the Boers proved to be an effective opponent. Due to the Boers’ use of guerrilla tactics, the British sustained high casualties and immense expenses in securing victory. Almost 450,000 British and imperial forces were needed to defeat 87,000 Boers at a cost of 22,000 British deaths. Mass newspapers in Britain reported on the high casualties, costs, and brutalities against Boer women and children, causing a public outcry and arousing antiwar sentiment at home. Britain had won, but the cost of the Boer War demonstrated that increased military and monetary investment would be needed to maintain the British Empire.
British policy toward the defeated Boers was remarkably conciliatory. Transvaal and the Orange Free State had representative governments by 1907, and in 1910, the Union of South Africa was created. Like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, it became a fully self-governing dominion within the British Empire.
PORTUGUESE AND FRENCH POSSESSIONS Before 1880, the only other European settlements in Africa had been made by the French and the Portuguese. The Portuguese had held on to their settlements in Angola on the west coast and Mozambique on the east coast. The French had started the conquest of Algeria in Muslim North Africa in 1830, although it was not until 1879 that French civilian rule was established there. The next year, 1880, the European scramble for possession of Africa began in earnest. By 1900, the French had added the huge area of French West Africa and Tunisia to their African empire. In 1912, they established a protectorate over much of Morocco; the rest was left to Spain.
OTHER BRITISH POSSESSIONS The British took an active interest in Egypt after the Suez Canal was opened by the French in 1869. Believing that the canal was their lifeline to India, the British sought to control the canal area. Egypt was a well-established state with an autonomous Muslim government, but that did not stop the British from landing an expeditionary force there in 1882. Although they claimed that their occupation was only temporary, they soon established a protectorate over Egypt. From Egypt, the British moved south into the Sudan and seized it after narrowly averting a war with France. Not to be outdone, Italy joined in the imperialist scramble. Their humiliating defeat by the Ethiopians in 1896 only led the Italians to try again in 1911, when they invaded and seized Ottoman Tripoli, which they renamed Libya.
BELGIUM AND CENTRAL AFRICA Central Africa was also added to the list of European colonies. Popular interest in the forbiddingly dense tropical jungles of Central Africa was first aroused in the 1860s and 1870s by explorers, such as the Scottish missionary David Livingstone and the British-American journalist Henry M. Stanley. But the real driving force for the colonization of Central Africa was King Leopold II (1865-1909) of Belgium, who rushed enthusiastically into the pursuit of empire in Africa: “To open to civilization,” he said, “the only part of our globe where it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which envelops whole populations, is a crusade, if I may say so, a crusade worthy of this century of progress.” Profit, however, was far more important to Leopold than progress; his treatment of the Africans was so brutal that even other Europeans condemned his actions. In 1876, Leopold created the International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of Central Africa and engaged Henry Stanley to establish Belgian settlements in the Congo. Alarmed by Leopold’s actions, the French also moved into the territory north of the Congo River.
GERMAN POSSESSIONS Between 1884 and 1900, most of the rest of Africa was carved up by the European powers. Germany entered the ranks of the imperialist powers at this time. Initially, Bismarck had downplayed the significance of colonies, but as domestic political pressures for a German empire intensified, Bismarck became a political convert to colonialism (see the box on p. 750). As he expressed it, “All this colonial business is a sham, but we need it for the elections.” The Germans established colonies in South-West Africa, the Cameroons, Togoland, and Tanganyika.
IMPACT ON AFRICA By 1914, Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal had carved up the entire African continent. Only Liberia, founded by emancipated American slaves, and Ethiopia remained free states. Despite the humanitarian rationalizations about the “white man’s burden,” Africa had been conquered by European states determined to create colonial empires (see the box on p. 746). Any peoples who dared to resist (with the exception of the Ethiopians, who defeated the Italians) were simply devastated by the superior military force of the Europeans. In 1898, Sudanese tribesmen attempted to defend their independence and stop a British expedition armed with the recently developed machine gun.
In the ensuing Battle of Omdurman (om-door-MAHN), the Sudanese were massacred. One observer noted, “It was not a battle but an execution.... The bodies were not in heaps – bodies hardly ever are; but they spread evenly over acres and acres. Some lay very composedly with their slippers placed under their heads for a last pillow; some knelt, cut short in the middle of a last prayer. Others were tom to pieces.” The casualties at Omdurman tell the story of the one-sided conflicts between Europeans and Africans: twenty-eight British deaths to 11,000 Sudanese. Military superiority was frequently accompanied by brutal treatment of blacks. Nor did Europeans hesitate to deceive the Africans to gain their way. One South African king, Lo Bengula, informed Queen Victoria about how he had been cheated:
Some time ago a party of men came to my country, the principal one appearing to be a man called Rudd. They asked me for a place to dig for gold, and said they would give me certain things for the right to do so. I told them to bring what they could give and I would show them what I would give. A document was written and presented to me for signature. I asked what it contained, and was told that in it were my words and the words of those men. I put my hand to it. About three months afterwards I heard from other sources that I had given by that document the right to all the minerals of my country.