IMPERIALISM

SUBMITTED TO: SIR SAHIB KHANA CHANA

GROUP MEMBERS:MEESAM ABBASI

ContentsIMPERIALISM:................................................................................................2

DEFINITION:................................................................................................2

HISTORY OF IMPERIALISM:................................................................................2

LENIN’S THEORY OF IMPERIALISM:......................................................................4

MARXIST VIEW:...........................................................................................4

LENIN POINT OF VIEW:..............................................................................4

CRITICISM TO LENIN’S 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

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OPENING OF CONTINENT........................................................................20

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

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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 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,

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and is developed for ideological as well as financial reasons whereas colonialism is nothing more than development for settlement or commercial intentions.

Europe’s 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.

LENIN’S 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.

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.

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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.]

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

(3) Finance capital exportation replaces the exportation of goods (though they continue in production).

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(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 LENIN’S 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.

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

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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 (1815-1870). 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 Río 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:

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 self-government 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 Napoleonic France 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

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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. 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 low—and falling—profit 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

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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 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

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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 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 Age’—the 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

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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 historian Frederick 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, 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 Asia—a 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.

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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 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

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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.

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 under-consumption, 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 Léopold 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.

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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" 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 neo-mercantilism, 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 self-sufficient, 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 commodities—a 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

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French influence in India and established the British East India Company as the most important political force on the Indian Subcontinent.

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 powers—conflicts 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 re-emergence 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.

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

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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.

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.

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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 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 governor-

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generalship 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 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.

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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.

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.

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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 and increasingly protectionist continental markets due to the Long Depression (1873-1896), 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).

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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; Léopold 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".

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.”

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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 Raj India , Qing Dynasty China , 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]

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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 Léopold 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 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.

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Italy continued its conquest to gain its ‘place in the sun’. Following the defeat of the First Italo–Ethiopian 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 Italo-Abyssinian 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 Anglo-Japanese 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; 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.

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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.

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 Léopold II of Belgium, who in 1876 had organised the International African Association. From 1869 to 1874, Stanley was secretly sent by Léopold 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. Léopold 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 Léopold II of Belgium, the Franco-Italian 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.

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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 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].

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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 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 façade 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 Léopold 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.

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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 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, Théophile Delcassé, took a defiant line. The crisis peaked in mid-June 1905, when Delcassé 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.

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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's naval 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.

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

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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.

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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