The New Imperialism
I.
Background: 1815-1870
By 1815 the world had known some four
hundred years of continuous European imperialism. In a sense this was the
outward expansion of European power over other continents. Spanish,
Portuguese, Dutch, French, British colonial empires had followed one another
throughout these four centuries. Always these extensions of control over
non-European territories had involved, in varying proportions, trade,
evangelical missions, adventure, settlement, looting, conquest, and intense
rivalry between the European powers. The very list of countries emphasizes the lead
taken in this expansion by the western, maritime peoples.
But it is not necessary to cross sea, rather than land, to become an imperial
power. The creation of the great dynastic empires of the Habsburgs and the
Ottoman Turks, the traditional drive eastward (Drag nach Osten) of the
Germans in quest of lands for settlement and trade, the continental conquests
of Napoleon, the rapid advance of Russia into southern and central Asia
during the nineteenth century, even the expansion westward of the United
States during the same period, are all examples of the same process carried
out, it so happened, within continental land areas rather than across oceans.
In 1870 there was, therefore, nothing whatever new about the extension of
European control and power over other parts of the earth. Yet the very word
"imperialism," was, it seems, a mid-nineteenth-century invention,
and the generation after 1870 has come to be known, in some specially
significant and discreditable sense, as "the age of imperialism."
In what sense can these decades between 1870 and 1914 be so described?
A. Hobson
What is Hobson’s explanation for the
New Imperialism of the late 19th century? 
A famous British economist, J. A.
Hobson-and following him, Lenin-attributed the colonial expansions
of these years to special new economic forces at work in the most
industrialized nations of western and central Europe. This economic
explanation of the urge to imperialism is usually taken to mean that the
basic motives were also the basest motives and that, whatever political,
religious, or more idealistic excuses might be made, the real impulse was
always one of capitalistic greed for cheap raw materials, advantageous
markets, good investments, and fresh fields of exploitation.
The argument has commonly been used, therefore, to denounce the events, and
to attack the men, parties, and nations that took part in them. The argument,
in brief, is that what Hobson called "the
economic taproot of imperialism" was "excessive capital in
search of investment,"and that this excessive capital came from
oversaving made possible by the unequal distribution of wealth. The remedy,
he maintained, was internal social reform and a more equal distribution of
wealth. "If the consuming public in this country raised its standard of
consumption to keep pace with every rise of productive powers, there could be
no excess of goods or capital clamorous to use imperialism in order to find
markets." It is undeniable that the search for lucrative yet secure
overseas investment played a very great part in the European urge to acquire
colonies at the end of the nineteenth century.
V.I. Lenin
How does Lenin extend Hobson’s
argument? How, according to him, did the great capitalists avoid revolution at home?
Lenin,
the leader of the Bolshevik Party which would seize power in Russia in
October 1917, elaborated Hobson's argument in his pamphlet on Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). Lenin
emphasized the current importance of finance capital rather than industrial,
and the priority of the desire to find new outlets for investment rather than
new markets. His thesis was that imperialism was "a direct continuation
of the fundamental properties of capitalism in general," and that
"the war of 1914 was on both sides imperialist." He used this
thesis to explain the fact, which Marx and Engels had declared to be normally
impossible in a capitalist society, that there had been a conspicuous general
improvement in the economic condition of workers in the more advanced
countries. In the backward colonial
peoples, argued Lenin, capitalism had found a new proletariat to exploit; and
from the enhanced profits of such imperialism it was able to bribe at least
the "aristocracy of labor" at home into renouncing its
revolutionary fervor and collaborating with the bourgeoisie. But such improvement could only be
temporary, and since imperialist rivalries must lead to war, all workers
alike must eventually suffer from it.
This argument ignored the awkward facts
that much of the foreign investment of the European powers was not in
colonial territories at all but in countries such as South America and
Russia, and that the standard of living of the working classes was high in
countries like Denmark and Sweden which had no colonies, but low in France
and Belgium which had large colonial territories. Nor, of course, could it be
a general explanation of imperialism, which had existed centuries before
there was a "glut of capital" and before finance capital was as
plentiful or as well organized as it was in the later nineteenth century. But it was a convenient and persuasive enough
case, at the time, for explaining the First World War in exclusively economic
terms, and for presenting it as the result of capitalist activities and the
unequal distribution of wealth.
II.
The New Imperialism
What made it seem particularly
necessary to find some special reason for modern imperialism was both the
dramatic suddenness of its reappearance and its pre-eminence in the policies
of the great Western powers during the last quarter of the century. Until 1870
national policies, and even more national public opinion, in most European
countries had been hostile to colonies. By the 1820's several countries,
after having long colonial connections, had lost these connections without
suffering any apparent economic deprivation. By 1815 France had lost most of
her colonial possessions in America and in the east, and Spain had lost her
vast South American territories. Before that the thirteen colonies in America
had broken away from Britain, and by 1822 Portugal had lost Brazil.
Advanced opinion everywhere welcomed these events. Adam Smith had argued that
the burdens of colonialism outweighed its alleged benefits; radicalism
favored laissez faire; Bentham urged France to ''Emancipate your Colonies'';
'Cobdenism' preached free trade and the abolition of all commercial privileges;
and in 1861 France opened to all nations the trade of her colonies. Gladstone
expected the whole British Empire to dissolve in the end, and in 1852
Disraeli, who agreed with Gladstone in little else, made his famous
declaration that "These wretched colonies will all be independent in a
few years and are millstones around our necks."
As late as 1868 Bismarck, who until a decade later was opposed to colonial
aspirations for Germany, held that "All the advantages claimed for the
mother country are for the most part illusory," adding that
"England is abandoning her colonial policy: she finds it too
costly." But he was wrong, and only four years later Disraeli announced
his conversion to a policy of imperial consolidation and expansion. The tide
of opinion turned abruptly. The chorus
of anti-colonialism before 1870 was so strange a prelude to an era of
especially hectic colonial scramble that some extraordinary explanation seems
to be called for.
It is improbable that this explanation can be entirely economic. However
important the economic forces were, they cannot explain why France, one of
the least fully industrialized of the northwestern European nations, was the
one which had already set the pace of expansion by more than doubling her
colonial possessions between 1815 and 1870, when she gained firm footholds
in Algeria, Senegal, and Indochina; nor why after 1870 it was the political
republican leaders, Jules Ferry and Leon Gambetta, who took the initiative
in further colonial expansion in Tunisia, despite the great unpopularity of such expansion with public
opinion in France.
It is not a mere thirst for exporting surplus capital which can explain the
new shape given to the British Empire by the invention of ''dominion status''
and the readiness with which complete political independence was granted
first to Canada, and later to Australia, New Zealand, and the Union of South
Africa. British commercial and capitalist interests knew that trade with the
United States had increased after it won political independence; that
migration to the independent United States had been greater than to any of
the territories which had remained under British control; and that Argentine
railways had offered opportunities to British investors no less attractive
than had Indian railways. German economic penetration of eastern Europe, the
Balkans, and the Ottoman Empire was remarkably effective without any of these
territories becoming German colonies.
A. Africa and Eastern Asia
What was most strikingly novel about
the new imperialism was its intense concentration upon two continents: Africa
and eastern Asia. These were the only two important areas of the globe
still not brought under European influence before 1870. The decades
between 1870 and 1914 speedily completed the expansion of European influence
and civilization over the whole of the earth; and it was accomplished in an era when the realism, ruthlessness, and
rivalries of European national governments were exceptionally great. It
therefore had a temper uniquely masterful and remorseless, brooking no
obstacles and aggressively self-assertive. This quality came as much from the nature of
European politics as from the urges of European economic development.
What factors contributed most
powerfully to the brutal and rapid spread of European empires in the late 19th
century?
There was no international organization fitted to exercise any kind of
control or regulation over the scramble for territories in which the great
powers now indulged. The
naked power politics of the new colonialism were the projection, onto an
overseas screen, of the interstate frictions and rivalries of Europe. It was this
combination of novel economic conditions with anarchic political relations
which explained the nature of the new imperialism.
Among the economic forces behind it, the urge to find new outlets for
the "glut of capital" and fresh markets for industrial output
were in general more important than either the quest for raw materials or the
factor of overpopulation. The special attraction of Africa and Asia were,
indeed, that they offered many of the raw materials needed by the multiplying
factories of Europe: including cotton, silk, rubber, vegetable oils, and the
rarer minerals. The products of the tropics were especially welcome to
Europe. But many of these raw materials could be, and were, got by trading
without political control.
The pressure of
population in Europe was becoming great by the early twentieth
century, but it still found free outlet in migration to the traditional areas
of reception in the United States and Australasia. Neither Africa nor eastern
Asia offered climatic or economic conditions inviting enough to attract
large-scale white settlements, and the pressure of population within Japan,
China, and India was now itself so great as to exert a steady demand for
fresh outlets. It was against Asiatic immigrants, not European, that the main
barriers began to be raised.
Chinese were excluded from the United States after 1882, from Hawaii after
1898, from the Philippines after 1902. The United States excluded Japanese
laborers in 1907, and by the Immigration Act of 1917 barred the entry of
other non-Europeans, especially Indians and inhabitants of the East Indies.
Canada took similar action against the Chinese after 1885, and against the
Japanese after 1908. New Zealand restricted Chinese, and in 1901 Australia
passed a federal Immigration Restriction Act with the same purpose. The Union
of South Africa barred Chinese in 1913, and some South American states
followed suit. The main impediments to European migration came only after
1918, and the nineteenth-century flow out of Europe actually reached its peak
in 1914.
The quest for markets
in which to sell manufactured goods was more important. But here, again, the
political factor was no less important than the purely economic. Until 1870
British manufacturers of textiles, machinery, and hardware had found good
markets in other European lands. After 1870 Germany, France, Belgium, and
other nations were able to satisfy their own home markets, which they began
to protect against imports from Britain by tariff barriers. They even began
to produce a surplus for which they sought markets abroad. With increasing
saturation of European markets, all tended to look for more open markets
overseas, and in the competitive,
protectionist mood of European politics they found governments responsive enough to
national needs to undertake the political conquest of undeveloped territories.
For this purpose, Africa and Asia served admirably. It was in these economic
and political circumstances that the urge to exploit backward territories by
the investment of surplus capital could make so much headway. It began
especially after 1880, and gained rapidly in momentum until 1914. (Of the
annual investment of British capital between 1909 and 1913, 36 percent went
into British overseas territories.) By then the main industrial countries had
equipped themselves with an abundance of manufacturing plants, and the
openings for capital investment at home were more meager.
The vast undeveloped realm of Africa and Asia offered the most inviting
opportunities, provided that they could be made safe enough for investment
and there seemed no better guarantee of security than the appropriation of
these lands. Again governments were responsive, for reasons that were not
exclusively economic. The ports of Africa and the Far East were
invaluable as
naval
bases and ports of call, no less than as inroads for trade and
investment. Given the tangle of international fears and distrusts in Europe
during these years, and the ever-present menace of war, no possible
strategic advantage could be forfeited. Once the scramble for
partitioning Africa had begun, the powers were confronted with the choice of
grabbing such advantages for themselves or seeing them snatched by potential
enemies. The "international
anarchy,"
contributed an impetus of its own to the general race for colonies. To say,
as it was often said after 1918, that imperialism had led to war, was only
half the story; it was also true that the menace of war had led to
imperialism.
It was normally the coexistence of economic interests with political aims
which made a country imperialistic; and in some, such as Italy or Russia,
political considerations predominated. With nations as with men, it is what
they aspire to become and to have, not only what they already are or have,
that governs their behavior. There was no irresistible compulsion or
determinism, and no country acquired colonies unless at least a very active
and influential group of its political leaders wanted to acquire them.
Britain had long had all the economic urges of surplus population, exports,
and capital, but they did not drive her to scramble for colonies during the
1860's as much as during the 1870's and after. Neither Italy nor Russia had a
surplus of manufactures or capital to export, yet both joined in the
scramble; Norway, although she had a large merchant fleet which was second
only to that of Britain and Germany, did not. Germany, whose industrial
development greatly outpaced that of France, was very much slower than France
to embark on colonialism. The Dutch were active in colonialism long before
the more industrialized Belgians.
Essay Thesis: What human choices does this
historian cite to explain the brutal exploitation in the
colonies, not to inexorable historical processes? By
pointing to human causes for the new imperialism, to what political ideology
does this historian pledge allegiance?
What determined whether or not a country became
imperialistic was more the activity of small groups of people, often
intellectuals, economists, or patriotic publicists and politicians anxious to
ensure national security and self-sufficiency, than the economic conditions
of the country itself. And, as the examples of the British, French,
Dutch, and Portuguese show, nations that had traditions of colonialism were
more prompt to seek colonies than were nations, such as Germany and Italy,
that had no such traditions.
B. Adventurers and
Missionaries
Besides the direct political motives of
imperialism-the desire to strengthen national security by strategic naval
bases such as Cyprus and the Cape, or to secure additional sources of
manpower as the French sought in Africa, or to enhance national prestige as
the Italians did in Libya there was a medley of other considerations which,
in varying proportions, entered into the desire for colonies. One was the
activities of explorers and adventurers, men like the Frenchmen, Du
Chaillu and De Brazza, in equatorial Africa; Or the Welshman, Henry Morton
Stanley, in the Congo basin; or the German Karl Peters in east Africa.
Prompted by a genuine devotion to scientific discovery, or a taste for
adventure, or a buccaneering love of money and power as was Cecil Rhodes in
South Africa-men of initiative and energetic enterprise played an important
personal part in the whole story.
Christian missionaries played their part too in the spread of colonialism.
The most famous was the Scot, David Livingstone. A medical missionary
originally sent to Africa by the London Missionary Society, he later returned
under government auspices as an explorer "to open a path for commerce and
Christianity." When he had disappeared for some years in quest of the
source of the Nile, Stanley was sent to find him, and duly met him in 1872 on
the shores of Lake Tanganyika. When Livingstone died in Africa in 1873, his
body was taken to London under naval escort, to be buried in Westminster
Abbey as a great national hero. But Livingstone was only one among many, and
France, even more than Britain, sent organized missions into Africa to
convert the heathen to Christianity.
The Catholic missions of France under the Third Republic were exceptionally
active, and provided two thirds (some forty thousand) of all Catholic
missionaries. They were spread all over the world, including the Near and Far
East; and in 1869 Cardinal Lavigerie, installed only the year before in the
see of Algiers, founded the Society of African Missionaries, soon to be known
because of their Arab dress as the ''White Fathers.'' By 1875 they spread
from Algeria into Tunisia, and set up a religious protectorate that preceded
the political protectorate. Gambetta said of Lavigerie, ''His presence in
Tunisia is worth an army for France." Other French missions penetrated
into all parts of Africa, setting up schools and medical services, often in
the footsteps of the explorers and adventurers. Belgian missionaries were
active in the Congo as early as 1878.
C. Administrators and
Soldiers
Yet another element in the growth of
imperialism was the administrator and soldier, the man with a mission, who
was not a missionary but who welcomed an opportunity to bring order and
efficient administration out of muddle. Such men became the great
colonial proconsuls Lord Cromer in Egypt, Lord Lugard in Nigeria, Lord Milner
at the Cape, Marshal Lyautey in Morocco, Karl Peters in German East Africa.
Without such men the extent and the consolidation of European control over
Africa would have been impossible. The sources and the nature of the urge to
imperialism were multiple, and varied considerably from one country to
another. It was not just that trade followed the flag, but that the flag
accompanied the botanist and buccaneer, the Bible and the bureaucrat, along
with the banker and the businessman.
The unexplored and unexploited parts of the earth
offered a host of possible advantages which, in the competitive world of the
later century, few could resist seizing; they were seized, amid the
enthusiastic approval of the newly literate nationalist-minded masses in
Britain and Germany, or amid the sullen resentments of the French and Belgians.
In 1875 less than one tenth of Africa had been turned into European colonies;
by 1895, only one tenth remained unappropriated. In the generation between
1871 and 1900 Britain added 4.25 million square miles and 66 million people
to her empire; France added 3.5 million square miles and 26 million people;
Russia in Asia added half a million square miles and 6.5 million people. In
the same decades Germany, Belgium, and Italy each acquired a new colonial
empire: Germany, of one million square miles and 13 million people; Belgium
(or, until 1908, Leopold II, King of the Belgians), of 900,000 square miles
and 8.5 million inhabitants; and Italy, a relatively meager acquisition of
185,000 square miles and 750,000 people. The old colonial empires of Portugal
and the Netherlands survived intact and assumed increasing importance. It was
a historical novelty that most of the world should now belong to a handful of
great European powers.
These immense acquisitions had no close correlation
with the ascendancy of one political party. In Belgium they were originally an
almost personal achievement of the king; in Britain and Germany they were
mainly the work of conservative governments which had turned empire-minded,
though in Britain former radicals like Joseph Chamberlain and liberals like
Lord Rosebery supported them; in France they were the work of radical
republicans like Jules Ferry and Leon Gambetta, and in Italy, of liberals
like Depretis; in Russia they were mainly the work of the official military
class and bureaucracy. The beneficiaries of imperialism were not always the
initiators of it; and although King Leopold, Cecil Rhodes, and many of the
other empire builders amassed great personal fortunes and powers, so too did
many who merely stepped in later to reap the rewards of high administrative
offices and rich concessions for trading and investment.
D. Popular Support
On the other hand some of the
initiators, such as Ferry in France and Crispi in Italy, earned only disrepute
and violent hatreds for their achievements. Wherever there was any
considerable section of public opinion generally in support of imperialism,
it tended to be canalized into active propagandist associations and pressure
groups, often distinct from any one political party. In Britain, Disraeli
committed the Conservative party to a general policy of imperialism in 1872,
backed by the purchase of shares in the Suez Canal in 1875 and by the
conferring of the title "Empress of India" upon Queen Victoria in
1877. In 1882 a Colonial Society was formed in Germany, and in 1883, a
Society for German Colonization. In the same year the British conservative
imperialists founded the Primrose League, and the liberals soon followed suit
with the Imperial Federation League.
The British Navy League of 1894 was followed in 1898 by the corresponding
German Flottenverein-incidents in the naval rivalry of the two powers. They
championed the rapidly increasing naval expenditures of their respective
governments. The more explicit arguments for colonialism, and for the sea
power which it necessitated, were as much expressions as causes of the
expansion.
III.
The Scramble for Colonies
What plan to avoid open conflict did
the European powers agree to at this conference?
To the Berlin
Conference of 1884-85 came
representatives from fourteen states-roughly all the states of Europe except
Switzerland. It was occasioned mainly by the activities of the International
African Association, which had been formed in 1876 by King Leopold II of
Belgium. This Association had sent J. M. Stanley on explorations into the
Congo between 1879 and 1884, where he made treaties with the native chiefs
and established Leopold's influence over vast areas of the interior. By the
beginning of 1884 Britain and Portugal, apprehensive of this development, set
up a joint commission to control navigation of the whole river. The colony of
Angola south of the Congo mouth had been held by Portugal since the fifteenth
century, and now Britain recognized Portugal's claim to control the whole
mouth of the river. It looked like an alliance of the older colonial powers
to strangle the expansion of the new; for France was increasingly interested
in the tropical belt north of the Congo River, and Germany, in the Cameroon
still further north. Leopold therefore looked to France and Germany for help,
and the result was the Berlin Conference.
It was concerned with defining "spheres of influence," the
significant new term first used in the ensuing Treaty of Berlin of 1885. It
was agreed that in future any power that effectively occupied African
territory and duly notified the other powers could thereby establish
possession of it. This gave the signal for the rapid partition of Africa
among all the colonial powers, and inaugurated the new era of colonialism. In
the treaty it was agreed that Leopold's African Association would have full
rights over most of the Congo basin, including its outlet to the Atlantic,
under international warrantee of neutrality and free trade. Slavery was to be
made illegal. Both the Niger and the Congo were to be opened on equal terms
to the trade of all nations. The treaty was, in short, a compact among the
powers to pursue the further partition of Africa as amicably as possible; and
an attempt to separate colonial competition from European rivalries.
For a decade after the Berlin Conference, imperialistic conservative governments
ruled in Britain and Germany and anti-colonialist protests subsided in France
and Italy. Their policies of mercantilism and protection, the popular mood of
assertive nationalism in all four countries, favored colonialism. Expansion
into Africa was unbridled. In 1885 the African Association converted itself
into the Congo Free State, with Leopold as its absolute sovereign. The
success prompted other powers to set up chartered companies to develop other
African areas. Such companies, granted by their governments’ monopoly rights
in the exploitation of various territories, became the general media of
colonial commerce and appropriation in the subsequent decade. The German and
British East African Companies were set up by 1888, the South Africa Chartered
Company of Cecil Rhodes to develop the valley of the Zambezi in 1889, the
Italian Benadir Company to develop Italian Somaliland in 1892, the Royal
Niger Company in 1896.
By these and every other means each power established protectorates or
outright possessions, and made their resources available for home markets.
Germany enlarged and consolidated her four protectorates of Togoland and the
Cameroons, German Southwest Africa and German East Africa. France took
Dahomey, and by pressing inland from Algeria, Senegal, Guinea, and the Ivory
Coast, she linked up her west African territories into one vast bloc of
French West Africa. She drove inland along the north bank of the Congo to
consolidate French Equatorial Africa. On the east coast she established her claim
to part of Somaliland and by 1896 conquered the island of Madagascar.
Great Britain was already firmly based on the Cape, and began to push
northward. She appropriated Bechuanaland in 1885, Rhodesia in 1889, Nyasaland
in 1893, so driving a broad wedge between German Southwest Africa and German
East Africa and approaching the southern borders of the Congo Free State.
This expansion, largely the work of Cecil Rhodes, involved her in constant
conflicts with the Dutch Boer farmers, who set up, in the Orange Free State
and the Transvaal, two republics of their own. The Boer War of 1899 was the
direct result. From the Indian Ocean she also pressed westward inland,
founding British East Africa by 1888 and taking Uganda by 1894.
In West Africa, Nigeria was acquired by the activities of the Royal Niger
Company between 1886 and 1899. Italy, indignant at the French occupation of
Tunisia, had laid the basis of an Italian East African Empire in Eritrea by
1885, and added Asmara in 1889. In the same year she appropriated the large
southern coastal strip of Somaliland and claimed a protectorate Over the
African kingdom of Abyssinia. But in 1896 her expeditionary forces were
routed by Abyssinian forces at Adowa, and she was obliged to recognize
Abyssinian independence.
By 1898 the map of the African continent resembled a patchwork quilt of
European acquisitions, and south of the Sahara the only independent states
were Liberia and Abyssinia, and the two small Dutch Boer republics. The North
African coastline, especially the provinces of Morocco in the west and Libya
and Egypt in the east, remained a troublesome source of great power
rivalries.
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