The New Imperialism
mars.acnet.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/wc2/lectures/imperialism.html
By 1815 the world had known some four hundred years of continuous European
imperialism. In a sense this was the outward expansion of European power over
other continents. Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British colonial empires
had followed one another throughout these four centuries. Always these
extensions of control over non-European territories had involved, in varying
proportions, trading, missionizing, adventure, settlement, loot, national pride,
conquests, and wars between rival powers. The very list of countries emphasizes
the lead taken in this expansion by the western, maritime peoples.
But it
is not necessary to cross sea, rather than land, to become an imperial power.
The creation of the great dynastic empires of the Habsburgs and the Ottoman
Turks, the traditional drive eastward (Drag nach Osten) of the Germans in quest
of lands for settlement and trade, the continental conquests of Napoleon, the
rapid advance of Russia into southern and central Asia during the nineteenth
century, even the expansion westward of the United States during the same
period, are all examples of the same process carried out, it so happened, within
continental land areas rather than across oceans.
In 1870 there was,
therefore, nothing whatever new about the extension of European control and
power over other parts of the earth. Yet the very word "imperialism," was, it
seems, a mid-nineteenth-century invention, and the generation after 1870 has
come to be known, in some specially significant and discreditable sense, as "the
age of imperialism." In what sense can these decades between 1870 and 1914 be so
described?
A famous British economist, J. A. Hobson-and following him, Lenin-attributed
the colonial expansions of these years to special new economic forces at work in
the most industrialized nations of western and central Europe. This economic
explanation of the urge to imperialism is usually taken to mean that the basic
motives were also the basest motives and that, whatever political, religious, or
more idealistic excuses might be made, the real impulse was always one of
capitalistic greed for cheap raw materials, advantageous markets, good
investments, and fresh fields of exploitation.
The argument has commonly
been used, therefore, to denounce the events, and to attack the men, parties,
and nations that took part in them. The argument, in brief, is that what Hobson
called "the economic taproot of imperialism" was "excessive capital in search of
investment," and that this excessive capital came from oversaving made possible
by the unequal distribution of wealth. The remedy, he maintained, was internal
social reform and a more equal distribution of wealth. "If the consuming public
in this country raised its standard of consumption to keep pace with every rise
of productive powers, there could be no excess of goods or capital clamorous to
use imperialism in order to find markets." It is undeniable that the search for
lucrative yet secure overseas investment played a very great part in the
European urge to acquire colonies at the end of the nineteenth century.
Lenin elaborated the argument, in his pamphlet on Imperialism the Highest
Stage of Capitalism (1916), to emphasize the current importance of finance
capital rather than industrial, and the priority of the desire to find new
outlets for investment rather than new markets. His thesis was that imperialism
was "a direct continuation of the fundamental properties of capitalism in
general," and that "the war of 1914 was on both sides imperialist." He used this
thesis to explain the fact, which Marx and Engels had declared to be normally
impossible in a capitalist society, that there was a conspicuous general
improvement in the economic condition of workers in the more advanced countries.
In the backward colonial peoples, argued Lenin, capitalism had found a new
proletariat to exploit; and from the enhanced profits of such imperialism it was
able to bribe at least the "aristocracy of labor" at home into renouncing its
revolutionary fervor and collaborating with the bourgeoisie. But such
improvement could only be temporary, and since imperialist rivalries must lead
to war, all workers alike must eventually suffer from it.
This argument
ignored the awkward facts that much of the foreign investment of the European
powers was not in colonial territories at all but in countries such as South
America and Russia, and that the standard of living of the working classes was
high in countries like Denmark and Sweden which had no colonies, but low in
France and Belgium which had large colonial territories. Nor, of course, could
it be a general explanation of imperialism, which had existed centuries before
there was a "glut of capital" and before finance capital was as plentiful or as
well organized as it was in the later nineteenth century. But it was a
convenient and persuasive enough case, at the time, for explaining the First
World War in exclusively economic terms, and for presenting it as the result of
capitalist activities and the maldistribution of wealth.
What made it seem particularly necessary to find some special reason for
modern imperialism was both the dramatic suddenness of its reappearance and its
pre-eminence in the policies of the powers during the last quarter of the
century. Until after 1870 national policies, and even more national public
opinion, in most European countries had been hostile to colonies. By the 1820's
several countries, after having long colonial connections, had lost these
connections without suffering any apparent economic deprivation. By 1815 France
had lost most of her colonial possessions in America and in the east, and Spain
had lost her vast South American territories. Before that the thirteen colonies
in America had broken away from Britain, and by 1822 Portugal lost
Brazil.
Advanced opinion everywhere welcomed these events. Adam Smith had
argued that the burdens of colonialism outweighed its alleged benefits;
radicalism favored laissez faire; Bentham urged France to ''Emancipate your
Colonies''; Cobdenism preached free trade and the abolition of all commercial
privileges; and in 1861 France opened to all nations the trade of her colonies.
Gladstone expected the whole British Empire to dissolve in the end, and in 1852
Disraeli, who agreed with Gladstone in little else, made his famous declaration
that "These wretched colonies will all be independent in a few years and are
millstones around our necks."
As late as 1868 Bismarck, who until a
decade later was opposed to colonial aspirations for Germany, held that "All the
advantages claimed for the mother country are for the most part illusory,"
adding that "England is abandoning her colonial policy: she finds it too
costly." But he was wrong, and only four years later Disraeli announced his
conversion to a policy of imperial consolidation and expansion. The tide of
opinion turned abruptly. The chorus of anticolonialism before 1870 was so
strange a prelude to an era of especially hectic colonial scramble that some
extraordinary explanation seems to be called for.
It is improbable that
this explanation can be entirely, or even "basically," economic. However
important the economic forces were, they cannot explain why France, one of the
least fully industrialized of the northwestern European nations, was the one
which had already set the pace of expansion by more than doubling her colonial
possessions between 1815 and 1870, when she gained firm footholds in Algeria,
Senegal, and Indochina; nor why after 1870 it was the political republican
leaders, Jules Ferry and Leon Gambetta, who took the initiative in further
colonial expansion in Tunisia and Tonnin, despite the great unpopularity of such
expansion with public opinion in France.
It is not a mere thirst for
exporting surplus capital which can explain the new shape given to the British
Empire by the invention of ''dominion status'' and the readiness with which
complete political independence was granted first to Canada, and later to
Australia, New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa. British commercial and
capitalist interests knew that trade with the United States had increased after
it won political independence; that migration to the independent United States
had been greater than to any of the territories which had remained under British
control; and that Argentine railways had offered opportunities to British
investors no less attractive than had Indian railways. German economic
penetration of eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Ottoman Empire was
remarkably effective without any of these territories becoming German
colonies.
What was most strikingly novel about the new imperialism was its intense
concentration upon two continents: Africa and eastern Asia. These were the only
two important areas of the globe still not brought under European influence
before 1870. The decades between 1870 and 1914 speedily completed the expansion
of European influence and civilization over the whole of the earth; and it was
accomplished in an era when the realism, ruthlessness, and rivalries of European
national governments were exceptionally great. It therefore had a temper
uniquely masterful and remorseless, brooking no obstacles and pushfully
self-assertive. This quality came as much from the nature of European politics
as from the urges of European economic development.
There was no
international organization fitted to exercise any kind of control or regulation
over the scramble for territories in which the great powers now indulged. The
naked power politics of the new colonialism were the projection, onto an
overseas screen, of the interstate frictions and rivalries of Europe. It was
this combination of novel economic conditions with anarchic political relations
which explained the nature of the new imperialism.
Among the economic
forces behind it, the urge to find new outlets for the "glut of capital" and
fresh markets for industrial output were in general more important than either
the quest for raw materials or the factor of overpopulation. The special
attraction of Africa and Asia were, indeed, that they offered many of the raw
materials needed by the multiplying factories of Europe: including cotton, silk,
rubber, vegetable oils, and the rarer minerals. The products of the tropics were
especially welcome to Europe. But many of these raw materials could be, and
were, got by trading without political control.
The pressure of
population in Europe was becoming great by the early twentieth century, but it
still found free outlet in migration to the traditional areas of reception in
the United States and Australasia. Neither Africa nor eastern Asia offered
climatic or economic conditions inviting enough to attract large-scale white
settlements, and the pressure of population within Japan, China, and India was
now itself so great as to exert a steady demand for fresh outlets. It was
against Asiatic immigrants, not European, that the main barriers began to be
raised.
Chinese were excluded from the United States after 1882, from
Hawaii after 1898, from the Philippines after 1902. The United States excluded
Japanese laborers in 1907, and by the Immigration Act of 1917 barred the entry
of other non-Europeans, especially Indians and inhabitants of the East Indies.
Canada took similar action against the Chinese after 1885, and against the
Japanese after 1908. New Zealand restricted Chinese, and in 1901 Australia
passed a federal Immigration Restriction Act with the same purpose. The Union of
South Africa barred Chinese in 1913, and some South American states followed
suit. The main impediments to European migration came only after 1918, and the
nineteenth-century flow out of Europe actually reached its peak in 1914.
The quest for markets in which to sell manufactured goods was more
important. But here, again, the political factor was no less important than the
purely economic. Until 1870 British manufacturers of textiles, machinery, and
hardware had found good markets in other European lands. After 1870 Germany,
France, Belgium, and other nations were able to satisfy their own home markets,
which they began to protect against imports from Britain by tariff barriers.
They even began to produce a surplus for which they sought markets abroad. With
increasing saturation of European markets, all tended to look for more open
markets overseas, and in the competitive, protectionist mood of European
politics they found governments responsive enough to national needs to undertake
the political conquest of undeveloped territories.
For this purpose,
Africa and Asia served admirably. It was in these economic and political
circumstances that the urge to exploit backward territories by the investment of
surplus capital could make so much headway. It began especially after 1880, and
gained rapidly in momentum until 1914. (Of the annual investment of British
capital between 1909 and 1913, 36 per cent went into British overseas
territories.) By then the main industrial countries had equipped themselves with
an abundance of manufacturing plant, and the openings for capital investment at
home were more meager.
The vast undeveloped realm of Africa and Asia
offered the most inviting opportunities, provided that they could be made safe
enough for investment and there seemed no better guarantee of security than the
appropriation of these lands. Again governments were responsive, for reasons
that were not exclusively economic. The ports of Africa and the Far East were
invaluable as naval bases and ports of call, no less than as inroads for trade
and investment. Given the tangle of international fears and distrusts in Europe
during these years, and the everpresent menace of war, no possible strategic or
prestige-giving advantage could be forfeited. Once the scramble for partitioning
Africa had begun, the powers were confronted with the choice of grabbing such
advantages for themselves or seeing them snatched by potential enemies. The
"international anarchy," contributed an impetus of its own to the general race
for colonies. To say, as it was often said after 1918, that imperialism had led
to war, was only half the story; it was also true that the menace of war had led
to imperialism.
It was normally the coexistence of economic interests
with political aims which made a country imperialistic; and in some, such as
Italy or Russia, political considerations predominated. With nations as with
men, it is what they aspire to become and to have, not only what they already
are or have, that governs their behavior. There was no irresistible compulsion
or determinism, and no country acquired colonies unless at least a very active
and influential group of its political leaders wanted to acquire them. Britain
had long had all the economic urges of surplus population, exports, and capital,
but they did not drive her to scramble for colonies during the 1860's as much as
during the 1870's and after. Neither Italy nor Russia had a surplus of
manufactures or capital to export, yet both joined in the scramble; Norway,
although she had a large merchant fleet which was second only to that of Britain
and Germany, did not. Germany, whose industrial development greatly outpaced
that of France, was very much slower than France to embark on colonialism. The
Dutch were active in colonialism long before the more industrialized
Belgians.
What determined whether or not a country became imperialistic
was more the activity of small groups of people, often intellectuals,
economists, or patriotic publicists and politicians anxious to ensure national
security and self-sufficiency, than the economic conditions of the country
itself. And, as the examples of the British, French, Dutch, and Portuguese show,
nations that had traditions of colonialism were more prompt to seek colonies
than were nations, such as Germany and Italy, that had no such
traditions.
Besides the direct political motives of imperialism-the desire to strengthen
national security by strategic naval bases such as Cyprus and the Cape, or to
secure additional sources of manpower as the French sought in Africa, or to
enhance national prestige as the Italians did in Libya there was a medley of
other considerations which, in varying proportions, entered into the desire for
colonies. One was the activities of explorers and adventurers, men like the
Frenchmen, Du Chaillu and De Brazza, in equatorial Africa; Or the Welshman,
Henry Morton Stanley, in the Congo basin; or the German Karl Peters in east
Africa. Prompted by a genuine devotion to scientific discovery, or a taste for
adventure, or a buccaneering love of money and power as was Cecil Rhodes in
South Africa-men of initiative and energetic enterprise played an important
personal part in the whole story.
Christian missionaries played their
part too in the spread of colonialism. The most famous was the Scot, David
Livingstone. A medical missionary originally sent to Africa by the London
Missionary Society, he later returned under government auspices as an explorer
"to open a path for commerce and Christianity." When he had disappeared for some
years in quest of the source of the Nile, Stanley was sent to find him, and duly
met him in 1872 on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. When Livingstone died in
Africa in 1873, his body was taken to London under naval escort, to be buried in
Westminster Abbey as a great national hero. But Livingstone was only one among
many, and France, even more than Britain, sent organized missions into Africa to
convert the heathen to Christianity.
The Catholic missions of France
under the Third Republic were exceptionally active, and provided two thirds
(some forty thousand) of all Catholic missionaries. They were spread all over
the world, including the Near and Far East; and in 1869 Cardinal Lavigerie,
installed only the year before in the see of Algiers, founded the Society of
African Missionaries, soon to be known because of their Arab dress as the
''White Fathers.'' By 1875 they spread from Algeria into Tunisia, and set up a
religious protectorate that preceded the political protectorate. Gambetta said
of Lavigerie, ''His presence in Tunisia is worth an army for France." Other
French missions penetrated into all parts of Africa, setting up schools and
medical services, often in the footsteps of the explorers and adventurers.
Belgian missionaries were active in the Congo as early as 1878.
Yet another element in the growth of imperialism was the administrator and
soldier the man with a mission, who was not a missionary but who welcomed an
opportunity to bring order and efficient administration out of muddle. Such men
became the great colonial proconsuls Lord Cromer in Egypt, Lord Lugard in
Nigeria, Lord Milner at the Cape, Marshal Lyautey in Morocco, Karl Peters in
German East Africa.
Without such men the extent and the consolidation of
European control over Africa would have been impossible. The sources and the
nature of the urge to imperialism were multiple, and varied considerably from
one country to another. It was not just that trade followed the flag, but that
the flag accompanied the botanist and buccaneer, the Bible and the bureaucrat,
along with the banker and the businessman. The unexplored and unexploited parts
of the earth offered a host of possible advantages which, in the competitive
world of the later century, few could resist seizing; they were seized, amid the
enthusiastic approval of the newly literate nationalist-minded masses in Britain
and Germany, or amid the sullen resentments of the French and Belgians.
In 1875 less than one tenth of Africa had been turned into European
colonies; by 1895, only one tenth remained unappropriated. In the generation
between 1871 and 1900 Britain added 4.25 million square miles and 66 million
people to her empire; France added 3.5 million square miles and 26 million
people; Russia in Asia added half a million square miles and 6.5 million people.
In the same decades Germany, Belgium, and Italy each acquired a new colonial
empire: Germany, of one million square miles and 13 million people; Belgium (or,
until 1908, Leopold II, King of the Belgians), of 900,000 square miles and 8.5
million inhabitants; and Italy, a relatively meager acquisition of 185,000
square miles and 750,000 people. The old colonial empires of Portugal and the
Netherlands survived intact and assumed increasing importance. It was a
historical novelty that most of the world should now belong to a handful of
great European powers.
These immense acquisitions had no close
correlation with the ascendancy of one political party. In Belgium they were
originally an almost personal achievement of the king; in Britain and Germany
they were mainly the work of conservative governments which had turned
empire-minded, though in Britain former radicals like Joseph Chamberlain and
liberals like Lord Rosebery supported them; in France they were the work of
radical republicans like Jules Ferry and Leon Gambetta, and in Italy, of
liberals like Depretis; in Russia they were mainly the work of the official
military class and bureaucracy. The beneficiaries of imperialism were not always
the initiators of it; and although King Leopold, Cecil Rhodes, and many of the
other empire builders amassed great personal fortunes and powers, so too did
many who merely stepped in later to reap the rewards of high administrative
offices and rich concessions for trading and investment.
On the other hand some of the initiators; such as Ferry in France and Crispi
in Italy, earned only disrepute and violent hatreds for their achievements.
Wherever there was any considerable section of public opinion generally in
support of imperialism, it tended to be canalized into active propagandist
associations and pressure groups, often distinct from any one political party.
In Britain, Disraeli committed the Conservative party to a general policy of
imperialism in 1872, backed by the purchase of shares in the Suez Canal in 1875
and by the conferring of the title "Empress of India" upon Queen victoria in
1877. In 1882 a Colonial Society was formed in Germany, and in 1883, a Society
for German Colonization. In the same year the British conservative imperialists
founded the Primrose League, and the liberals soon followed suit with the
Imperial Federation League.
The British Navy League of 1894 was followed
in 1898 by the corresponding German Flottenverein-incidents in the naval rivalry
of the two powers. They championed the rapidly increasing naval expenditures of
their respective governments. The more explicit arguments for colonialism, and
for the sea power which it necessitated, were as much expressions as causes of
the expansion.
By no means all the acquisitions of colonies caused disputes among the
powers. Some of the earliest, like the. French conquest of Algeria in the
earlier years of the century or of Annam in 1874, and even some later
acquisitions, like the British conquests of Nigeria and Ashanti in the 1890's,
aroused little or no opposition from other European powers. Occasionally one
power made pins with the encouragement or assent of others: Bismarck encouraged
France to expand into Tunisia as a diversion from continental affairs that was
likely to embroil her with Italy. Bismarck and Jules Ferry co-operated in 1884
to summon an international conference at Berlin to settle amicably the future of
the Congo in central tropical Africa.
To the Berlin Conference of 1884-85
came representatives from fourteen states-roughly all the states of Europe
except Switzerland. It was occasioned mainly by the activities of the
International African Association, which had been formed in 1876 by King Leopold
II of Belgium. This Association had sent J. M. Stanley on explorations into the
Congo between 1879 and 1884, where he made treaties with the native chiefs and
established Leopold's influence over vast areas of the interior. By the
beginning of 1884 Britain and Portugal, apprehensive of this development, set up
a joint commission to control navigation of the whole river. The colony of
Angola south of the Congo mouth had been held by Portugal since the fifteenth
century, and now Britain recognized Portugal's claim to control the whole mouth
of the river. It looked like an alliance of the older colonial powers to
strangle the expansion of the new; for France was increasingly interested in the
tropical belt north of the Congo River, and Germany, in the Cameroon still
further north. Leopold therefore looked to France and Germany for help, and the
result was the Berlin Conference.
It was concerned with defining "spheres
of influence," the significant new term first used in the ensuing Treaty of
Berlin of 1885. It was agreed that in future any power that effectively occupied
African territory and duly notified the other powers could thereby establish
pos. session of it. This gave the signal for the rapid partition of Africa among
all the colonial powers, and inaugurated the new era of colonialism. In the
treaty it was agreed that Leopold's African Association would have full rights
over most of the Congo basin, including its outlet to the Atlantic, under
international warrantee of neutrality and free trade. Slavery was to be made
illegal. Both the Niger and the Congo were to be opened on equal terms to the
trade of all nations. The treaty was, in short, a compact among the powers to
pursue the further partition of Africa as amicably as possible; and an attempt
to separate colonial competition from European rivalries.
For a decade
after the Berlin Conference, imperialistic conservative governments ruled in
Britain and Germany and anticolonialist protests subsided in France and Italy.
Their policies of mercantilism and protection, the popular mood of assertive
nationalism in all four countries, favored colonialism. Expansion into Africa
was unbridled. In 1885 the African Association converted itself into the Congo
Free State, with Leopold as its absolute sovereign. The success prompted other
powers to set up chartered companies to develop other African areas. Such
companies, granted by their governments monopoly rights in the exploitation of
various territories, became the general media of colonial commerce and
appropriation in the subsequent decade. The German and British East African
Companies were set up by 1888, the South Africa Chartered Company of Cecil
Rhodes to develop the valley of the Zambezi in 1889, the Italian Benadir Company
to develop Italian Somaliland in 1892, the Royal Niger Company in
1896.
By these and every other means each power established protectorates
or outright possessions, and made their resources available for home markets.
Germany enlarged and consolidated her four protectorates of Togoland and the
Cameroons, German Southwest Africa and German East Africa. France took Dahomey,
and by pressing inland from Algeria, Senegal, Guinea, and the Ivory Coast, she
linked up her west African territories into one vast bloc of French West Africa.
She drove inland along the north bank of the Congo to consolidate French
Equatorial Africa. On the east coast she established her claim to part of
Somaliland and by 1896 conquered the island of Madagascar.
Great Britain
was already firmly based on the Cape, and began to push northward. She
appropriated Bechuanaland in 1885, Rhodesia in 1889, Nyasaland in 1893, so
driving a broad wedge between German Southwest Africa and German East Africa and
approaching the southern borders of the Congo Free State. This expansion,
largely the work of Cecil Rhodes, involved her in constant conflicts with the
Dutch Boer farmers, who set up, in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, two
republics of their own. The Boer War of 1899 was the direct result. From the
Indian Ocean she also pressed westward inland, founding British East Africa by
1888 and taking Uganda by 1894.
In West Africa, Nigeria was acquired by
the activities of the Royal Niger Company between 1886 and 1899. Italy,
indignant at the French occupation of Tunisia, had laid the basis of an Italian
East African Empire in Eritrea by 1885, and added Asmara in 1889. In the same
year she appropriated the large southern coastal strip of Somaliland and claimed
a protectorate Over the African kingdom of Abyssinia. But in 1896 her
expeditionary forces were routed by Abyssinian forces at Adowa, and she was
obliged to recognize Abyssinian independence.
By 1898 the map of the
African continent resembled a patchwork quilt of European acquisitions, and
south of the Sahara the only independent states were Liberia and Abyssinia, and
the two small Dutch Boer republics. The North African coastline, especially the
provinces of Morocco in the west and Libya and Egypt in the east, remained a
troublesome source of great power rivalries.