Imperialism & colonialism
The structures, ideologies, and chronology of modern imperialism (1815-1914), the Scramble for Africa, and the colonial systems exam canon.
Defining the Phenomenon
Imperialism in the exam sense denotes the deliberate extension of political, economic, and cultural control by industrial powers over weaker societies between roughly 1815 and 1914. It is distinct from earlier mercantilist colonialism (Portuguese-Spanish-Dutch, 16th-17th centuries) in scale, ideology, and the industrial-capital engine driving it. The historian's shorthand is the New Imperialism (c. 1870-1914), in which Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, the United States, and Japan partitioned Africa and consolidated Asian dominions.
The Driving Forces
Examiners reward candidates who marshal a layered causation rather than a single cause:
- Economic: J.A. Hobson, in Imperialism: A Study (1902), argued that surplus capital sought overseas outlets. V.I. Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) recast empire as the monopoly-finance phase of capitalism. Colonies furnished raw materials (Egyptian cotton, Malayan rubber, Congolese ivory and rubber) and captive markets.
- Strategic: The Suez Canal (opened 1869; Britain bought the Khedive's shares in 1875 and occupied Egypt in 1882) made the Nile valley and Cape route geopolitically indispensable.
- Nationalist-prestige: Post-1871 unified Germany and Italy sought 'a place in the sun' (Bernhard von Bulow's phrase, 1897). Empire became a measure of great-power status.
- Ideological: Social Darwinism, the mission civilisatrice, and Rudyard Kipling's 'The White Man's Burden' (1899) supplied moral cover.
- Technological: The Maxim gun (1884), quinine prophylaxis against malaria, steamships, and the telegraph made the African interior penetrable for the first time.
The Berlin Conference
The Berlin West Africa Conference (November 1884-February 1885), convened by Otto von Bismarck, produced the General Act regulating the partition. It established the principle of effective occupation (a power must actually administer territory to claim it), neutralized the Congo Basin under Leopold II's Congo Free State, and guaranteed free navigation of the Niger and Congo rivers. No African ruler was present. The 'Scramble for Africa' that followed reduced the only surviving independent states by 1914 to Ethiopia (which defeated Italy at Adwa, 1 March 1896) and Liberia. The conference is the single most testable event of the topic: memorize the dates, the convenor, and the effective-occupation doctrine.