European Imperialism for Dummies
THE DUAL MONARCHY OF AUSTRIA-HUNGARY
After the unification of Germany, one-sixth of all Germans remained outside Germany, mostly in the Austrian Empire. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Austria had steadily lost influence in Europe, first by its exclusion from the Crimean War, then by the loss of its Italian territories, and then in its humiliating defeat in the Seven Weeks’ War.
Furthermore, the empire was weakened internally by the multiplicity of nationalities and the growing forces of nationalism within it, particularly among the Magyars (Hungarians). There were at least twenty other nationalities in the Habsburg Empire, including Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Slovenes, Croats, Romanians, and Italians. Germans constituted about one-third of the total population (mostly concentrated in Austria and Bohemia), and Magyars, mostly in the eastern part of the country, made up about a quarter of the total. The Magyars had long complained about the dominance of Germans in the empire and about German bureaucracy and centralization.
The Prussian defeat of Austria in 1866 weakened Austria and quickened Magyar demands. The result was the Ausgleich, or compromise, of 1867 that created the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. Austria and Hungary each got its own constitution and parliament, but they were joined together under the common crown of the Habsburgs. This gave the restless Hungarians a considerable degree of autonomy without actually creating two separate nation-states. The nationality problem of the empire was not solved, however. Although the arrangement worked to the benefit of both Hungarians and Austrians, it did nothing to help other nationalities in the empire, especially the Slavic peoples, such as the Czechs, Slovaks, and Poles. The nationality problem would fester for the next fifty years, eventually contributing to the outbreak of World War I.
IMPLICATIONS OF NATIONALISM AND UNIFICATION
In Germany and Italy, civic nationalism, directed from the top, created unified nation-states after popular nationalism had failed in 1848. In both cases in the 1860s, the unification projects had the support of powerful states and leaders in Piedmont and Prussia and, in the Italian case at least, outside support (from France) as well. Elsewhere in Europe, nationalists were not so fortunate. The Poles, for example, who had uprisings against occupying powers in 1830, 1848, and 1863, had no outside support and no success. As the historian Norman Davies has put it, “The Polish national movement had the longest pedigree, the best credentials, the greatest determination, the worst press, and the least success.” The Poles had to wait until the conclusion of World War I to regain their statehood.
Nationalism had mixed success elsewhere on the Continent during the nineteenth century. The Greeks, Belgians, Romanians, and Norwegians got their own nation-states, but the Irish and the Czechs did not. The various nationalities of the Russian Empire had to wait another century before gaining independence. The hodgepodge of nationalities in the Balkans would provide the tinderbox that ignited World War I (and would remain problematic to the present day).
The unification of Italy and Germany fundamentally reshaped the map of Europe and the balance of power in Europe. The German Empire, in particular, was now the largest and most populous state on the Continent, next to Russia, and the most powerful one. The Industrial Revolution was advancing quickly in Germany, and with industry came military power.
In Bismarck’s wars of unification, the Germans had quickly and easily defeated the two other major military powers on the Continent, Austria and France. Bismarck’s policies had created a Germany that was united, dynamic, and strong, and it was not the last time that Germany’s leaders would use nationalism to advance Germany’s interests.
The Age of Imperialism and the Scramble for Africa
In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the European powers engaged in a competitive struggle to extend their influence around the world. During this age of imperialism, more than a quarter of the land surface of the Earth was claimed by six European states. The competition was particularly intense in Africa, which until then had been largely free of European influence and, except for coastal areas, mostly unknown and unexplored by Europeans. In 1880, about 90 percent of Africa was ruled by Africans. Twenty years later, after a period of competitive land grabbing called the Scramble for Africa, virtually the whole continent had been parceled out to the European states. Only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent.
The reasons for European imperialism are numerous and complex; they include national pride; strategic competition; the search for new markets, raw materials, and cheap labor; and a European sense of mission partly based on social Darwinism. For Africans, the colonial experience brought European technology, ideas, and religions, as well as a deep-seated resentment and bitterness bred of European exploitation and condescension.
The age of imperialism was relatively short-lived, and almost as soon as the continent was carved up, African nationalists began campaigning for independence. Within the first thirty years after World War II, virtually all of the African colonies had become independent states.
EUROPEAN EXPANSIONISM BEFORETHE NINETEENTH CENTURY
Imperialism can be defined as “the process by which one state, with superior military strength and more advanced technology, imposes its control over the land, resources, and population of a less developed region.” This phenomenon was not new to the nineteenth century, of course. With the Age of Exploration in the fifteenth century, Spain and Portugal became the first major colonizers, and over the next century, Spain established a huge empire in the Americas, including most of South America.
The French explored and then colonized much of North America, but were eventually replaced almost everywhere by the British. The Dutch explored and colonized in the Pacific and Indian oceans, especially in Indonesia. Beginning in the fifteenth century, the Portuguese began exploring the west coast of Africa and setting up settlements there for trade, especially in slaves, and missionary work. England, France, Spain, and other Europeans soon followed suit.
The first subjects of European colonization, however, were also the first to become independent. Britain’s colonies in North America revolted and gained independence at the end of the eighteenth century, and most of South America gained independence from Spain and Portugal during the early nineteenth century. By the middle of that century, only Britain had a large empire, stretching across the globe from Canada through India to Australia and New Zealand. The British proudly claimed that “the sun never sets on the British Empire.” By the 1880s, only Africa, Indochina (in Southeast Asia), China, and the Pacific Islands remained unclaimed by Europeans.
THE MOTIVATIONS FOR IMPERIALISM
The primary motive for imperialist expansion was economic. The Industrial Revolution stimulated both production and demand in Europe and led to a search by entrepreneurs and governments alike for new sources of raw material for industry, new markets for the products of industry, and new supplies of labor, especially cheap labor. The drive for overseas markets was intensified by a long and deep economic depression across Europe, beginning in 1873 and lasting until the mid-1890s. As their economies declined, one country after another imposed tariffs (taxes on imports) as a means of protecting their own industries from foreign competition.
Such protectionism led to further declines in foreign trade and contributed to the deepening depression. To get around this, European states sought “sheltered markets” free from such restrictions to trade and found them in the colonies they established in Africa and Asia. This nineteenth-century form of imperialism, however, was much more intensive and expensive than earlier forms and included substantial capital investments in the colonies in the form of mines, plantations, railroads, harbor facilities, banks, and the like. These investments necessitated a political and military presence to protect them, thus bringing soldiers, administrators, and settlers in increasing numbers.
A number of political and economic theorists pointed to imperialism as being a natural consequence of capitalism. In Das Kapital, for example, Karl Marx argued that, in capitalist society, the bourgeoisie required a constantly expanding market for its products. And the Russian Marxist and revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, in his booklet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) asserted that imperialism was an inevitable stage in capitalist development. It would, however, bring the capitalist states into conflict with each other as they competed for colonial territory and would produce wars of national liberation in the colonies themselves against colonial powers. Lenin believed that imperialism was, therefore, a major cause of war among capitalist states (including World War I) and that it would eventually lead to the downfall of capitalism.
There were other motivations for imperialism besides purely economic ones. Both the Great Game of imperialist competition in the Middle East and the Scramble for Africa were driven in part by the strategic and diplomatic rivalries of the great powers in Europe. Britain and France had long been rivals on the European continent, and with the unifications of Germany and Italy in the 1860s and 1870s, those two countries were also drawn into the struggle for power and influence.
Britain, in particular, wanted to protect its interests in India and Egypt from other Europeans. In the 1880s, Britain established a protectorate over Afghanistan as a buffer against Russian expansionism toward India; it established another protectorate over Egypt to protect its control of the recently built Suez Canal (which connected the Mediterranean and Red seas). As the British statesman Lord Curzon put it, Turkestan, Afghanistan, and Persia were “pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the domination of the world.” The same could be said of Africa, where each European country scrambled to acquire territory before any of its rivals could. There was also a humanitarian element in European expansionism into less-developed countries, although this was often tainted by condescension and social Darwinism. Many Europeans felt that their involvements in the colonies would help uplift and modernize the peoples of Africa and Asia. Christian missionaries wished to save souls and bring Christ to those they regarded as heathen and therefore lost.
And many missionaries and reform-minded settlers sought to end real or imagined native practices that they considered barbaric, such as slavery, child marriage, polygamy, and cannibalism.
But much of this was motivated by the social Darwinist notions that the natural superiority of some races justified the conquering of “backward” peoples. The Englishman Herbert Spencer, the main advocate of social Darwinism, felt that Darwin’s notion of the survival of the fittest applied to nations as well as to species. This condescension could take extreme forms: In 1904, a local zoo in Hamburg, Germany, for example, exhibited a group of Samoan women in one of its enclosures. The conjunction of social Darwinism and imperialism is illustrated by English writer Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “The White Man’s Burden” (1899), in which he urges the United States to take up that burden in the Philippines after it had annexed them that same year:
Take up the White Man’s burden-
Send out the best ye breed-
Go bind your sons in exile,
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild-
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
