Commodore Matthew Perry, shown here being received by the Japanese emperor in 1854, helped open up the island kingdom to U.S. and world trade. (Library of Congress)
A policy of extending the rule of one country over another country or colonies that began with the establishment of empires in the sixteenth century and lasted until the twentieth century.
From 1492 to 1776, mercantile imperialism spread European influence around the world. Portugal, Spain, Holland, France, and England all attempted to exploit parts of the world that were new to them and seemingly undeveloped and uninhabited. The powers competed with each other in Africa, the Americas, and in Asia, each trying to establish trade arrangements that secured its own interest while it excluded the others. Because of the need for control, the indigenous populations were quickly subordinated to colonists—traders, merchants, and agriculturalists—from the home country. These colonists had different roles. Initially, they were to produce the massive stocks of gold and silver for the Spanish. The gold flowed through piracy to the English and through commercial services such as insurance and banking to the Dutch. Mercantilists without gold and silver mines found trade assets in other raw materials: furs, ships, stores, tobacco, rice, and sugar. Settlers provided markets for the finished goods the European states—England, then the others—began producing. Integral to mercantilism was the migration of Europeans to the areas to be exploited.
Commodore Matthew Perry, shown here being received by the Japanese emperor in 1854, helped open up the island kingdom to U.S. and world trade. (Library of Congress)
During the initial settlements, the Europeans were at a disadvantage because they were the intruders and because they came long distances with limited technology that allowed them to come only in small numbers. The initial European toeholds in the Americas, for instance, mostly failed. Successful efforts relied on the aid of the indigenes, whether in Mexico, Virginia, or Canada. Where the natives resisted, as in Asia and India, the European presence was tenuous. In the Americas, the slight European edge in technology, the inability of the indigenous groups to band together, and the major impact of European diseases allowed the Europeans to conquer. Within relatively short periods, they began to take full possession and create mines and plantations to supply the home country with wealth and resources for the mercantile competition of the European states. In Asia, the Europeans were supplicants to a more sophisticated market, wanting more of the Asians’ goods than the Asians wanted of theirs; the Europeans remained dependent on local trading patterns and indigenous elites.
The characteristic “old imperialism” had involved the movement of people to establish primarily coastal agricultural colonies in areas previously unexplored. The Europeans attempted to replicate their home countries in the new areas and named them accordingly: New England, New France, New Spain, New Sweden, and New Netherlands. Success came to those in the most heavily populated settlements. There was a false belief that the expansion was occurring into unsettled and unpopulated lands.
The British success came because trade and empire reinforced each other. As colonies grew, trade between the colonies and the home country increased. Increased trade encouraged merchants to expand their fleets and the volume and variety of goods they shipped to the growing colonial market. The demand for raw materials increased, promoting the slave system in the Caribbean and, once the indentured system faded on the mainland, in the southern colonies of North America as well. Accelerating population growth continued as the colonies became more attractive as sources of economic opportunity or religious refuge, and the expanding population of eighteenth-century North America provided more raw products in return for more finished British goods. At the same time, the larger population led to a greater diversity and sophistication of demand, and British industry such as textiles diversified in response. Linen, cotton, and new hardware and metalware grew in demand in the second half of the eighteenth century. The ideal colonial arrangement was a closed system with large volume, which is what the British had during the quarter century preceding the American Revolution.
But this ideal situation was an anomaly. More typical were the power struggles that characterized the mercantile competition. The frequent wars of the rival imperialists during the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries diverted attention from economic well-being and drained national treasuries. The slow loss of trade wealth eliminated the weaker nations, which were already hampered by the absence of colonies anywhere near as robust as the British Americas. Over time, the competition won over Portugal, Spain, and Holland, leaving the field to France and Britain who fought four wars in less than a century. By 1763, Britain was the last empire to remain standing. But the British perceived a need for colonial assistance in financing the war debts, and the effort to impose taxes and other revenue-enhancers on colonial trade led to the loss of the colonies. The death of mercantilism occurred about the same time as the rise of Adam Smith’s ideas on free trade. As some colonies became independent, others became economically less significant. Therefore, the imperial impulse lessened for a time.
The old style of imperialism was largely abandoned by 1776, and for 80 to 100 years imperialism waned. However, there was a period of lighter activity—the British taking of the Cape Colony (1815), Hong Kong (1842), and New Zealand (1840), the French expansion into Algiers, and perhaps the misadventure of Maximilian in Mexico. But this activity was sporadic, and the trading system was what came to be known as free-trade imperialism, with colonial outposts serving a competitive edge but not necessarily competing with one another. A major contributor was the protective tariff barriers imposed by the Europeans against the British, who consequently looked elsewhere for markets. And because the British had the edge industrially, they had no fear of the competition. The new imperialism was ratified by trade agreement rather than by war: the term of choice was free-trade imperialism.
The first European venture into the greater world, during the age of exploration and discovery after Christopher Columbus, was at least initially a major leap into the unknown, and they had extremely limited assets. By the time the second age of imperialism occurred, the process was more precise, discovered areas had been controlled, and the advantages lay overwhelmingly with the Europeans. The reasons for exploration had changed from the intent to civilize, Christianize, and exploit easy wealth, such as gold and silver. The age of imperialism, from 1850 to 1914, was better characterized as a race by the European powers to possess what was available—the world was being divided quickly, and national prestige, geopolitical influence, and military advantage were all on the line. But more important, in a time when Europe and the United States were fueling their Industrial Revolutions, there was a need for access to reliable markets and sources of raw material.
Initially, the imperial impulse was a political and economic rivalry, with Russia entering Persia, Austria-Hungary entering the Balkans, Italy entering North Africa, Germany entering Baghdad and southwest Africa, and Britain entering North and South Africa as well as western North America. The United States took the spoils of the Spanish-American War, but also entered Canada, Mexico, and the Panama Canal region. Technology penetrated the continent and allowed links back home: railroads and steam engines, telegraphs and weapons far beyond those of the indigenes. There was also quinine, used to treat malaria, and the preferred approach of divide and conquer.
As the pace of “new imperialism” accelerated mid-century, the Europeans used their advanced weapons and technology (transportation and communication) to move into the interiors of the continents. They built railways, dams, roads, and industry to better exploit the raw materials found in the interior. To an extent, the expansion occurred because technology made it possible; to a greater extent, it occurred because the technological advantage at home had created surplus output and a system that needed more raw materials to maintain itself, and perhaps free itself of the economic cycle that featured periodic depressions due to surplus capacity and insufficient consumption. The trade was in European-finished goods for native raw materials, a disadvantage to the natives in Africa, the Near and Middle East, China, Southeast Asia, and North America, including Mexico and Canada.
The societies of West Africa had well-developed and extensive trade arrangements that extended across the Sahara to the north and east. The East African societies traded from Somalia to Mozambique. They traded with the inland Great Zimbabwe and Mwene Matapa. From the fifteenth century on, these traditional economic and cultural links came under pressure from the intrusion of foreign cultural and commercial elements along the coasts. But until the nineteenth century, the impact remained predominantly on the edges of the continent because the interior was inhospitable to the Europeans, limiting the extent of their disruption of interior Africa. Then, late in the nineteenth century the Europeans had the technology, the spirit, and the immunity through new medicines—and their presence quickly became an occupation of virtually the entire continent. In the mid-nineteenth century, they finally did away with the slave trade that they had abetted and profited from, if not coerced. In the late nineteenth century they extended their moral crusade to the source, Africa.
The British, with a vast empire left over from the old imperialism, had no need for Africa. They had moral qualms about the slave trade, but their qualms were not sufficiently strong to put troops on the ground. Although the Atlantic slave trade ended before the resurgence of imperialism, there continued to be a trade across the Sahara and around the Indian Ocean. This trade affected the British experience as the British penetrated Africa. In their pursuit of African products, such as palm oil and groundnuts for margarine, soap, and machines, they interfered with local politics, backing those who at least purported to be abolitionist and were willing to become capitalist. They won over the slave interests in Zanzibar by imposing a naval embargo, resulting in a quick, rewarding, and symbolically uplifting victory. When it came to economic interests, in Africa, the Suez Canal and South Africa were most appealing to the British empire.
The Suez Canal shortened the trip to India by 6,000 miles. The subcontinent was even more an asset than before. The French built the canal on land belonging to the Khedive of Egypt. In return, he received stock in the company. When he ran into financial difficulties in the 1870s, the British bought his stock and thus the controlling interest in the canal.
With the canal open, African ports became moot. South Africa was of interest for other reasons. In 1871, the British annexed the Kimberley field after the discovery of diamonds in 1870. In 1877, they annexed the Boer Transvaal, which led to the Boer uprising of 1881 and defeat for the British—until the discovery of gold in the Transvaal. In 1895, Cecil Rhodes tried to overthrow the Boer government, but he failed and only the second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) ended hostilities between the Boers and the British. The British granted home rule within the British empire in 1906, allowing local legislatures to decide domestic issues.
As Spanish gold brought the Americas to the attention of European mercantilists in the sixteenth century, the discovery of gold and diamonds accelerated the race for Africa. Quickly, the competition for African territory became so fierce that the Europeans met to stabilize the situation. The Berlin Agreement of 1884–1885 specified that no nation would compete for another’s claim. By 1914, Ethiopia and Liberia were the only African nations free of European control.
Having established hegemony, the Europeans began exploiting both the land and the people. The plantation was the preferred arrangement for producing peanuts, rubber, cocoa, and palm oil. Mines were needed to collect South Africa’s gold and diamonds and the Congo’s copper and tin. The Europeans opposed indigenous rulers who resisted their attempt to control the trade, who maintained slave labor or trade, or who attempted to impose tariffs and taxes. The internal slave trade and associated wars persisted despite the European efforts to quell them.
By disrupting the old power arrangements and erasing tribal boundaries, the European intrusion opened the export business to new producers. Tied to the world economy, prices became unstable. Where the imperialists controlled the traditional male activity of slave trading, their actions encouraged the displaced slave traders to take over other economic sectors. For instance, displaced slavers took over palm oil production, traditional women’s work, which led to the loss of women’s economic power and social standing.
By the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman empire grew weak, letting Greece become independent in 1830 and giving Serbia autonomy within the empire in 1806. By 1914, the empire was on the verge of collapse. Within the empire, modernizers broke Egypt away from the Ottomans and convinced the Egyptian peasants to grow cotton instead of food because cotton was in demand in Europe. Further modernization in Egypt led to the creation of the Suez Canal, which speeded trade immensely. When Egypt ran into financial hard times (as was generally to happen to the colonized end of this trade arrangement), the British took the canal and the country.
Britain and Russia competed in Persia as well. Persia would have given Russia an outlet to the Indian Ocean. Britain wanted Persia as a buffer between Russia and India. Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, oil was discovered and the British agreed to develop the fields. After local forces deposed their ruler because he was pro-European and corrupt, Russia and Britain took Persia for their own benefit.
The British presence in India dated to the mercantile age, and the British East India Company dominated until it finally gave control over India to the British government. The indigenous Mughal empire in India began declining in the early eighteenth century. By mid-century, the British East India Company had almost all the sub-continent under its control. By law, India had to provide Britain with tea, indigo, cotton, and coffee. The law also prevented the development of Indian manufacturing. After the East India Company built the rail lines that linked the agricultural interior with coastal ports, India became even more valuable. India did benefit in that the British railway system built there was the third largest in the world, and the British built schools, dams, canals, bridges, telephone and telegraph networks, and roads. They also improved literacy, sanitation, and public health. Negative effects of the British presence in India included substituting commercial production for self-sufficient agriculture, leaving the populace vulnerable to famine and death. British racism delegitimated and weakened Indian culture, leading to protests against the company that led the government to take over in the mid-nineteenth century. Unrest persisted through the period, as did British exploitation of India.
The European system of exploitation unfolded similarly in Southeast Asia. The region was valuable for its proximity to China and the legendary Chinese market. It also had the climate and soil to grow commercial crops, some imported and some native, such as sugar, rubber, cocoa, and coffee. Traders initially established an outpost and negotiated with the local leaders. As trade grew, the European investment increased, and dependence on local rulers, who were sometimes unstable, became less desirable. The need for political stability led to increased control by the European powers, including the taking of territory. The Dutch took Indonesia. The British took Singapore, Malaya, and Burma (Myanmar). The British also promoted the spread of skilled Chinese merchants throughout their empire. France took Indochina, coercing farmers to grow rice commercially and thus reducing the amount of rice the growers had for themselves. Siam avoided the colonial rush through skilled political maneuvering during this entire period. Colonialism brought improved schools, sanitation, and health. It also brought outsiders to work on the colonial plantations and mines, thereby producing a mix of cultures.
In China, American and European merchants had traded for tea and silk since the 1780s. The Europeans had an insatiable desire for Chinese tea and porcelain, but they did not have anything they could sell in adequate volume to hold a reasonable trade balance. When the Qing rulers of China sought to rejuvenate their society by eradicating the opium stored in Guangzhou, the British Parliament declared that open trade was the foundation of civilization and progress, affirmed that God would replace the Chinese evil with good, and declared war. The war ended with concessions to the British in Hong Kong and Shanghai and the general opening of China to British trade, including opium. After China lost the First Opium War (1839–1842), the United States, Britain, and France won concessions and trading privileges in five ports under the 1844 Treaty of Wangxia. Merchants, missionaries, and diplomats set the pattern for the Open Door Policy in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion, which gave the powers unfettered access to all of China.
That the war forced an unwanted drug trade on the Chinese mattered little compared to its aftermath, a continuing loss of Chinese autonomy. The revived imperialism expanded geographically as Europeans began racing to take their own parts of Asia between 1850 and 1880. The Dutch expanded in Indonesia, the French in Indochina, and the United States and Britain in Japan.
But that route to the great China market was a long-term project. In the middle of the pursuit was Japan, which was closed off to the West. Japan came under pressure to open its doors when Commodore Matthew C. Perry intruded in 1854, in pursuit of the American desire to link Asia with the western United States in trade. For the moment, the opening of Asia remained a casual impulse, diverted by the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction. Then postwar industrialization demanded new sources of raw materials and new outlets for American agricultural and manufactured products (maybe broader markets would stabilize an economy characterized by periodic economic depressions). This demand coincided with missionary and military interests: the need to spread Anglo-Saxon Protestant civilization through the world and the closing of the frontier. Early imperial ventures included the purchase of Alaska, the annexation of the Midway Islands, Samoa (the building of a U.S. naval base on Pago Pago in 1878 and then the formal partition in 1899), and Hawaii (annexed 1898). Samoa had the benefit of being on the trade route to Australia, and Hawaii was on the route to the broad Asian market. Although the United States fought two wars to acquire it, the Philippines lacked the significance for trade that it had enjoyed during the centuries of the Manila-Acapulco trade. For the United States, the Philippines was a stepping-stone to greater Asia. It was not even considered a trading partner until the Jones Act of 1914, which established free trade for the United States. With the Philippines, Hawaii, Guam, Wake, and Johnston Atoll, the United States had a strong military posture to protect its trade routes in the Pacific to China.
Latin America began industrializing late, as it was in a position of dependency on Europe. The sympathetic countries were Britain and the United States, both of which advocated free trade at the time. Latin America had to cooperate as Britain took Spain’s place as its leading partner. Britain continued its export of finished goods in return for raw materials from Latin America. Ports and agricultural interests flourished, but nascent regional industry languished as the old economy and class structure strengthened, maintaining Latin America’s backwardness and animus toward equality for mestizos, women, and others, and its refusal to reform land distribution.
In Latin America, most of the countries won independence early in the nineteenth century, and their original leaders were enlightenment figures with a dislike of colonial government. The colonial legacy also discouraged participatory government in favor of class leadership. The colonial parochialism persisted, with class and regional divisions and wide disparities in wealth.
In the late nineteenth century, the economies began to grow, as liberal reformers took office and established the infrastructure and government needed to bring economies up to date. Population and demand soared. Foreign capital and merchants tied the Latin American economy to that of the West, but the growth excluded the peasants. Landowners, still resistant, incorporated new forms of peonage, servitude, and tenancy, and women remained subordinate. The market economy became volatile, especially as outside conditions, mostly European, affected markets. Open trade allowed Germany and the United States to enter the Latin economies by offering financing and incentives. Eventually key industries became foreign controlled, which led to foreign influence on governments. Foreign business people preferred stability, so they allowed or promoted the old elites, maintaining the economic and social status quo.
American interest in Latin America dated from 1855, when William Walker, the filibusterer, assembled his own army and invaded Nicaragua, declaring himself president. Walker’s term lasted two years before he was ousted by hostile Central American states. Similarly, in Panama an isthmian railroad was built in 1855, but the greater effort was the building of the canal. American interest in the canal zone dated from 1814. After Spain opened Cuba to world trade in 1818, it came under strong commercial influence from the United States due to its proximity—interest that led to periodic talk of annexation. In 1848, the United States offered $100 million to buy sugar and cotton slaves and markets, but Spain refused. After Spain lost the war of 1898, the United States kept bases in Cuba and controlled internal affairs, foreign policy, and the economy until 1934 under the Platt Amendment. Cuba was a de facto protectorate.
Elsewhere in the Americas, the Pan-American Union of 1889 promoted U.S. trade and cultural exchanges with Latin America. At one point, the United States owned 80 percent of Mexican railroads and 70 percent of Mexican oil.
Before Commodore Perry’s arrival in 1854, Japanese society was highly structured, with commercial elements—merchants and bankers—looked down upon. Perry’s ships challenged Japanese independence and isolation and its ability to resist the pressure to Westernize. While China succumbed and allowed itself to be divided into spheres, Japan learned the potential of Western military strength, established a nationalist resistance, and began borrowing from the West the ideas and skills that would make Japan strong, rich, and able to resist cultural domination. The Japanese acquiesced when resistance was either hopeless or self-defeating. They channeled nationalism from xenophobia to a disciplined and organized strength for long-term resistance to Western institutions, and they held their basic values while incorporating Western ideas and technology.
Japan incorporated Western science and an imperialism of its own; loosened the caste structure to develop a leadership of merit; began strengthening the state, economy, and military; imposed national taxes, a national education system, and a state-sponsored industry; reformed currency; and established conscription. They did away with the samurai and other obsolete elements. And while developing industry, infrastructure, and exports, Japan managed to avoid provoking the Europeans.
The nineteenth-century expansion of European interests into the rest of the world was an expensive process as the Europeans invested in ports, mines, factories, utilities, plantations, and railroads. They wanted internal improvements good enough to handle the trade they envisioned. Trade did increase, and the economies of both sides developed as a result. The West became much more prosperous than the rest of the world. And the European effort, although it might have begun peacefully enough, reverted to force when faced with obstacles, whether in Africa or in Asia.
The late nineteenth-century imperialism was the final wave of European expansion and the culmination of the free-trade imperialism that had replaced the mercantilist empires in the late eighteenth century. Between 1870 and 1925, there was a general scramble for increased control in Asia and new control in Africa. Factors included power politics, racism, and Darwinian survival of the fit-test. It happened because the imperialists had the overpowering industrial and technological advantage. During this period, there grew an increasing disparity in income and population. Also, there were the battles such as the one in Omdurman (1898), where the machine gun caused thousands of deaths for those who did not have it compared to dozens for those who did. Those who resisted militarily lost, those who accommodated survived (elites and masses alike), and those who incorporated the Western tools prospered. Japan learned all too well, becoming imperialist in its own right.
The European claims met with resistance—the Afrikaans tried and failed to keep the British out. And in Africa the colonial map ignored the preexisting pattern of states, kingdoms, and ethnic groups. The European effort undid old empires—the Ottoman empire became history, with Europeans taking parts. And in some cases, as in India, the Europeans took the rest of what they had earlier occupied, and in the process they remade the local economy into something to fit the colonial power’s interests, not those of the colony. Southeast Asia was a popular arena, where even the United States entered the race. Early in the nineteenth century, the European presence in Africa was negligible, restricted to only the coast. The imperial impulse and improved tropical medicine fueled the race to control the raw materials that made Europe’s industrial economies strong. Strong industrial output meant that they wanted guaranteed markets—and the colonies provided just that.
In the thirty years before the turn of the twentieth century, Great Britain, France, and Germany colonized 8.75 million square miles, home to 105 million people. The empires were global rather than limited, as were those of the first imperial era. Technology made this possible: the steamship that cut a two-month voyage to two weeks; the telegraph that made communication and commerce immeasurably more immediate and efficient; medicine such as quinine, which allowed Europeans to penetrate areas where they would have previously succumbed to disease; and, most important perhaps, the machine gun, which safeguarded European property and resources.
The European powers had entered fully into the industrial age, and their attention was fixed on developing industry and enhancing the growth of their economies. The rapid industrialization and growth generated shortages of raw materials and an oversupply of finished goods that required new markets, either at home or abroad—the latter being preferred because the new market could also become the new supplier of raw materials. Because the Europeans had the technological edge, they managed to venture deeper into areas where their presence had been mostly peripheral, almost dependent on the indigenous leaders for access. They leveraged their initial advantage into an ever-larger disparity in power and wealth as they used the less industrialized areas of the world to their own material advantage.
John Barnhill
See also: British Empire; French Empire; German Empires.
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