New Imperialism

New Imperialism was the expansionist foreign economic policy, resulting from the breakdown of Pax Britannica, which was seen amongst the more powerful of the European nation-states, in that period of time between the Franco-Prussian War and World War I, during the late-Victorian Era, also known as, "The Era of Empire for Empire's Sake". During this period, Europe added almost 23,000,000 km² (20% of Earth's land area) to its collection of overseas colonial possessions, with the focus of this period being that of colonizing Africa.

Scholars continue to debate the causes and ramifications of this period of colonialism, most notably, the relationship this period might have to the First World War.

For Old Imperialism see: mercantilism and free-trade colonialism

Pax Britannica

In the years, prior to the Franco-Prussian War, Britain became known as, "the workshop of the world", being the world's most advanced industrial nation. Following the defeat of Napoleon, British goods were produced so cheaply that they could often undersell, locally manufactured, goods in almost any other market. At this time, Britian was supplying half the manufactured goods of such nations as Germany, France, Belgium, and the United States.

The decline of Pax Britannica, was made possible by changes economics and the balance of power, such as the breakdown of the Concert of Europe and the establishment of nation-states in Germany and Italy. As France, Germany, and the United States, increasingly became industrial powers, Britain's comparative advantages began to decline.

Loss of Britain's Comparative Advantage

German textiles and metal industries had, by the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War, surpassed those of Britain and usurped British manufactures within their own domestic market. Meanwhile, Britain was growing incapable of dominating its captive markets, such as India, and was likewise witnessing market depletion in the industrializing regions of central Europe, Latin America, and China. Britain had lost, and would continue to lose, much of its comparative advantage. Britain’s share of world trade fell from 25%, in 1880, to 16% in 1913, to 12% by 1948.

The Long Depression

The abovementioned problems coincided with the ‘Long Depression’ of 1873-1896, which had followed fifteen years of economic instability. Business, after 1873, suffered from lengthy periods of falling profits. During this period, production often exceeded domestic demand. The capitalists, being powerful political forces, urged the nation towards securing new markets in Africa.

The Second Industrial Revolution led increasingly efficient machines, along with monopolistic mass-production, resulting in greatly expanded output and lowered production costs. As a result, production often exceeded domestic demand. People, such as [[Joseph Chamberlain, concluded that profits were falling because, "too much capital was chasing too few markets". He argued that formal imperialism was necessary for Britain because of the relative decline of the British share of the world’s export trade and the rise of German, American, and French economic competition.

Technology and Innovation

New techonologies also played an important role during this era. The development of steam ships greatly decreased transportation costs and made previously unviable markets, in Africa, of great economic interest. New techniques, especially that of mass production, reduced production costs, further increasing the potentials for profit.

The African Power Vacuum

The continent of Africa was also largely unclaimed by nation-states of significant military power. Most of this region consisted of territories claimed by the ‘dying nations’ (i), (Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the Ottoman Empire), none of which were significant powers by the begining of the twentieth century. As a result, the major European powers felt that the entire continent was open to colonization. This led to what is known as, "the scramble for Africa".

Increasing Competition

As mentioned, by the end of the Franco-Prussian War, Britain was no longer the world's sole modern, industrialized nation. Germany, Italy, and France were no longer as embroiled in continental concerns and domestic disputes, as they were prior to the Franco-Prussian War. The industrial nations began to enter an era of aggressive national rivalry, particularly in regards to trade and colonialism, this era is the that of the New Imperialism.

Continental political developments of the late 19th century, rendered imperial competition feasible, in spite of Britain’s centuries of naval superiority. As unification of Germany, by the Prussian "Garrison State", proceeded, the Germans began to compete against the British, for control of foreign markets, notably in southern Africa. The rise of Napoleon III and the Third Republic also rendered France more capable of challenging Britain’s global preeminence. Likewise, Italy became interested in securing African markets.

Many European statesmen and industrialists wanted to accelerate the rise of formal colonialism, securing colonies before they strictly needed them. Their reasoning was that markets might soon become glutted, and a nation’s economic survival depend on its being able to offload its surplus products elsewhere.

Chamberlain, Hobson, Capitalism, and Finance

Pro-imperialist industrialists, like Joseph Chamberlain, never represented a majority in Britain’s Parliament. Joseph Chamberlain argued on behalf of a grand imperial Zollverein, or customs union. This campaign failed in the 1890s and for another forty years afterwards until the premiership of his son, Neville.

Just as industrial capitalism had replaced mercantilism and commercial capitalism in the 18th Century, finance capitalism supplanted industrial capitalism in the late 19th Century. Late-Victorian political leaders, most of whom were stockholders , “shared a common culture with the financial class.” This prompted critic J.A. Hobson to conclude that the financiers were unfairly manipulating events and in possession of far too much power.

British Strategic Expansions

For Britain, the 1869 completion of the Suez Canal, prompted the strengthening of control over Egypt. Battles over the Nile headwaters caused Britain to expand in Sudan, and the close proximity of Russia's expanding empire, to India, triggered wars in Afghanistan. Rhodes and Milner advocated a “Cape to Cairo” empire, which would link, by rail, the Suez Canal to the mineral rich regions of southern Africa. Though hampered by the German conquest of Tanganyika, Rhodes continued to lobby on behalf of a vast British empire, in East Africa.

Social Darwinism and Human Rights

Racism and Social Darwinism were terms sometimes used to describe the so-called "mission of civilization", that is, the practice of spreading republican government and capitalist economics. Human rights issues, during this era, were similar to those of earlier imperialist eras.

The Entente Cordiale and the Franco-Prussian Alliance

German Otto von Bismarck argued in favor of the new colonies, “They are new markets for German industry, for the expansion of trade, and a new field for German, activity, civilization, and capital”. Eventually German expansion would result in the the Entente Cordiale, in fact, was an agreement between Britain and France for the purposes of curtailing further German expansion. Likewise, the Franco-Russian alliance came into being.

The 1890 Census and The Panic of 1893

The United States was a newly industrializing nation, like Germany. The findings of the 1890 Census, popularized by historian Frederick Jackson Turner, in his paper, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, contributed to fears of dwindling natural resources . The Panic of 1893, during President Cleveland's second administration, led American businessmen and politicians to come to the same conclusions as their European counterparts, that industry had over-expanded and was producing more goods than domestic consumers could purchase. Politicians, such as Henry Cabot Lodge, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt, advocated a more aggressive foreign policy. in order to pull the United States out of this depression.

The Panic created a depression, not unlike the Long Depression, which bred doubts about the strength of capitalism. Similarly, the post-1873 in Europe period, had seen a reemergence of militant working-class organization. Like the Long Depression, the Panic of 1893 contributed to fierce competition over those markets lying within the depressed nation's spheres of influence, which, in the case of the United States, tended to overlap with Britian, especially in the Pacific and South America.

Just as the German Reich reacted to depression with the adoption of protective tariff protection in 1879 , so would the United States with the landslide election victory of William McKinley, who had risen to national prominence six years earlier with the passage of the McKinley Tariff of 1890. Britain’s economic threat from the United States, hence, was (at the time at least) intensified by America’s rise as a great military and political power after the Civil War, its adoption of such protective tariff protection, its acquisition of a colonial empire in 1898, and its building of a powerful navy—the Great White Fleet—under the slain McKinley’s more “big stick”, racist, and militarist successor, Theodore Roosevelt. This course of events, ushered in by the Second Industrial Revolution—paralleled a similar trend in Germany, which emerged as a potential military power after its own unification, its adoption of a tariff in 1879, its acquisition of a colonial empire in 1884-85, and its building of a powerful navy after 1898. On the Pacific, since the Meiji Restoration, Japan’s development followed a similar pattern, following the Western lead in industrialization and militarism, enabling it to gain a foothold or ‘sphere of influence’ in Qing China.

Although US capital investments within the Philippines and Puerto Rico were relatively small (figures that would seemingly detract from the broader economic implications on first glance), these colonies were strategic outposts for expanding trade with Asia, particularly China and Latin America, enabling the United States to reap the benefit of China’s ‘Open Door’ and Dollar Diplomacy under Taft—a sort of US variant of Britain’s informal colonialism. Such developments, whether in Germany, Japan or in the United States, hence disseminated fears that formal imperialism was necessary for Britain because of its relative decline of the British share of the world’s export trade. Imperialism for the United States, however, marked by the reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine (formalized by the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in 1904), would thus herald the trend of the United States replacing Britain as the predominant ‘investor’ in Latin America—a process largely completed by the end of the Great War.

The Scramble for Africa

Until the dismissal of the aging Chancellor Bismarck by the pigheaded and belligerent Kaiser Wilhelm II, the expropriation of vast, unexplored areas of Asia and Africa by emerging imperial powers such as Italy and Germany and more-established empires such as Britain and France was nevertheless relatively orderly. The 1885 Congress of Berlin, initiated by Bismarck to establish international guidelines for the acquisition of African territory, formalized this new phase in the history of Western imperialism. Between the Franco-Prussian War and the Great War (the age of New Imperialism), Europe added almost 9 million square miles—one-fifth of the land area of the globe—to its overseas colonial possessions.

The late 19th century saw the transition from 'informal empire' of control through economic dominance to direct control, marked by the scramble for further territory in Africa from the late 1870's in areas previously regarded as open to British trade and influence. The Berlin Conference (1884-85) regulated the imperial competition between Britain, France and Germany, defining "effective occupation" as the criterion for international recognition of colonial claims, codifying the imposition of direct rule, accomplished usually through armed force.

While some British colonies were already a century old, Egypt was occupied by British forces in 1882 (although not formally declared a protectorate until 1914); Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda were subjugated in the 1890s and early 1900s; and in the south, the Cape Colony (first acquired in 1795) provided a base for the subjugation of neighbouring African states and the Dutch Afrikaner settlers who had left the Cape to found their own republics (see Boer War).

Formal empire in Sub-Saharan Africa, the last vast region of the world largely untouched by ‘informal imperialism’ and “civilization”, was also attractive to Europe’s ruling elites for other potential reasons. First, insofar as the “Dark Continent” was agricultural or extractive, and no longer ‘stagnant’ since its integration with the world’s interdependent capitalist economy, it required more capital for development that it could provide itself . Second, during a time when in nearly every year since the 1813 liberalization of trade onward Britain’s balance of trade showed a deficit, and a time of shrinking and increasingly protectionist continental markets, Africa offered Britain an open market that would garner it a trade surplus—a market that bought more from the metropole than it sold overall . Britain, like most other industrial countries, had long since begun to run an unfavorable balance of trade (which was increasingly offset, however, by the income from overseas investments). As perhaps the world’s first post-industrial nation, financial services became an increasingly more important sector of its economy. Invisible financial exports, as mentioned, kept Britain out of the red, especially capital investments outside Europe, particularly to the developing and open markets in Africa, predominately white ‘settler colonies’, the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific.

Control of tropical Africa had strategic implications in an era of feasible inter-capitalist competition, particularly for Britain, which was under intense economic and thus political pressure to secure lucrative markets such as India, China, and Latin America. In Britain’s case this process of capitalist diffusion had in many regions led it to acquire colonies in the interests of commercial security; France and Germany would later follow suit. For example the 1869 completion of the Suez Canal, prompted the strengthening of control of Egypt. Battles over control of the Nile headwaters caused Britain to expand in thh Sudan, and the close proximity of the Russia’s expanding empire in Central Asia to India also terrified Lord Curzon, thus triggering Afghan wars of conquest. Rhodes and Lord Milner (the British colonial minister in South Africa) also advocated the prospect of a “Cape to Cairo” empire, which would link by rail the extrinsically important canal to the intrinsically mineral and diamond rich South, from a strategic standpoint. Though hampered by German conquest of Tanganyika until the end of World War I, Rhodes successfully lobbied on behalf of such a sprawling East African empire. Formal colonies were often, in hindsight, strategic outposts to protect large zones of ‘investment’, such as India, Latin America, and China.

Each of Europe’s major elites also found some advantages in formal, overseas expansion: mammoth monopolies wanted imperial support to secure overseas investments against competition and domestic political tensions abroad; bureaucrats wanted more occupations, military officers desired promotion, and the traditional but waning landed gentry wanted formal titles. Observing the rise of trade unionism, socialism, and other protest movements during an era of mass society in both Europe and later North America, the elite in particular was able to utilize imperial “jingoism” to co-opt the support of the impoverished industrial working class. Riding the sentiments of the late nineteenth century Romantic Age, imperialism inculcated the masses with ‘glorious’ neo-aristocratic virtues and helped instill broad, nationalist sentiments.

New Imperialism in Africa and Asia

Changes in African Society

Capitalism, an economic system in which capital, or wealth, is put to work to produce more capital, revolutionized traditional economies, inducing social changes and political consequences that revolutionized African and Asian societies. Maximizing production and minimizing cost did not necessarily coincide with traditional, seasonal patterns of agricultural production. The ethic wage productivity was thus, in many respects, a new concept to supposedly ‘idle’ natives merely accustomed to older patterns of production. Balanced, subsistence-based economies shifted to specialization and accumulation of surpluses. Tribal states or empires organized along precarious, unwritten cultural traditions also shifted to a division of labor based on legal protection of land and labor—once inalienable, but now commodities to be bought, sold, or traded.

The Congo Free State

As an aside, it must be noted that the integration of traditional economies in Africa within the framework of the modern, capitalist economy was also particularly exploitative. Leopold’s fortunes, ploughed back into monumental buildings in Brussels, for instance, was made mainly on the proceeds of Congolese rubber, which had never been mass-produced in surplus quantities.

Exploitation of the Dutch East Indies, French Indochina, German Southwest Africa, Rhodesia, and South Africa paled in comparison to that of the Belgian Congo. The most infamous example of this is the Congo Free State. The fortunes of King Leopold II, for instance, the famed philanthropist, abolitionist, and self-anointed sovereign of Congo Free State (1885)—76 times larger geographically than Belgium itself—and those of the multinational concessionary companies under his auspices, were mainly made on the proceeds of Congolese rubber, which had historically never been mass-produced in surplus quantities. Between 1880 and 1920 the population of Congo thus halved; over 10 million ‘indolent natives’ unaccustomed to the bourgeois ethos of labor productivity, were the victims of murder, starvation, exhaustion induced by over-work, and disease.

Notes

i -- The term "dying nations" is attributed to Lord Salisbury, during the 1890s.