IMPERIALISM AND COLONIALISM 1870-1914

Imperialism is the process of extending one state control over another a process that takes many forms. Historians begin by distinguishing between formal and informal imperialism. “Formal imperialism”, or colonialism, was sometimes exercised by direct rule: the colonizing nations annexed territories outright and established new governments to subjugate and administer other states and peoples. Sometimes colonialism worked through indirect rule: the conquering Europeans reached agreements with indigenous leaders and governed them. There was no single technique of colonial management; as we will see, resistance forced colonial powers to shift strategies frequently. “Informal imperialism” refers to a more subtle and less visible exercise of power, in which the stronger state allowed the weaker state to maintain, its independence while reducing its sovereignty. Informal imperialism took the form of carving out zones European sovereignty and privilege, such as treaty ports, within other states. It could mean using European economic, political, and cultural power to get advantages treaties or terms of trade. Informal imperialism was not only common; it played an even more fundamental role in shaping global power relations.

Both formal and informal imperialism expanded dramatically in the nineteenth century. The “scramble for Africa” was the most sudden and startling case of formal imperialism: from 1875 to 1902 Europeans seized up to 90 percent of the continent. The overall picture is no less remarkable: between 1870 and 1900, a small group of western states [France, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia, and the United States] colonized about one quarter of the world land surface. In addition to these activities, Western states extended informal empire in sections of China and Turkey, across South and East Asia, and into Central and South America. So striking was this expansion of European power and sovereignty that by the late nineteenth century contemporaries were speaking of the “new imperialism”.

Imperialism was not new. It is more helpful to think of nineteenth-century developments as a new stage of European empire building. The “second European empires” took hold after the first empires, especially those in the New World, had by and large collapsed. The British Empire in North America was shattered in 1776 by the American Revolution. French imperial ambitions across the Atlantic were toppled along with napoleon. Spanish and Portuguese domination of Central and South America ended with the Latin American revolutions of the early nineteenth century. In what ways were the second, nineteenth-century European empires different?

The nineteenth-century empires developed against the backdrop of developments we have considered in the preceding chapters: industrialization, liberal revolutions, and the rise of nation –states. These developments changes Europe, and they changed European imperialism. First, industrialization created new economic needs for raw materials. Second, industrialization, liberalism, and science forged a new view of the world, history, and the future. A distinguishing feature of nineteenth-century imperialism laid in Europeans conviction that economic development and technological advances would inevitably bring progress to the rest of the world. Third, especially in the case of Britain and France, the nineteenth-century imperial powers were also in principle democratic nations, where government authority rested on consent and on the equality of most citizens. This made conquest and subjugation more difficult to justify and raised increasingly thorny questions about the status of colonized peoples. Nineteenth-century imperialists sought to distance themselves from earlier histories of conquest. They spoke not of winning souls for the church or subjects for the king, but rather of building railroads and harbors, encouraging social reform, and fulfilling Europe’s secular mission to bring civilization to the world. The “new” aspects of nineteenth-century imperialism, however, resulted equally from changes and events outside Europe. Resistance, rebellion, and recognition of colonial failures obliged Europeans to developed new strategies of rule. The Haitian revolution of 1804 , echoed by slave rebellions in the early nineteenth century, compelled the British and French, slowly to end the slave trade and slavery in their colonies in the 1830 and 1840, although new systems of forced labor cropped up to take their places. The examples of the American Revolution encouraged the British to grant self-government to white settler in Canada [1867], Australia [1901], and New Zealand [1912]. In India , as we will see, the British responded to rebellion by taking the area away from the east India Company and putting it under control of the crown, by requiring civil servants to undergo more training, and by much more careful policing of indigenous peoples. Almost everywhere, nineteenth-century empires established carefully codified racial hierarchies to organize relationships between Europeans and different groups. [Apartheid in South Africa is but one example]. In general, nineteenth-century imperialism involved less independent ‘entrepreneurial’ activity by merchants and traders [such as the East India Company] and more “settlement and discipline.” This meant that empire became a vast project, involving legions of administrators, school teachers, and engineers. Nineteenth-century imperialism then arose from new motives. It produced new forms of government and management in the colonies. Last, it created new kinds of interactions between Europeans and indigenous peoples.

THE NEW IMPERIALISM AND ITS CAUSES

All historical events have many causes. The causes of a development with the scope, intensity, and long range importance of the “new imperialism’ inevitably provoke heated controversy. The most influential and long standing interpretation points to the economic dynamics of imperialism. As early as 1902, the British writer J. a Hobson charged that what he named the “scramble for Africa” had been driven by the interest of a small group of wealthy financiers. British taxpayers subsidized armies of conquest and occupation, and journalists whipped up the public’s “spectatorial lust of jingoism” but Hobson believed that the core interests behind imperialism where those of international capitalists. At a time when fierce economic competition was producing protectionism and monopolies, he argued, and when Western Europe did not provide the markets that industry needed, investors sought out secure investment opportunities overseas, in colonies. Hobson saw investors and international bankers as the central players: “large savings are made which cannot find any profitable investment in this country, they must find employment elsewhere.” Yet investors were not alone. Their interest matched those of manufactures involved in colonial trade, the military, and the armaments industry. Hobson was a reformer and social critic. His point was that international finance and business had distorted conceptions of England’s real national interest. He hoped that genuine democracy would be an antidote to the country imperial tendencies.

Hobson’s analysis, still widely read, inspired the most influential Marxist clique of imperialism, which came from the Russian socialist and revolutionary leader Vladimir Iliac Lenin. Like Hobson, Lenin underscored the economics of imperialism. Unlike Hobson, he considered imperialism to be an integral part of late – nineteenth-century capitalism. Competition and the monopolies that it produced had lowered domestic profits. Capitalists, Lenin argued, could only enlarge their markets at home by raising workers wages, which would have the effect of further reducing profits. Thus the “internal contradictions” of capitalism produced imperialism, compelling capitalists to invest and to search for new markets overseas. If this were the case, it followed that Hobson hopes for democratic reform were misplaced; only overthrowing capitalism itself could check imperialist expansion, conflict, and violence. Lenin published his book [imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism, 1917] at the height of World War 1, a war many considered imperialist. The timing gave reel urgency to his argument that revolution alone could topple capitalism, imperialism, and the forces that had brought the world to the brink of disaster.

Historians now would agree that economic pressures were one though only one, important cause of imperialism. In the case of Great Britain, roughly half its total o 4 billion in foreign invesment was at work within its empire. As Hobson, Lenin, and their contemporaries correctly noted, late nineteenth-century London was rapidly becoming the banker of the world. In all western euro pen countries, demand for raw materials made colonies seem a necessary investment and helped persuade government that imperialism was a worthwhile policy. Rubber, tin, and foods, coffee, sugar, tea, wool, and grain supplied European consumers. Yet the economics explanation has limits. Colonial markets were generally too poor to meet the needs of European manufactures. Africa, the continent over which Europeans frantically “scrambled” was the poorest and least profitable to investors. Regarding overseas investment, before 1914 only a very small portion of German capital was invested in Russia, hoping to stabilize that ally against the Germans, than in all their colonel possessions. Yet some of these calculations are clear only in retrospect. Many nineteenth-century Europeans expected the colonies to produce profits. French newspapers, for instance, reported that the Congo was “rich vigorous. And fertile virgin territory, ” with “fabulous quantities” of gold, copper, ivory, and rubber. Such hopes certainly contributed to expansionism, even if the profits of empire did not match Europeans expectations.

A second interpretation of imperialism emphasizes strategic and nationalist motives more than economic interest. International rivalries reinforced the belief that vital national interest were at stake, and made European powers more determined to control both the government and economies of less developed nations and territories. French politicians supported imperialism as a means of restoring national prestige and honor, lost in the humiliating defeat by the Prussians in 1870-1871. The British on the other hand, looked with alarm at the accelerating pace of industrialization in Germany and France and feared losing their existing and potential world markets. The Germans recently unified in a modern nation, viewed overseas empire as a “national” birthright possession and as a way of entering the club of great powers.

This second, noneconomic, interpretation stresses the links between imperialism  and nineteenth-century state and nation building. That nations should be empires was not always self-evident. Otto Von Bismarck, the architect of German unification, long considered colonialism overseas a distraction from far more serious issues on the continent of Europe. By the last decades of the century, however , Germany had joined France and England in what seemed an urgent race for territories. Advocates of colonialism from businessmen and explores to writer [such as Rudyard Kipling] and political theorists- spelled out why empire was important to a new nation. Colonies did more than demonstrate military power, they showed the vigor of a nation economy, the strength of its convictions, the will of its citizenry, the force of its laws and the power of its culture. A strong national community could assimilate others, bring progress to new lands and new peoples.

One German proponent of expansion called colonialism the “national continuation of the German desire for unity”. Lobby groups such as the German colonial society, the French colonial party, and the royal colonial institute argued for empire in similar terms, as id newspaper, which also recognized the attraction of sensational stories of overseas conquest. Presented in this way, as part of nation building, imperialism seemed to rise above particular interest or mundane cost-benefit analysis. Culture law, religion, and industry were vital national products, and their value rose as they were exported and defended abroad.

Third, imperialism had important cultural dimensions. A French diplomat once described the British imperial adventure Cecil Rhodes as “a force cast in an idea” the same might be said of imperialism itself. Imperialism as an idea excited such explores as the Scottish missionary David Livingston, who believed that the British conquest of Africa slave trade, and “introduce the negro family into the body of corporate nations”. Rudyard Kipling, the British poet and novelist, wrote of the “white man’s burden”, a notorious phrase that referred to the European mission to “civilize” what Kipling and others considered the “barbaric” and “heathen” quarters of the globe. Taking arms against the slave trade, famine, disorder, and illiteracy seemed to many Europeans not only a reason to invade Africa and Asia, but also a duty and proof of a somehow superior civilization. These convictions did not cause imperialism, but they illustrate how central empire building became to the west self image. In short, it is difficult to disentangle the economic, political, and strategic “causes” of imperialism. It is more important to understand how the motives over lapped. Strategic interest often persuaded policy makers that economics issues were at stake. Different constituencies- the military, international financiers, missionaries, colonial lobby groups at home- held different and often clashing visions of the purpose and benefits of imperialism. “imperial policy” was less a matter of long-range planning than of a series of quick responses, often improvised, to particular situations. International rivalries led policy makers to redefine their ambitions. So did individual explorers, entrepreneurs, or group of settlers who established claims to hitherto unknown territories that home government then felt compelled to recognize and defend. Finally, Europeans were not te only players on the stage. Their goals and practices were shaped by social changes in the countries in which they became involved , by the independent interest of local peoples , and by resistance , which as often as not, they found themselves unable to understand and powerless to stop.

 Is there any reason to call nineteenth-century imperialism “new”? economic integration or developing lines of investment and trade to the advantages of the European, was not new. The informal and subterranean exercise of European power at work in Latin America, china and the ottoman empire was a much more long term process. This kind of power expanded more or less continuously through the modern period. But nineteenth-century imperialism did have new aspects or specific features stamped on it by developments within Europe and by indigenous to Europeans.

IMPERIALISM IN SOUTH ASIA

How was the Indian empire reorganized after the munity on 1857?

India was the center of the British empire, the jewel of the British crown. It was also an inheritance from eighteenth-century empire building, secured well before the period of the “new imperialism”. The conquest of most of the subcontinent began in the 1750 and quickened during the age of revolution. Conquering India helped compensate for losing north America. General Cornwallis defeated at York town, went on to a brilliant career in India. By the mid nineteenth century, India had become the focal point of Britain newly expanded global power, which reached from southern Africa across south Asia and to Australia. Keeping this region involved changing tactics and forms of rule.

Until the mid-nineteenth century, British territories in the subcontinent were under the control of the British east India company. The company had its own military, divided into European and [far larger] Indian divisions. The company held the right to collect taxes on land from Indian peasants. Until the early nineteenth century, the company had legal monopolies over trade in all goods, including indigo, textiles, salt, minerals, and most lucrative of all, opium. The British government had granted trade monopolies in its northern American colonies. Unlike North American, however, India never became a settler state. In the 183s Europeans were a tiny minority, numbering forty-five thousands in an Indian population of 150 million. The company government was military and repressive. Soldiers collected taxes, civil servants wore military uniform: British troops brashly commandeered peasant’s oxen and carts for their own purpose. Typically, though, the company could not enforce its rule uniformly. It governed some areas directly, other through making alliances with local leaders, and others still by simply controlling goods and money. Indirect rule, here as in other empires, meant finding indigenous collaborators and maintaining their good will. Thus the British cultivated groups that had provided administrators in earlier regimes the Rajputs and Bhumihars of north India, whom they considered especially effective soldiers ,and merchants of big cities such as Calcutta. They offered economic privileges, state offices, or military posts to either groups or entire nations that agreed to ally with the British against others

British policy shifted between two poles: one group wanted to westernize” India, another believed it safer, and more practical, to defer to local culture. Christian missionaries, whose numbers rose as occupation expanded, were determined to replace “blind superstition” with the “genial influence of Christian light and truth”. Indignant at such practices as child marriage and sati [in which a widow immolated herself on her husband funeral pyre], they sought support in England for a wide-ranging assault on Hindu culture. Secular reformers, many of them liberal, considered ‘Hindoos’ and ‘Mahommedans’ susceptible to forms of despotism- in both the family and in the state. They  turned their reforming zeal to legal and political change. But other company and British administrators warned their country men not to meddle with Indian institutions and practices. ‘Englishmen are as great fanatics in politics as Mahommedans in religion. They suppose that no country can be saved without English institutions’ said one British administrator. Indirect rule, they argued, would only work with the cooperation of local powers. Conflicts such as these meant that the British never agreed on any single cultural policy.

FROM MUTINY TO REBELLION

The company rule often met resistance and protest. In 1857-1858, it was particularly badly shaken by what the British called the sepoy [soldiers]rebellion’ now known in India as the great rebellion of 1857. The uprising began near Delhi, when the military disciplined a regiment of sepoys [ the traditional tern for Indian soldiers employed by the British] for refusing to use rifle cartridges greased with pork fat unacceptable to either Hindus or Muslims. Yet as the British Prime minister Disraeli later observed, the decline and fall of empires are not affairs of greased cartridges’. The causes of the mutiny were much deeper and involved social, economic and political grievances. Indian peasants attacked law courts and burned tax rolls, protesting debt and corruption. In areas such as Oudh, which had recently been annexed, rebels defended their traditional leaders, who had been summarily ousted by the British. Army officers from privileged castes resented arbitrary treatment at the hands of the British, they were first promoted as loyal allies and then forced to serve without what they considered titles and honors. The mutiny spread through large areas of northwest India. European troops, which counted for fewer than one fifth of those in arms found themselves losing control. Religious leaders, both Hindu and Muslim, seized the occasion to denounce Christian missionaries sent in by the British and their assault on local traditional and practices.

            At first the British were faced with a desperate situation, with areas under British control cut off from one another and pro-British cities under siege. Loyal Indian troops were brought south from the frontiers, and British troops, fresh from the Crimean war, were shipped directly from Britain to suppress the rebellion. The fighting lasted more than a year, and the British matched the rebels early massacres and vandalism with a systematic campaign of repression. Whole rebel units were either killed rather than being allowed to surrender or else tried on the spot and executed. Towns and village that supported the rebels were burned, just as the rebels had burned European homes and out spots. Yet the defeat of the rebellion caught the British public imagination. After the bloody, inconclusive mess of Crimea, the terrifying threat to British India and the heroic rescue of European hostages and British territory by British troops were electrifying news. Pictures of the Scottish highland regiments [wearing wool kilts in the sweltering heat of India] liberating besieged white women and children went up in homes across the United Kingdom. At a political level, British leaders were stunned by how close the revolt had brought them to disaster and were determined never to repeat the same mistakes.

            After “the munity”, the British were compelled to reorganize their Indian empire, developing new strategies of rule. The east India company was abolished, replaced by the British crown. The British raj [or rule] was governed directly, though the British also sought out collaborators and cooperative interest groups. Princely India was left to the indigenous princes, who were subject to British advisors. The British also reorganized the military, and tried to change relations among soldier. Indigenous troops were separated from each other, in order to avoid the kind of “fraternization” that proved subversive. As one British officer put it, “if one regiment mutinies I should like to have the next so alien that it would fire into it”. Even more than before, the British sought to rule through the Indian upper classes rather than in opposition to them. Queen Victoria, now empress of India, set out the principles of indirect rule. “We shall respects the rights, dignity and honour of native princes as our own, and we desire that they , as well as our own subject should enjoy that prosperity and that social advancement which can only be secured by internal peace and good government.” Civil –service reform opened up new positions to members of the Indian upper classes. The briish had to reconsider their relationship to Indian cultures. Missionary activity was subdued, and the british channeled their reforming impulses into the more secular projects of economic development, railways, roads, irrigation and so on. Still consensus of effective colonial strategies was elusive . Some administrators counseled more reform and change, other sought to give the princes more support , the british tried both, in fits and starts until the end british rule 1947

            In india , the most prominent representative of the “new imperialism” was lord Curzon, a prominent conservative  and the viceroy of india from 1898 to 1905. Curzon deepened british commitments to the region. Concerned about the british position in the world, he warned of the need to fortify india borders against Russia. He urged continued economic investment. Curzon worried out loud that the british would be worn down by resistance to the raj, and that confronted with their apparent inability to transform Indian culture, they would become cynical get “lethargic and think only of home”. In the same way that ruyard kipling urged the british and the American to “take up the white mans burden”, Curzon pleaded with his countrymen to see how central india was to the greatness  of Britain.

            What did india provide to great Britain? By the eve of world war1,india was britain largest export market. One tenth of all the british empire trade passed through india port cities of madras, Bombay, and Calcutta. India mattered enormously to brittain balance of payments: surpluses earned there compensated for deficits with Europe and the united states. Equally important to grat Britain were the human resources of india.Indian laborers worked on tea plantations in Asam, near Bura, and they built railways and dams in southern Africa and Egypt. British rule casts an enormous diaspora of Indian workers throughout the empire. Over a million indentured Indian servants left their country in the second half of the century. India also provided the british empire with highly trained engineers, land surveyors, clerks, bureaucrats, schoolteachers, and merchants. The nationalists leader Mohandas Gandhi , for instance, first came into the public eye as a young lawyer in Pretoria, south Africa, where he worked for an Indian law firm. The british deployed Indian troops across the empire [ they would later call up roughly 1.2 million troops in world war 1]. For all these reason men such as Curzon found it impossible to imagine their empire or even their nation without india.

            How did the british raj shape Indian society?. The british practice of indirect rule sought to create an Indian elite that would serve british interest a group ‘who may be the interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern a class of persons Indian in colour and blood , but English in taste, in opinion, in morals, and in intellect”, as one british writer put in. Eventually, this practice created a large social group of british educated Indian civil servants and businessmen, well trained for government and skeptical about british claims that they brought progress to the subcontinent. This group provided the leadership for the nationalist movement that challenged british rule in india. At the same time, this group became increasingly distant from the rest of the nation. The overwhelming majority of Indians remained desperately poor peasents, many of them unable to pay taxes and thus in debt to british landlords, all strunggling to subsist on diminishing plots of land, villagers working in the textile trad beaten down by imports of cheap anufactured goods from England, all residents of what would become the most populous nation in the world

IMPERIALISM IN CHINA

How did western countries “open” china?

In china , too European imperialism escalated early, well before the period of the “new imperialism’.Yet there it took a different form. Europeans did not conquer and annex whole regions . Instead , they forced favorable trade agreements as gunpoint, set up treaty ports where Europeans lived and worked under their own jurisdiction, and established  outpost of European missionary activity all with such dispatch that the Chinese spoke of their country as being carved up like a melon.

            Since the seventeenth century European trade with china in coveted luxuries such as silk, porcelain, art object, and the Chinese government, which was determined to keep foreign traders, and foreign influence in general, at bay. By the early nineteenth century, however, britain global ambitions and rising power were setting the stage for a confrontation. Freed from the task of fighting napoleon, the british set their sights on improving the terms of the china trade , demanding the rights to come into open harbors and to have special trading privileges. The other source of constant friction involved the harsh treatment of british subjects by Chinese law courts including the summary execution of several Britons convicted of crimes. And by the 1830 these diplomatic conflicts had been heightened by the opium trade.

THE OPIUM TRADE

            Opium provided a direct link among Britain, British India, and China. Since the sixteenth century, the drug had been produced in India and carried by Dutch, and later, British traders. In Fact, opium [derived from the poppy plant] was one the very few commodities that European could sell in China, and for this reason it become crucial to the balance of east west trade. When the british conquered northeast India, they also annexed one of the richest opium growing areas and became deeply involved in the trade so much so that historians do not shy from calling east india company rule a “ narco- military empire ”. British agencies designated specific poppy-growing regions and gave cash advances to Indian peasants who would cultivate the crop. Producing opium was a labor-intensive process: peasant cultivators the sap and formed it into opium balls, which were dried before being weighed and shipped out, In the opium- producing areas northwest of Calcutta,”factories” employed as many as one thousand Indian workers forming and curing the opim, as well as young boys whose job it was to turn the opium balls every four days.

            From India, the east india company sold the opium to “country traders” small fleets of british, dutch, and Chinese shippers who carried the drug to southeast asia and china. Silver paid for the opium came back to the east india company, which used it, in turn to buy Chinese goods for the Europeans market. The trade, therefore, was not only profitable, it was key to a triangular europens Indian Chinese economic relationship. Production and export rose dramatically in the early nineteenth century. By the 1830s: when the british Chinese confrontation was taking shape, opium provided british india with more revenues than any other source except taxes on land.

            People all over the world consumed opium, for medical reasons as well as for pleasure. The Chinese market was especially lucrative. Eighteenth century china had witnessed a craze for tobacco smoking that taught users how to smoke opium. A large, wealthy Chinese elite of merchant and government officials provided much of the market, but opium smoking also became popular among soldiers, students, and Chinese laborers. In the nineteenth century opium imports followed Chinese labor al over the world to southeast asia and san Francisco. In an effort to control the problem, the Chinese government banned opium imports, prohibited domestic production, criminalized smoking, and in the 1830s began a full scale campaign to purge the drug from china. That campaign set the Chinese emperor on a collision course with british opium traders. In one confrontation the Chinese drug commissioner Lin confiscated 3 million pounds of raw opium from the british abd washed it out to sea. In another the Chinese authorities blockaded british ships in port, and local citizens demonstrated angrily in front of british residences.

THE OPIUM WARS

            In 1839, these simmering conflicts broke into what was called the firt “opium war”. Drugs were not the core of the matter. The highlighted larger issues of sovereignty and economic status: the Europeans “rights” to trade with whom ever they pleased , by passing Chinese monopolies; to set up zones of Europeans residence in defiance of Chinese sovereignty; and to proselytize and open schools. War flared up several times over the course of the century. After the first war of 1839-1842, in which british steam vessels and guns overpowered in Chinese fleet, the treaty of Nanking 1842 compelled the Chinese to give the british trading privilegers, the right to reside in five cities, and the port of hong kong “in perpetuity” . After a second war the british secured yet more treaty ports and privileges, including the rights to send in missionaries. In the aftermath of those agreements between the Chinese and british, other countries demanded similar rights and economic opportunities. By the end of the nineteenth century, during the period of the new imperialism, the French, germans, and russians had claimed mining rights and permission to build railroads, to begin manufacturing with cheap Chinese labor, and to arm and police Europeans communities in Chinese cities. In shanghai, for instance, seventeen thousand foreigners lived with their own courts, school, churches, and utilities. The united states, not wanting to be shouldered aside, demanded its own “open door policy”. Japan wa an equally active imperialist power in the pacific, and the sinojapanese war on 1894-1895 was a decisive moment in the history of the region. The Japanese victory forced china to concede trading privileges, the independence of Korea, and the Liaotung Peninsula in Manchuria. It opened a scramble for spheres of influence and for mining and railway concessions. The demand for reparations forced the chinnese government to levy greater taxes. All these measures heightened resentment and destabilized the regime.

            Surrendering previleges to Europeans and the Japanese seriously undermined the authority of the Chinese qing emperor at home and only heightened popular hostility to foreign intruders. Authority at the imperial center had been eroding for more than a century by 1900, hastened by the opium wars and by the vast taiping rebellion 1852-1864, an enormous, bitter, and deadly conflicts in which radical Christian rebels in south central china challenged the authority of the emperors themselves. On the defensive against the rebels, the dynasty hired foreign generals, including the british commander Charles Gordon to  lead its forces. The war devastated china agricultural heartland, and the death toll, never confirmed, may have reached 20 million. This ruinous disorder, and the increasing inability of the emperor to keep order and collect the taxes necessary to stabilize trade and repay foreign loans, led Europeans countries to take more and more direct control of their side of the “ china trade”

THE BOXER REBELLION

From a western perspective, the most important of the nineteenth century rebellions against the corruptions of foreign rule was the boxer rebellion of 1900. The boxers were a secret society of young men trained in chine martial arts and believed to have spiritual powers. Anti foreign and anti missionary, they provided the spark for a loosely organized but widespread uprising in northern china. Bands of boxes attacked foreign engineers, tore up railways lines, and in the spring of 1900 marched on Beijing . They laid siege to the foreign legations in the city , home to several thousand western diplomats and merchants and their families . The legations small garrison defended their walled compound with little more than rifles, bayonets, and improvised artillery, but they withstood the siege for fifty-five days until a large relief column arrived. The rebellion, particularly the siege at Beijing, mobilized a global response. Europe Great powers, rivals everywhere else in the world, drew together in response to this crisis in order to tear china part. An expedition numbering twenty thousand troops combining the forces of Britain, France, the United States, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia ferociously repressed the boxer movement. The outside powers then demanded indemnities, new trading concessions, and reassurances from the Chinese government.

            The boxer rebellion was one of several anti imperialist movements at the end of the nineteenth century. The rebellion testified to the vulnerability of Europeans imperial power. It dramatized the resources Europeans would have to devote to maintaining their far-flung influence. In the process of repression, the europes became committed to propping up corrupt and fragile governments in order to protect their agreements and interest, and they were drawn into putting down popular uprisings against local inequalities and foreign rule.

            In china the age of the new imperialism capped a century of conflict and expansion. By 1900, virtually all of Asia had been divided up among the European powers. Japan, an active imperial power in its own rights, alone had maintained its independence. British rule extended from india across Burma, Malaya, Australia and new Zealand . The dutch, Britain longstanding trade rivals , secured indonesia. During the 1880s[ among Britain, france, and Russia, china and japan] caused the strunggle for influence  and economic advantages in asia, that strunggle, in turn exacerbated nationalist feeling  Imperial expansion, the expression of Europeans power, was showing its destabilizing effects.

RUSSIAN IMPERIALISM

Russia was a persistently imperialist power throughout the nineteenth century. Its rulers championed a policy of annexation by conquest, treaty or both of lands bordering on the existing Russian state. Beginning in 1801, with the acquisition of Georgia following a war with Persia, the tsars continued to pursue their expansionist dream. Bessarabia and Turkestan[taken from the turks] and Armenia[from the Persians] vastly increased the empire size. This southward colonization brought the Russian close to war with the british twice; first in 1881 when Russian troops occupied territories in the trans Caspian region, and again in 1884-1887, when the tsars forces advanced to the frontier of Afghanistan. In both cases the british feared incursions into areas they deemed within their sphere of influence in the middle east. They were concerned, as well about a possible threat to india. The maneuvering, spying, and support of friendly puppet governments by Russia and britain became known as the ‘great game’ and foreshadowed western countries jockeying for the regions oil resources in the twentieth century.

            Russian expansion also moved east. In 1875, the Japanese traded the southern half of Sakhalin island for the previously RusSion Kurile islands. The tsars eastward advance was finally halted in 1904. Russian expansion in Mongolia and Manchuria came up against Japanese expansion, and the two powers went to war. Russia huge imperil army more than met its match in a savage, bloody conflict. Russian navy was sent halfway round the world to reinforce the beleaguered Russian troops, but was ambushed and sunk by the better trained and equipped Japanese fleet. This national humiliation helped provoke a revolt in Russia and led to an american brokered peace treaty in 1905. The defeat shook the already unsteady regime of the tsar, and proved that European nations were no the only ones who could play the imperial game successfully.

THE FRENCH EMPIRE AND CIVILIZING MISSION

Like british expansion into india, French colonialism in northern Africa began before the so called new imperialism of the late nineteenth century. By the 1830s, the French had created a general government of their possessions in Algeria, the most important of which were cities along the Mediterranean coast. From the outset the Algerian, the conquest was different from most other colonial ventures: Algeria became a settler state, one of the few a part from south Africa. Some of the early settlers were utopian socialists, out to create ideal communities; some were workers the French government deported after the revolution of 1848 to be “resettled” safely as farmers; some were winegrowers whose vines at home had been destroyed by an insect infestation. The settlers were by no means all French; they included Italian, Spanish, and maltese merchants and shopkeepers of modes means, laborers, and peasants. By the 1870s, in several of the coastal cities, the new creole community outnumbered indigenous Algerians, and within it, other Europeans outnumber the French. With the French military help, the settlers appropriated land, and French business concerns took cork forests and established mining in cooper,lead and iron. Economic activity was for European benefit. The first railrods, for instance, did not even carry passengers; they took iron ore to the coasts for export to france, where it would be smelted and sold.

            The settlers and the French governments did not necessarily pursue common goals. In the 170s, the new and still fragile third republic [founded after napolean111 was defeated in 1870] in an effort to ensure the settlers loyalty, made the colony a department of france. This gave the French settlers the full rights of republican citizenship. It also gave them the power to pass laws in Algeria that consolidated their privileges and community [ naturalizing al Europeans, for instance] and further disenfranchised indigenous populations, who had no voting rights at all. French politicians in paris occasionally objected to settlers contemptuous treatment of indigenous peoples, arguing that it subverted the project of “lifting up” the natives. The French settlers in Algeria had little interest in such a project; although they paid lip service to republican ideals, they wanted the advantages of “frenchness” for themselves. Colonial administrators and social scientists differentiated the “good” mountain dwelling berbers, who could be brought into French society, from the “bad” arabs whose religion made them supposedly inassimilable. In Algeria, then, colonialism was at the very least a three way relationship and illustrates the dynamics that made colonialism in general a contradictory enterprise.

            Before the 1870s colonial activities aroused relatively little interest among the French at home. But after the humiliating defeat in the franco- Prussian war[180-181] and the establishment of the third republic, colonial lobby groups and, gradually, the government, became increasingly adamant about the benefits of colonialism. These benefits were not simply economic. Taking on the “civilizing mission” woud reinforce the purpose of the French republic and the prestige of the French people. It was frances duty “ to contribute to this work of civilization.” Jules ferry, republican political leader, successfully argued for expanding the frenh presence in indochina, saying, “ we must believe that if providence deigned to confer upon us a mission by making us masters of the earth, this mission consists not of attempting an impossible fusion of the races but of simply spreading or awakening among the other races the superior notions of which we are the guardians”. Those “ superior notions” included a commitment to economic and technological progress and to liberation from slavery, political oppression, poverty, and disease. In what ferry ironically considered an attack on the racism of his contemporaries, he argued that” the superior races have a right vis-à-vis the inferior races… they have a right to civilize them”.

            Under ferry, the france acquired Tunisia [1881], northern and central vietnam9 tonkin and annam: 1883], and laos and Cambodia[1893]. They also carried this “civilizing mission” into their colonies in west Africa. European and atlantic trade with the west coast of Africa, in slaves, gold, and ivory, had ben well established for centuries. In the late nineteenth century, trade gave way to formal administration. The year 1895 saw the established of a federation of French west Africa, a loosely organized administration to govern an area nine time the size of france, including guinea, Senegal and the ivory coast. Even with forms and centralization in 1902. French control remained uneven. Despite military campaign of pacification, resistance remained, and the French deal gingerly with tribal leaders t some times deferring to their authority and at others trying to break their power. They established French courts and law only in cities, leaving Islamic or tribal courts to run other areas. The federation aimed to rationalize the economic exploitation of the area, and to replace “booty capitalism” with a more careful management and development of resources. The French called this “enhancing the value” of the region, which was part of the civilizing mission of the modern republic. The federation embarked on an ambitious program of public works. Engineers rebuilt the huge harbor at Dakar the most important on the coasts to accommodate rising exports. with some utopian zeal they redesigned older cities, tried to improve sanitation and health, improved water systems, and so on. The French republic was justifiably  proud of the Pasteur Institute for bacteriological research, which opened in France in 1888 overseas institutes became part of the colonial enterprise. One plan called for a large-scale West African railroad network to lace through the region. A publics school program built free schools in villages not controlled by missionaries. Education, though, was not compulsory and was usually for boys.

Such programs plainly served French interests. "Officially this process is called civilizing, and after all, the term is apt, since the undertaking serves to increase the degree of prosperity of our civilization," remarked one Frenchman who opposed the colonial enterprise. None of these measures aimed to give indigenous peoples political rights. As one historian puts it, "the French government general was in the business not of making citizens, but of civilizing its subjects." More telling, however, the French project was not often successful. The French government did not have the resources to carry out its plans, which proved much more expensive and complicated than anyone imagined. Transportation costs ran very high. Libor posed the largest problems. Here as elsewhere, Europeans faced massive resistance from the African peasants, whom they wanted to do everything from building railroads to working mines and carrying rubber. The Europeans resorted to forced labor, signing agreements Slaves with local tribal leaders to deliver workers, and they turned a blind eye to the continuing use of slave labor in the interior. For all of these reasons, the colonial project did not produce the profits some expected. In important respects, however, the French investment in colonialism was cultural. Railroads, schools, and projects such as the Dakar harbor were, like the Eiffel Tower (1889), symbols of the French nation modernity, power, and world leadership.

THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA AND THE CONGO

French expansion into \West Africa was but one instance of Europe's voracity on the African continent. The scope and speed with which the major European powers conquered and colonized, asserting formal control was astonishing. The effects were profound. In 1875, 11 percent of the continent was in European hands. By 1902, the figure was 9O percent. European powers mastered logical problems of transport and communication ; they learned how to keep diseases at bay. They also had new weapons. The Maxim gun, adopted by the British army in 18!9 and first used by British colonial troops, pelted out as many as five hundred rounds a minute; it turned encounters with indigenous forces into bloodbaths and made armed resistance virtually impossible.

THE CONGO FREE STATE

In the 1870s, the British had formed new imperial relationships along the costs of south and east Africa, and in the north and west. A new phase of European involvement struck right at the heart of the continent. Until the latter part of the nineteenth century this territory had been out of bounds for Europeans. Therapids down stream on such strategic rivers as the Congo and the Zambezi made it difficult to move inland, and tropical diseases against which Europeans had little or no resistance were lethal to most explorers. But during the 1870s, a new drive into central Africa produced results. The target was the fertile valleys around the river Congo, and the European colonizers were a privately financed group of Belgians paid by their king, Leopold II ( 1 865-1909). They followed in the footsteps of Henry Morton Stanley, an American Newspaper man and explorer who later became a British subject and a knight of the realm. Stanley hacked his way through thick canopy jungle and territory where no European had previously set foot. His "scientific" journeys inspired the creation of a society of researchers and students of African culture in Brussels, in reality a front organization for the commercial company set up by Leopold. The ambitiously named International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of the Congo was set up in 1876, and set about signing treaties with local elites that opened the whole Congo River basin to commercial exploitation. The vast resources of palm oil and natural rubber and the promise of minerals (including diamonds) were now within Europeans' reach.

 The strongest resistance that Leopold's company faced came from other colonial powers, particularly Portugal, which objected to this new drive for occupation. In 1884, a conference was called in Berlin to settle the matter of control over the Congo River basin. It was chaired by the master of European power politics, Otto von Bismarck, and attended by all the leading colonial nations, as well as the United States. The conference established ground rules for a new phase of European economic and political expansion- Europe two great overseas empires, Britain and France, and the strongest emerging power inside Europe, germany, joined forces and settled the Congo issue. Their dictates seemed to be perfectly in line with nineteenth century liberalism. The Congo valleys would be open to free trade and commerce,- a slave trade still run by some of the Islamic kingdoms in the region would be suppressed in favor of free labor and a Congo Free State would be set up, denying the region to the formal control of any single European country. In reality the "Congo Free State" was run by Leopold's private company, and the region was opened up to unrestricted exploitation by a series of large European corporations. The older slave trade was suppressed, but the European companies took the "free" African labor guaranteed in Berlin and placed workers in equally bad conditions. Huge tracts of land, larger than whole European countries, became diamond mines or plantations for the extraction of palm oil, rubber, or cocoa. African workers labored in appalling conditions, with no real medicine or sanitation, too little food, and according to production schedules that made European factory labor look mild by comparison. Hundreds of thousands of African workers died from disease and overwork. Because European managers did not respect the different cycle of seasons in central Africa, whole crop years were lost, leading to famines. Laborers working in the heat of the dry season often carried individual loads on their backs that would have been handled by heavy machinery in a European factory. Thousands of Africans were pressed into work harvesting goods Europe wanted. They did so for little or no pay, under the threat of beatings and ritual mutilation for dozens of petty offenses against the plantation companies, who made the laws of the 'Tree State." Eventually the scandal of the Congo became too Grcat to go on unquestioned- A whole generation of authors and journalist, most famously Joseph Conrad in his hcart of darkness, publicized the arbitrary

brutality and the vast scale of suffering. In 1908, Belgium was forced to take direct control of the Congo, turning it into a Belgian colony. A few restrictions at least were imposed on the activities of the great plantation companies that had brought a vast new store of raw materials to European industry by using slavery in all but name.

THE PARTITION OF AFRICA

The occupation of Congo, and its promise of great material wealth, pressured other colonial powers into expanding their holdings. By the 1880s, the scramble for Africa was well underway, hastened by stories of rubber forests or diamond mines in other parts of central and southern Africa. The guarantees made at the 1884 Berlin conference allowed the Europeans to take further steps. The French and Portugese increased their holdings. Italy moved into territories along the Red Sea, beside British-held land and the independent kingdom of Ethiopia.

Germany came to relatively to empire overseas. Bismarck was reluctant to engage in an enterprise that he believed would yield few economic or political advantages. Yet he did not want either Britain or France to dominate Africa, and Germany seized colonies in strategic locations. The German colonies in Cameroon and most of modern tanzania separated the territories of older, more established powers. Though the German were not the most enthusiastic colonialists, they were still fascinated by the imperial adventure, and jealous of their territories. When the Herero people of german Southwest Africa (now

Namibia) rebelled in the early 1900s, the Germans responded with a vicious campaign of village burning

and ethnic killing that nearly annihilated the Herero. Great Britain and France had their own ambitions.

The French aimed to move west to east across the continent, an important reason for the French expedition to Fashoda (in the Sudan) in 1898 (see below). Britain's part in the "scramble" took place largely in southern and eastem Africa, and was encapsulated in the dreams and career of one man: the diamond tycoon, colonial politician, and imperial visionary Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes, who made a fortune from the South African diamond mines in thc l870s and l88Os and founded the diamond mining company DeBeers, became prime minister of Britain Cape Colony in 1890. (He left part of this fortune for the creation of the Rhodes scholarships to educate future leaders of the empire at Oxford.) In an uneasy alliance with the Boer settlers in their independent republics and with varying levels of support from London, Rhodes pursued two great personal and imperial goals. The personal goal was to build a southern African empire that was founded on diamonds. "Rhodesia" would fly the Union Jack out of pride but send

its profits into Rhodes' own companies. Through bribery, double dealing, careful coalition politics with the british and boer settlers, warfare, and outright theft, Rhodes helped carve out territories occupying the modern nations of Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Botswana-most of the savannah of southern Africa. Rhodes had a broader imperial vision, one colonialists that he shared with the new British colonial secretary in the late 1890s, Joseph Chamberlain. The first part of that vision was a British presence along the whole of eastern Africa, symbolized by the goal of a "Cape-to- Cairo" railway. The second was that the empire should  make Britain self-sufficient, with British industry able to run on the goods and raw materials shipped in from its colonies, then exporting many finished products back to those lands. Once the territories of "Zambeziland" and "Rhodesia" were taken, Rhodes found himself turning against the European settlers in the region, a conflict that led to outright war in 1899 (see below). This battle over strategic advantage, diamonds, and European pride was symbolic of the "scramble." As each European power sought its "place in the sun," in the famous phrase of the German Kaiser William II, they brought more and more of Africa under direct colonial control. It created a whole new scale of plunder as companies were designed and managed to strip the continent of its resources, and African peoples faced a combination of direct European control and "indirect rule" which allowed local elites friendly to European interests literally to lord over those who resisted. The partition of Africa was the most striking instance of the new imperialism, with international and domestic repercussions.

IMPERIAL CULTURE

HOW DID EMPIRE AFFECT EUROPEAN IDENTITY?

The relationship between the metro pole and the colonies was not carried on at a distance; imperialism was thoroughly anchored in late nineteenth-century Western culture. Images of empire were everywhere in the metro pole. They were not just in the propagandist literature distributed by the proponents of colonial expansion, but on tins of tea and boxes of cocoa, as background themes in posters advertising everything from dance halls to sewing machines. Museums and world's fairs displayed the products of empire and introduced spectators to "exotic peoples" who were now benefiting from European "education." Music halls rang to the sound of imperialist songs. Empire was almost always present in novels of the period, sometimes appearing as a faraway setting for fantasy, adventure, or stories of self-discovery. Sometimes imperial themes and peoples were presented as a subtly menacing presence at home. Even in the tales of Sherlock Holmes, which were set  in London and not overtly imperialist, the furnishings of empire provided instantly recognizable signs of opulence and decaden ce. Ln The Sign oJ Four, Holmes visits a gentleman in a lavish apartment: "Two great tiger skins thrown athwart [the carpet] increased the suggestion of Eastern luxury as did a huge hookah which stood upon a mat in the comer." In "The Man with the Twisted Lip," l Vatson wanders into one of the supposed opium dens in the East End of London, and is waited on by a "sallow Malay attendant." The "dens" themselves were largely an invention; police records of the time show very few locations in London that supplied the drug. As a realm of fantasy, overseas empires and "exotic" cultures became part of the centuryi sexual culture. Photos and postcards of North African harems or "unveiled" Arab women were common in European pornography, as were colonial memoirs that chronicled the sexual adventures of their authors. Empire, however, was not simply background; it played an important part in establishing European identity. In the case of France, the "civilizing mission" demonstrated to French citizens the grandeur of their nation. Building railroads and 'bringing progress to other lands" illustrated the vigor of the French republic. Many

British writers spoke in similar tones. One called the British empire 'the greatest secular agency for good known to the world." Another, using more religious Empire, language, argued, "The Britiih race may safely be called a missionary race. The command to go and teach all nations is one that the British people have, whether dchtly or wrongly, regarded as specially laid upon themselves." The sense of high moral purpose was not restricted to male writers or authority figures. In England, the United States, Cermany, and France, the speeches and projects of women's reform movements were full of references to empire and the civilizing mission. Britain's woman suffrage movement, for instance, was fiercely. critical of the British government but often equally nationalist and imperialist. Asking that women be brought into British politics seemed to involve calling on them to take on imperial, as well as civic, responsibilities. British women reformers wrote about the oppression of Indian women by child marriage and sati, and saw themselves shouldering the "white woman's burden" of reform. The French suffragist Hubertine Auclert \^/rote a book entitle d Arab Women in Algeria (1900), which angrily indicted both French colonial administrators for their indifference to the condition of women in their domains and the French

republic for shrugging off the claims of women at home. Her arguments stung precisely because they rested on the assumption that European culture should be enlightened. Arab women were "victims of Muslim debauchery," wrote Auclert, and polygamy led to "intellectual degeneracy." The image of women languishing in the colonies not only dramatized the need for reform, it enabled European women in their home countries to see themselves as bearers of progress. The liberal writer and political theorist John Stuart Mill (see Chapter 20) regularly used the colonial world as a foil. \flhen he wanted to drive home a point about freedom of speech or religion, he pointed to India as a counter example, trading in stereotypes about Hindu or Muslim "obscurantism," and appealing to British convictions that theirs was the superior civilization. This contrast between colonial backwardness or moral degeneration and European civility and stability shaped Vestern culture and political debate. Imperial culture also gave new prominence to theories of race. In the 1850s, Count Arthur de Cobineau (181{-1882) had written a massive tome on Tbe Ine4uality oJ tbe Races, but the book sparked little interest until the period of the new imperialism, when it was translated into English and widely discussed. For Gobineau, race offered the "master key" to understandlng  lems in the modern world. He argued, "The racial question overshadows all other problems of history . . .the ineguality of the races from whose fusion a people is formed is enough to explain the whole course of it destiny-'Some of Cobineau's ideas followed from earlier Enlightenment projects that compared and examined different cultures and govemments. Unlike his Enlightenment predecessors, however, Cobineau did not believe that environment had any effect on politics, culture, or morals. Race was all. He argued that a people degenerated when it no longer had "the same blood in its veins, continual adulteration having gradually affected the quality of that blood." Enlightenment thinkers often argued that slavery made its victims unable to understand liberty. Cobineau, by contrast, asserted

that slavery proved its victims' racial inferiority. Houston Stewart Chamberlain (tSSS-1s27), the son of a British admiral, tried to improve Gobineaul theories and make them more "scientific." That meant tying racial theories to the new scientific writing about evolution, Charles Darwin's natural science, and Herbert Spencer! views about the evolution of societies. (On Darwin and Spencer, see Chapter 23.) Like other european thinkers concerned with race, Chamberlain used the concept of evolutionary change to show that races changed over time' Chamberlaint books proved extremely popul5r, selling tens of thousands of copies in England and Cermany. Francis Galton (1822-191t), a British scientist who studied evolution, similarly explored how hereditary traits were communicated from generation to generation. In 1883, Calton first used the term "eugenics" to refer to the science of improving the "racial qualities" of humanity through selective breeding of "superior types." Karl Pearson (1857-1936), who did pioneering work in the use of statistics, turned his systematic analysis to studies of intelligence and "genius," sharing

Galton's worries that only new policies of racial management would check Europe's impen&ng decline. These theories did not, by themselves, produce an imperialist mindset, and they were closely linked with other developments in European culture, particularly renewed antagonism about social class and a fresh wave of European anti-Semitism (see Chapter 23). Yet the increasingly scientific racism of late nineteenth- century Europe made it easier for many to reconcile the rhetoric of progress, individual freedom, and the "civilizing mission" with contempt for other peoples. It also provided a rationale for imperial conquest and a justification for the bloodshed that imperialism brought, for instance, in Africa'

Still, Europeans disagreed on these issues. Politicians and writers who championed imperialism, or offered racial lustifications for it, met with opposition- Such thinkers as Hobson and lrnin condemned the entire imperial enterprise as an act of greed and antidemocratic arrogance- V'riters such as Joseph Conrad, who shared many of their contemporaried racism, nevertheless believed that imperialism signaled deeply rooted pathologies in European culture. In short, one result of imperialism was serious debate on its effects and causes. Many of the anti-imperialists were men and women from the colonies themselves, who brought their case to the metropole. The British Committee of the Indian National Congress, for instance, gathered together many members of london's Indian community determined to educate British public opinion about the exploitation of Indian peoples and resources. This work involved speaking tours, demonstrations, and meetings with potentially sympathetic British radicals and socialists. Perhaps the most defiant of all anti-imperialist actions was the London Pan-African conference of 1900, staged at the height of the "scramble for Africa" and during the Boer \War (see below). The conference grew out of an international tradition of African American, British, and American antislavery movements, and out of groups like the African Association (founded in 1897), which brought the rhetoric used earlier to abolish slavery to bear on the tactics of European imperialism. They protested forced labor in the mining compounds of South Africa as akin to slavery and asked in very moderate tones for some autonomy and representation for native African peoples. The Pan-African Conference of tgOO r.r,as smal1, but it drew delegates from the Caribbean, \Vest Africa, and North America, including the thirty-two-year-old Harvard Ph.D. and leadlng African American intellectual \f. E. B. Dubois (1868-1963). The conference issued a proclamation "To the Nations of the \World," with a famous introduction rr'rirten bl' DuBois ' The Problem of rhe n"en- IupenrAL CULTuRE 809 tieth century is the problem of the color line. . . . In the metropolis of the modern world, in this the closing year of the nineteenth century" the proclamation read, "there has been assembled a congress of men and women of African blood, to deliberate solemnly the present situation and outlook of the darker races of mankind." The British government ignored the conference completely. Yet Pan-Africanism, like Indian nationalism, grew by sudden (and, for imperialists, disturbing) leaps after Voild Var I. In recent years historians have become increasingly interested in colonial cultures, or the results of the imperial encounter across the world. Cities such as Bombay, Calcutta, and Shanghai boomed in the period, more than tripling in size. Hong Kong and other

"treaty ports", run as outposts of European commerce and culture, were transformed as Europeans built

banks. shipping enterprises, schools, and military academies, and engaged in missionary activities. The variety of national experiences makes generalization very difficult, but w€ can underscore a few points. First, colonialism created new, hybrid cultures. Both European and indigenous institutions and practices, especially religion, were transformed by their contact with each other.. Second, although Europeans often

considered the areas they annexed "laboratories" for creating well-disciplined and orderly societies, the social changes Europeans brought in their wake confounded such plans. In both western and southern Africa, European demands for labor brought men out of their villages, leaving their families behind, and

crowded them by the thousands into the shantytowns bordering sprawling new cities. Enterprising locals set up all manner of illegal businesses catering to transitory male workers, disconcerting European authorities in the process. HoPes that European rule would create a well-disciplined labor force and well-patrolled cities were quickly dashed. Third, authorities on both side of the colonial encounter worried   enormously about preserving national traditions children of such unions. But such prohibitions only and identity in the face of an inevitably hybrid and drove relations underground, increasing the gap be constantly changing colonial culture. Especially in China and India, debates about whether education should be "westernized' or continue on traditional lines set off fierce debates. Chinese elites, already divided over such customs as foot binding and concubinage (the legal practice of maintaining formal sexual partners for men outside their marriage), found their over territories dilemmas heightened as imperialism became a more powerful force. Uncertain whether such practices should be repudiated or defended, they wrestled with great anguish over the ways in which their own culture had been changed by the corruption of colonialism. Proponents of reform and change in China or India had to sort through their stance toward "modern" western culture, the culture of the colonizers, and "traditional" popular culture. For their part, British, French, and Dutch colonial authorities fretted that too Much familiarity between colonized and colonizer would weaken European traditions and undermine European power. In Phnom Penh, Cambodia (then part The turn of the twentieth century brought a series of of French Indochina), where French citizens lived in crises to the western empires. Those crises did not end neighborhoods separated from the rest of the city by a moat, colonial authorities nonetheless required "dressing appropriately and keeping a distance from the natives."Scandalized by what he considered the absence of decorum among the French in the city, a French journalist asserted that a French woman should never be seen in the public market. "The Asians cannot understand such a fall." European women were to uphold European standards and prestige. Not surprisingly, sexual relations provoked the most anxiety and also the most contradictory responses. "ln this hot climate, passions run higher" wrote a French administrator in Algeria. "The French soldiers seek out Arab women due to their strangeness and newness." "lt was common practice for unmarried Englishmen resident in China to keep a Chinese girl, and I did as others

did," reported a British man stationed in Shanghai. But when he followed convention and married an English woman, he sent, his Chinese mistress and their three children to England to avoid any awkwardness. European administrators fitfully tried to prohibit liaisons between European men and indigenous women, labeling such affairs as "corrupting" and "nearly always disastrous." They grew increasingly hostile to the children of such unions. But such prohibitions only drove relations underground, increasing the gap between the public facade of colonial rule and the private reality of colonial lives. In this and other spheres, colonial culture forced a series of compromises about “acceptability," and created changing, sometimes subtle, ethnic hierarchies. And such local and personal dramas  were no less complex than the Great Powers' clashes over territories.

CRISES OF EMPIRE AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

WHY WAS THE BOER WAR UNIQUE?

The turn of the twentieth century brought a series of crises to the Western empires. Those crises did not end European rule. They did, however, create sharp tensions between western nations. The crises also drove imperial nations to expand their economic and military commitments in territories overseas. They shook western confidence. In all of these ways, they became central to western culture in the years before world war I.

FASHODA

The first crisis, in the fall of 1898, pitted Britain against France at Fashoda, in the Egyptian Sudan. Britain's establishment of a "protectorate" in Egypt after the 1880s Suez Canal confrontation had several important effects. It changed British strategy in east Africa, encouraging Rhodes's "Cape to Cairo" ideas. It also opened up the archaeological and cultural treasures of Egypt's past to British adventurers and academics, keen student sand self-aggrandizing editors----of history. It seemed that the most ancient civilization was now linked to the most successful modem one, and British explorers could trace the "source of the Nile" by traveling up waters that were governed under a British flag. Explorers were not the only Britons to venture farther up the Nile. In the name of protecting the new, pro-British ruler, Britain intervened in an Islamic uprising in the Sudan. An Anglo-Egyptian force was sent to the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, led by the most flamboyant- and perhaps least sensible---of Britain colonial generals, Charles "Chinese" Gordon, well known for his role in suppressing the Taiping Rebellion.The Sudanese rebels, led by Mahdi (a religious leaders who claimed to be the successor to the prophet Muhammad) be sieged Cordon. British forces were ill prepared to move south on the Nile in strength, Cordon ended up dying a "hero death" as the rebels stormed Khartoum. Avenging Gordon occupied officials in Egypt and the British popular imagination for more than a decade. In 1898, a second large-scale rcbellion provided the opportunity. An Anglo-Egyptian army commanded by a methodical and ambitious engineer, General Horatio Kitchener, sailed south up the Nile and attacked Khartoum. Using modern rifles, artillery, and machine guns, they massacred the Mahdi army at the town of Omdurman and retook Khartoum. Gordon's

body was disinterred and reburied with pomp and circumstance as the British public celebrated a famous

and easy victory. That victory brought complications, however. France, which held territories in central Africa next door to the Sudan, saw the British presence along the eastern side of Africa as a prelude to Britain's dominance of the whole continent. A French expedition was sent to the Sudanese town of fashoda to challenge British claims to the southernmost part of the territory. The French faced off with troops from Kitchener's army. For a few weeks in September 1898 the situation teetered on the brink of war. The matter was resolved, however, when Britain not only called France's bluff but also provided guarantees against further expansion by cementing borders for the new "Anglo-Egyptian Sudan," an even greater extension of the political control that had begun with the Suez Canal.

ETHIOPIA

Traditional methods of imperial rule and notions of European military and moral superiority faced other

challenges at the turn of the century. The Boxer Rebellion in China was one of a number of indigenous

revolts against western imperial methods and its consequences. The Russo-Japanese war was a dangerously large conflict between two imperial powers that challenged nations of inherent European superiority over all the peoples of the world.

Other complications for European powers arose as well. During the 1880s and 1890s ltaly had been developing a small empire of its own along the shores of the Red Sea. Italy annexed Eritrea and parts of Somalia, and shortly after the death of Gordon at Khartoum defeated an invasion of its new colonies by the Mahdis forces. These first colonial successes encouraged Italian politicians, still trying to

build a modern industrial nation, to mount a much more ambitious imperial project. In 1896, an expedition was sent to conquer  Ethiopia. Ethiopia was a mountainous, in land empire, the last major independent African kingdom. Its emperor, Menelik II, was a savvy politician and shrewd military commander. His subjects were largely Christian, and the empire trade had allowed Menelik to invest in the latest European artillery to guard his vast holdings. The expedition, which consisted of a few thousand professional ltalian soldiers and many more Somali conscripts, marched into the mountain passes of Ethiopia. Menelik let them come, knowing that by keeping to the roads the Italian commanders would have to divide their forces. Menelik own huge army moved over the mountains themselves, and as the disorganized Italian command tried to regroup near the town of Adowa in March 1896, the Ethiopian army set on the separate columns and destroyed them completely, killing six thousand. Adowa was a national humiliation for Italy, and an important symbol for African political radicals and reformers during the early twentieth century. Menelik's prosperous kingdom seemed a puzzling and perhaps dangerous exception to European judgments about African cultures generally.'

SOUTH AFRICA: THE BOER WAR

Elsewhere in Africa vaulting ambitions led to an even more troubling kind of conflict' Europeans fighting European settlers. The Afrikaners, also ca11ed Boers (an appropriation of the Dutch word for "farmer"), were settlers from the Netherlands and Switzerland who had arrived in South Africa with the Dutch East India  Company in the early 1800s, and who had a long and troubled relationship with their imperial neighbor, great Britain. Over the course of the nineteenth century the Afrikaners trekked inland from the Cape, setting up two independent republics away from the influence of Britain' the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. In the mid 1880s, gold reserves were discovered in the Transvaal. The British diamond magnate and imperialist Cecil Rhodes had actually tried to provoke war between Britain and the Boers in hopes of adding the Afrikaners prosperous diamond mines and pastureland to his own territory of "Rhodesia." In 1899, as the result of a series of disputes, Britain did go to war with the Afrikaners. Despite the recent British victory in the Sudan, the British army was woefully unprepared for the war, supplies, communications, and medicine for the army in South Africa were a shambles. These initial problems were followed by several humiliating defeats as British columns were shot to pieces by Afrika forces who knew the terrain. British garrisons at the towns of Ladysmith and Mafeking were besieged. Angered and embarrassed by these early failures the British government, particularly the colonial secretary Joseph Chamberlain, refused any compromise. The new British commander, Sir Robert Roberts, used superior British resources and the railroads built to service the diamond mines to his advantage. British forces Steam rolled the Boers, relieved the besieged British garrisons, and took the Afrikaner capital at Pretoria. There were celebrations in London, and hopes that the war was now over. The Afrikaners, however, were determined never to surrender. Supplied by other European nations. Particularly germany and the Netherlands, the ,Afrikaners took to the wilderness in "commandos" (small raiding parties) and fought a guerrilla war that dragged on for another three years. British losses due to the commandos and disease led British generals to take most of the comprehensive and brutal steps to which later western armies would frequently resort in the face of guerrilla warfare. Armored blockhouses were set up to guard strategic locations, shooting at anything that moved.

Special cavalry units often using Irish or Australian horsemen fighting for the "mother country," Britain were sent in to fight the guerrillas on their own terms, each side committing its share of atrocities. Black Africans, despised by both sides, suffered the effects of famine and disease as the war destroyed valuable farm  land. The British also instituted "concentration  camp” the first use of the term-where Afrikaner civilians were rounded up and forced to live in appalling conditions so that they would be unable to lend aid to the guerrillas. Nearly twenty thousand civilians died due to disease and poor sanitation over the course of two years. These measures provoked an international backlash. European and American newspapers lambasted the British as imperial bullies. The concentration camps bred opposition in Britain itself where protesters, labeled "pro- Boers" by the conservative press, campaigned against these violations of white Europeans' rights while saying very little about the fate of native Africans in the conflict. In the end, the Afrikaners acquiesced. Afrikaner politicians signed their old republics over to a new, Britis “union of South Africa" that gave them a share of political power. The settlement created an uneasy alliance between English settlers and Afrikaners, politicians for both parties preserved their high standards of having by relying on cheap African labor and, eventually, a system of racial segregation known as apartheid.

U.S. IMPERIALISM

Another imperial power began to emerge in the 1890s: the United States. During the late nineteenth century, American governments and private interests that supported imperial expansion played a double game. The United States acted as the champion of the underdeveloped countries in the western Hemisphere when they were threatened from Europe. Yet America was willing, whenever it suited, to prey on its neighbors either "informally" or formally. This ultimately brought conflict with another, fragile western empire. Spaini feeble hold on its Caribbean and Pacific colonies was plagued by rebellion in the 1880s and 1890s. The American popular press talked up the cause of the rebels, and when an American battleship accidentally exploded in port at Havana, Cuba, American imperialists and the press clamored for a war of revenge. The administration of President william McKinley was extremely wary of going to war, but McKinley also understood political necessity. The United States  stepped in to protect its investments, to guarantee the maritim. security of trade routes in the Americas and the Pacific, and to demonstrate the power of the newly built-up American navy. It declared war on Spain in 1898 on trumped-up grounds and swiftly won' In Spain, the Spanish' American war provoked an entire generation of writers, politicians, and intellectuals to national soul searching. This led to the end of the Spanish monarchy in l9l2 and the germination of political tensions that eventually exploded in the Spanish Ciul war of the 1930s. ... In the same year that the United States won its "splendid little way'' against Spain, it also annexed Puerto Rico, established a "protectorate" over Cuba, and fought a short but brutal war against Philippine rebels who liked American colonialism no better than the Spanish kind. In the Americas, the United States continued its interventions. when the Colombian province of Panama threatened to rebel in 190'3, the American quickly backed the rebels, recognized Panama as a republic, and then proceeded to grant it protection while Americans built the Panama Canal on land leased from the new government' The Panama Canal (which opened officially in 1914), like Britain canal at Suez, cemented  American dominance Of the seas in the Americas and the weastern Pacific' Interventions in Hawaii and later Santo Domingo were further proof that the United States was no less an imperial

power than the nations of Europe.

CONCLUSION

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the longstanding relationship between European nations and the rest of the world entered a new stage' That stage was distinguished by the stunningly rapid extension of formal European control and by new patterns of discipline and settlement. It was driven by the rising economic needs of the industrial \West, by territorial conflict, and by nationalism, which by the late nineteenth century linked nationhood to empire. Among its immediate results was the creation of a "self-consciously imperial" culture in the Vest. At the same time, however, it plainly created unease in Europe, and contributed powerfully to the sense of crisis that swept through the late nineteenth- century west. For all its force, this European expansion was never unchallenged. Imperialism provoked resistance and required constantly changing strategies of rule' During world-war I, mobilizing the resources of empire would become crucial to victory' In the aftermath, reimposing the conditions of the late ninetcenth century would become nearly impossible'' And over the longer term, the political structure, economic developments, and patterns of race relations established in this pcriod would be contested throughout the twentieth century.