19 c Europe, session 3.18 imperialism

Nineteenth Century Europe
PART 3
Imperialism, 1815-1914

Major Themes of This Session
Encountering the “Other”
On the last frontiers
Mass media, the masses & democracy
From Colonialism to Imperialism
HEIC
The Raj
The Imperialist Scramble
Africa
Anglo-Zulu War, 1879
Khartoum, 1863-1898
Omdurman, 2 September 1898
Fashoda, 18 September 1898
Boer Wars, 1880-1904
The Laggards
Italy
Germany
Belgium
Russia
The Newcomers
Japan
The United States
Concluding Thoughts on
Imperialism

The Commercial Revolution at the end of the Middle Ages led to the Age of Exploration and
Discovery. Voila! Encounter with the Other.
To describe the motivations of these sixteenth century “imperialists,” the phrase “God, Gold and
Glory” has been coined.
The more temperate zones of the New World and Far East proved suitable for White Settlement
Colonies such as New Spain, New France and New England. Here intense rivalry with one
another and the original inhabitants led to debates over the proper policies and relations with
these “colored peoples.”
As we have already seen, by the nineteenth century the Enlightenment was giving way before
the movements of Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution and the War between Science and
Religion.
We will now see in this session how Imperialism emerged from this witches’ brew of conﬂicting
ideas.
jbp

THE “OTHER”
The “white race” & the “colored races”

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Napoleon III receiving the Siamese embassy at the palace of Fontainebleau in 1864.Jean-Léon Gérôme

This Wasn’t in the Script!
everywhere “colored peoples” were beginning to notice

WEB DuBois in America

Ho Chi Minh in French Indo-China

Mao tse Tung in China

Mohandas K. Gandhi in London studying law

the myth of white supremacy and invincibility began to crumble

the myth of white supremacy and invincibility began to crumble
it moved from being conventional wisdom to the status of core belief to an
increasingly small and embittered fringe group

dissolve
[Victor Davis] Hanson is the author of the 2001 book Carnage and Culture (Doubleday), published in Great
Britain and the Commonwealth countries as Why the West Has Won, in which he argued that the military
dominance of Western civilization, beginning with the ancient Greeks, results from certain fundamental aspects
of Western culture, such as consensual government, a tradition of self-critique, secular rationalism, religious
tolerance, individual freedom, free expression, free markets, and individualism. Hanson's emphasis on cultural
exception rejects racial explanations for Western military preeminence and disagrees as well with environmental
or geographical determinist explanations such as those put forth by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel
(1997).[5]
According to Hanson, Western values such as political freedom, capitalism, individualism, democracy, scientiﬁc
inquiry, rationalism, and open debate form an especially lethal combination when applied to warfare. Non-
western societies can win occasional victories when warring against a society with these western values, writes
Hanson, but the "Western way of war" will likely prevail in the long run. Hanson emphasizes that western warfare
is not necessarily more (or less) moral than war as practiced by other cultures; his argument is simply that the
"Western way of war" is unequaled in its emphases on devastation and decisiveness, fueled by superior
technology and logistics.
Carnage and Culture examines nine battles throughout history, each of which is used to illustrate a particular
aspect of Western culture that Hanson believes contributes to the dominance of Western warfare. The battles or
campaigns recounted (with themes in parenthesis) are the Battle of Salamis (480 BC; free citizens), the Battle of
Gaugamela (331 BC; the decisive battle of annihilation), the Battle of Cannae (216 BC; civic militarism), the
Battle of Tours/Poitiers (732; infantry), the Battle of Tenochtitlan (1521; technology and reason), the Battle of
Lepanto (1571; capitalism), the Battle of Rorke's Drift (1879; discipline), the Battle of Midway (1942;
individualism), and the Tet Offensive (1968; dissent).
Though Carnage and Culture appeared before the September 11 attacks of 2001, its message that the "Western
way of war" will ultimately prevail made the book a bestseller in the wake of those events. Immediately after
9/11, Carnage and Culture was re-issued with a new afterword by Hanson in which he explicitly stated that the
United States government would win its "War on Terror" for the reasons stated in the book.—Wikipedia

The Last Frontier
Victorian Gentlemen Adventurers

The Last Frontier
Victorian Gentlemen Adventurers
"The Pilgrim", illustration from Burton's Personal Narrative (Burton disguised as "Haji Abdullah", 1853)

Mass Media, the Masses &
Democracy

From Colonialism to
Imperialism, 1815-1870
Victoria
as
Empress
of
India
New Crowns for Old depicts
Prime Minister Disraeli
offering Queen Victoria an
imperial crown in exchange
for an earl's coronet. She
m a d e h i m E a r l o f
Beaconsﬁeld at this time.—
John Tenniel , Punch, 1876

Imperialism• as Compared to Colonialism

The Radicals
Blanqui, Proudhon, Bakunin, Marx

The Congo conference 1884/1885 in Berlin laid the basis for the
Scramble for Africa, the colonial division of the continent—Wikipedia

The Congo conference 1884/1885 in Berlin laid the basis for the
Scramble for Africa, the colonial division of the continent—Wikipedia
Fürst Bismarck

Parliamentary Politics
France (after 1830) and Britain

Isandlwana
This is a photo of Isandlwana the hill in Kwazulu Natal, South Africa where the Battle of Isandlwana
was fought.
The cairn in foreground is one of many marking the location of British mass graves at the site.—
Wikipedia

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When it came to tv in 1965 (?) I used the high school’s primitive VCR (reel-to-reel
½ inch tape) to record it for my students. It was Michael Caine’s ﬁrst big part. He
played the junior co-commander of this heroic defense—jbp

Khartoum
War in the Sudan
Khartoum

Khartoum
War in the Sudan
Khartoum is located in Sudan
Khartoum
Khartoum

Charlton Heston was a brilliant casting. Compare him to this photo—jbp

page ﬂip
Winston Churchill, The River War, vol. II, Longmans, Green & Co., 1899. pp., 248-50.

Fashoda
18 September 1898
Britain vs France

The Fashoda Incident or Crisis was the climax of imperial territorial disputes between Britain and
France in Eastern Africa, occurring in 1898. A French expedition to Fashoda on the White Nile river
sought to gain control of the Upper Nile river basin and thereby exclude Britain from the Sudan. The
French party and a British-Egyptian force (outnumbering the French by 10 to 1) met on friendly terms,
but back in Europe, it became a war scare. The British held ﬁrm as both empires stood on the verge of
war with heated rhetoric on both sides. Under heavy pressure the French withdrew, securing Anglo-
Egyptian control over the area. The status quo was recognized by an agreement between the two
states acknowledging British control over Egypt, while France became the dominant power in Morocco.
France had failed in its main goals. P.M.H. Bell says:
"Between the two governments there was a brief battle of wills, with the British insisting on immediate and unconditional
French withdrawal from Fashoda. The French had to accept these terms, amounting to a public humiliation....Fashoda was
long remembered in France as an example of British brutality and injustice.”
It was a diplomatic victory for the British as the French realized that in the long run they needed the
friendship of Britain in case of a war between France and Germany. It was the last crisis between the
two that involved a threat of war (until 1940) and opened the way for closer relations in the Entente
cordiale of 1904.—Wikipedia

The Boer Wars
The Fashoda affair left the British in a bumptious and exalted mood, and, a year later, this led
them into difﬁculties in South Africa that proved, in the end, to be more humiliating than the
French experience. To explain the incident, one must recall Britain’s attempt to assert control over
the Boers in the Transvaal in 1877 and its setback at Majuba Hill.• That earlier conﬂict had been
terminated by an agreement that…was ambiguous in wording and meaning, being interpreted by
the Boers as a grant of independence but by the British as an understanding that the Transvaal was
part of the British empire and subject to British supervision in foreign and other affairs.
Gordon A. Craig, Europe Since 1815, 3rd edition. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1971. p. 420.

The Jameson Raid
29 Dec 1895-2 Jan 1896

The Jameson Raid
29 Dec 1895-2 Jan 1896
1870-the pastoralist life of the Boers in Orange Free
State and Transvaal was ﬁrst shattered with the
discovery of the Kimberly diamond ﬁeld

The Jameson Raid
29 Dec 1895-2 Jan 1896
conﬂicts ensued between the British capitalist
exploiters, whom the Boers labelled Uitlanders, and
the trekkers (the Great Trek of the 1830s)

The Jameson Raid
29 Dec 1895-2 Jan 1896
1884-Gladstone’s government had recognized (sort
of) the independence of Transvaal following the First
Boer War. No one knew there would be a gold rush
two years later

The Jameson Raid
29 Dec 1895-2 Jan 1896
two years later
1886-now added to the diamond mines were the gold
ﬁelds of the Witwatersrand. Conﬂicts between Boers
and Britishers multiplied

The Jameson Raid
29 Dec 1895-2 Jan 1896
two years later
1886-now added to the diamond mines were the gold
fields of the Witwatersrand. Conflicts between Boers
and Britishers multiplied
1895-96-finally this botched raid by Cecil Rhodes’
employee failed to trigger an uprising by the
“oppressed” Uitlanders. The raiders were arrested

This affair, promptly disavowed by the British government, caused a worldwide sensation and
elicited a personal telegram of encouragement to the Boer government from Emperor William II of
Germany. The emperor’s message, with its implication that the Transvaal was an independent state
with the right to call on other powers for support, was greatly resented in Great Britain, but it
conﬁrmed the Boers in their discriminatory policy with respect to the Uitlanders. This led to
British claims that Kruger…”
Craig, op. cit. pp. 421-22.

British claims that Kruger was intent on expelling the British from South Africa entirely and
establishing a great Boer state. In negotiations in 1899 the British demanded that the grievances of
their subjects be satisﬁed and that the right of suffrage be accorded them. The Boers refused and,
after further inconclusive talks and a number of incidents, war broke out between the British on
one hand and the Transvaal and their sister republic, the Orange Free State, on the other.
It was a conﬂict in which the British won no reputation and which led the British poet Kipling •

British claims that Kruger • was intent on expelling the British from South Africa entirely and
establishing a great Boer state. In negotiations in 1899 the British demanded that the grievances of
their subjects be satisﬁed and that the right of suffrage be accorded them. The Boers refused and,
after further inconclusive talks and a number of incidents, war broke out between the British on
one hand and the Transvaal and their sister republic, the Orange Free State, on the other.
It was a conﬂict in which the British won no reputation and which led the British poet Kipling •
to write later:
Let us admit it fairly as a business people should.
We have had no end of a lesson, it will do us no end of good.

To defeat the sixty thousand men whom the Boers put in the ﬁeld, the British had to employ
350,000 and to ﬁght until 1902 suffering heavy casualties and heavier monetary expenditures.…”
Craig, op. cit. p. 422.

To defeat the sixty thousand men whom the Boers put in the ﬁeld, the British had to employ
350,000 and to ﬁght until 1902 suffering heavy casualties and heavier monetary expenditures.• In
the end, they were successful and were wise enough to put the victory to good use—treated the
defeated with leniency, granting extensive measures of self-government to the Boer governments,
and, thus, making possible the act of September 1909 that combined Transvaal, the Orange Free
State, Natal province, and the Cape province into the South African Union. But, in the course of all
this, a good many illusions had been dissipated, and the popularity of imperialism in Great Britain
had been dimmed.
Craig, op. cit. p. 422.

FIRST ITALO-ETHIOPIAN WAR
1895-1896

GERMAN COLONIAL EMPIRE
1892-1918
Service ﬂag of the Reichskolonialamt
(Imperial Colonial Ofﬁce),
German Empire 1892–1918—Wikipedia

GERMAN COLONIAL EMPIRE
1892-1918

Bismarck had been content to
smoke his meerschaum and plan
social reforms. Let the other
Great Powers pursue colonial
adventures.
source: Kladderadatsch, 1884.

page ﬂip
Not so his “successor”!

The Belgian Congo
Imperialist horror story

The Belgian Congo
Imperialist horror story
Mutilated Congolese children, image from King
Leopold's Soliloquy,• Mark Twain’s political
satire, where the aging king complains that the
incorruptible camera was the only witness he
had encountered in his long experience that he
could not bribe. The book was illustrated with
photographs by Harris--Wikipedia

In 1885 the Conference in Berlin resolved
African territorial claims including Leopold’s

The A.B.I.R Company
The Abir Congo Company (founded as the Anglo-Belgian India
Rubber Company and later known as the Compagnie du Congo
Belge) was a company that exploited natural rubber in the Congo Free
State, the private property of King Leopold II of Belgium. The company
was founded with British and Belgian capital and was based in
Belgium. By 1898 there were no longer any British shareholders and
the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company changed its name to the Abir
Congo Company and changed its residence for tax purposes to the
Free State. The company was granted a large concession in the north
of the country and the rights to tax the inhabitants. This tax was taken
in the form of rubber obtained from a relatively rare rubber vine. The
collection system revolved around a series of trade posts along the two
main rivers in the concession. Each post was commanded by a
European agent and manned with armed sentries to enforce taxation
and punish any rebels.
Abir enjoyed a boom through the late 1890s, by selling a kilogram of
rubber in Europe for up to 10 fr which had cost them just 1.35 fr.
However, this came at a cost to the human rights of those who could
not pay the tax with imprisonment, ﬂogging and other corporal
punishment recorded. Abir's failure to suppress destructive harvesting
methods and to maintain rubber plantations meant that the vines
became increasingly scarce and by 1904 proﬁts began to fall. During
the early 1900s famine and disease spread across the concession, a
natural disaster judged by some to have been exacerbated by Abir's
operations, further hindering rubber collection. The 1900s also saw
widespread rebellions against Abir's rule in the concession and
attempts at mass migration to the French Congo or southwards. These
events typically resulted in Abir dispatching an armed force to restore
order.—Wikipedia In the rubber coils – a Punch cartoon depicting Leopold II
as a rubber vine entangling a Congolese rubber collector

page ﬂip
Irkutsk [“the Paris of Siberia”], river crossing by ferry 1886

Prelude to the Great Game
Here we are, just as we were, snarling at each other, hating each other, but
neither wishing for war. - Lord Palmerston (1835)
1828-after coming to power he had to respond to a
Persian attack. His victory made Russia the dominant
power in the Caucasus
Nicholas I: Николай I Павлович, 1796 – 1825–1855

1824-1854-Russia occupied the entire Kazakh Khanate
(modern-day Kazakhstan). This raised Russo-Khivan
tensions in addition to:
Khiva’s legal discrimination of Russian merchants who were
just beginning to penetrate Central Asia,

1824-1854-Russia occupied the entire Kazakh Khanate
(modern-day Kazakhstan). This raised Russo-Khivan
tensions in addition to:
Khiva’s legal discrimination of Russian merchants who were
just beginning to penetrate Central Asia,
and the ongoing issue of Russian slaves.
1839–40 Russia launched an attack but it failed to
reach Khiva because of the tough terrain and weather
However, the khan of Khiva feared a further Russian
assault and released a number of Russian slaves

Britain’s Response
In the historical sense the term dated from the mid-19th century. "The Great Game" is attributed to Captain
Arthur Conolly (1807–42) • who had been appointed as a political ofﬁcer. In July 1840, in correspondence
to Major Henry Rawlinson •

to Major Henry Rawlinson • who had been recently appointed as the new political agent in Kandahar,•

Conolly wrote, "You've a great game, a noble game, before you." Conolly believed that Rawlinson's new
post gave him the opportunity to advance humanitarianism in Afghanistan, and summed up his hopes:
If the British Government would only play the grand game – help Russia cordially to all that she has a
right to expect – shake hands with Persia – get her all possible amends from Oosbegs [Uzbeks]– force the
Bokhara Amir to be just to us, the Afghans, and other Oosbeg states, and his own kingdom – but why go
on; you know my, at any rate in one sense, enlarged views. Inshallah! The expediency, nay the necessity
of them will be seen, and we shall play the noble part that the ﬁrst Christian nation of the world ought to
ﬁll."
The Great Game began on 12 January 1830 when Lord Ellenborough, the President of the Board of
Control for India, tasked Lord William Bentinck, the Governor-General, to establish a new trade route to
the Emirate of Bukhara.

Conolly wrote, "You've a great game, a noble game, before you." Conolly believed that Rawlinson's new
post gave him the opportunity to advance humanitarianism in Afghanistan, and summed up his hopes:
If the British Government would only play the grand game – help Russia cordially to all that she has a
right to expect – shake hands with Persia – get her all possible amends from Oosbegs [Uzbeks]– force the
Bokhara Amir to be just to us, the Afghans, and other Oosbeg states, and his own kingdom – but why go
on; you know my, at any rate in one sense, enlarged views. Inshallah! The expediency, nay the necessity
of them will be seen, and we shall play the noble part that the ﬁrst Christian nation of the world ought to
ﬁll."
The Great Game began on 12 January 1830 when Lord Ellenborough, the President of the Board of
Control for India, tasked Lord William Bentinck, the Governor-General, to establish a new trade route to
the Emirate of Bukhara. Britain intended to gain control over the Emirate of Afghanistan and make it a
protectorate, and to use the Ottoman Empire, the Persian Empire, the Khanate of Khiva, and the Emirate of
Bukhara as buffer states between both empires. This would protect India and also key British sea trade
routes by stopping Russia from gaining a port on the Persian Gulf or the Indian Ocean. Russia proposed
Afghanistan as the neutral zone.[6] The results included the failed First Anglo-Afghan War of 1838, the First
Anglo-Sikh War of 1845, the Second Anglo-Sikh War of 1848, the Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878, and
the annexation of Khiva, Bukhara, and Kokand by Russia.—Wikipedia

The Game concluded
1907
Some authors believe that the Great Game came to a close with the
three Anglo-Russian agreements of 1907 which delineated the
spheres of interest between British India and Russian Central Asia
in the borderland areas of Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet.•Another
that it was trailing off not long after that time, and another with the
Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the end of Russia's interest in
Persia. One has stated that unofﬁcially, the Great Game in Central
Asia might never end.•
Afghanistan maintained its independence throughout the century

The Game concluded
1907
in the borderland areas of Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet.

The Game concluded
1907
in the borderland areas of Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet.•Another
that it was trailing off not long after that time, and another with the
Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the end of Russia's interest in
Persia. One has stated that unofﬁcially, the Great Game in Central
Asia might never end.•
When everyone is dead, the Great Game is ﬁnished. Not before. - Rudyard Kipling

page ﬂip
Uncle
Sam
France
Germany
Russia
Austria-Hungary
Britain

The battleship Mikasa, Admiral Tōgō's ﬂagship at the battle of Tsushima, preserved as a memorial in Yokosuka, Japan—Wikipedia

Imperialism
Challenged
Comrade Lenin CLEANSES

the world of ﬁlth

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The Google Books edition:
https://books.google.com/books?id=bl0k_ZjcWZ8C

When productive capacity grew faster than consumer demand, there was very soon
an excess of this capacity (relative to consumer demand), and, hence, there were
few proﬁtable domestic investment outlets. Foreign investment was the only
answer. But, insofar as the same problem existed in every industrialized capitalist
country, such foreign investment was possible only if non-capitalist countries could
be "civilized", "Christianized", and "uplifted" — that is, if their traditional institutions
could be forcefully destroyed, and the people coercively brought under the domain
of the "invisible hand" of market capitalism. So, imperialism was the only answer.
— E.K. Hunt, History of Economic Thought, 2nd ed. page 355.—quoted in the Wiki article on J.A. Hobson

So from a noble Christian undertaking based on an impeccable scientific rationale, imperialism
became the object of moral opprobrium by the mid-twentieth century.
The Spanish have a proverb: ¡Oy los Flores, Mañana las Manzanas! (Today the flowers [are
thrown at you], tomorrow the [rotten] apples).
World War II had exhausted the remaining colonial powers. Churchill was out and Britain gave
up Palestine and India. When Britain and France created the Suez Crisis (29 Oct 56), Ike sided
with Nasser. The ‘sixties saw most of the remaining African colonies abandoned to a precarious
independence. Ironically, Portugal, the first African colonizer, would be the last to surrender.
But that’s a way “nother” story!
jbp

19 c Europe, session 3.18 imperialism

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