Colonialism and imperialism

The first principle

Colonialism is the direct rule of one people's land by another for the ruler's benefit, while imperialism is the wider drive of a state to extend its power over other territories, whether by rule, investment or influence. The first principle is that empire was organised to transfer resources and control from the colonised to the coloniser, and every feature of colonial rule, from railways to borders, followed from that purpose. This is why colonial rule left behind poverty, unequal economies and arbitrary states even after the flags came down.

The core

Two phases

• Mercantilist colonialism (about 1500 to 1800). Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain and France built trading empires in the Americas and coastal Asia. The aim was to accumulate bullion and control trade through chartered companies such as the English East India Company (1600) and the Dutch East India Company (1602), and the Atlantic slave trade supplied plantation labour.
• Industrial imperialism, or new imperialism (about 1870 to 1914). Industrial powers now needed raw materials such as cotton, rubber, copper and tin, markets for machine goods and outlets for surplus capital. Newly unified Germany and Italy, along with Belgium, the United States and Japan, joined the race, and rivalry turned trade into territorial conquest.

Motives

• Economic. The British economist J A Hobson, in Imperialism: A Study (1902), argued that underconsumption at home made capitalists seek profitable investment abroad. Lenin, in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), went further and called imperialism the monopoly stage of capitalism, which made war between imperial powers inevitable.
• Strategic. Britain held Egypt and the Cape to guard the route to India, and coaling stations and naval bases mattered to every navy.
• Ideological. Social Darwinism misused Darwin's theory to rank races, and the civilising mission, captured in Kipling's phrase "the white man's burden", presented conquest as a moral duty. Missionaries and explorers such as David Livingstone added a religious and humanitarian gloss.
• Nationalist and political. Colonies brought prestige, and politicians used empire to win support at home.

Nationalism and unification in Europe

The same nationalism that drove imperial rivalry also made new states in Europe. Italy was unified between 1859 and 1871 through Cavour's diplomacy, Garibaldi's campaign in the south and the capture of Rome, and Germany was unified under Prussia by Bismarck's "blood and iron" after wars with Denmark, Austria and France, ending with the proclamation of the German Empire at Versailles in 1871. Both new powers then sought colonies to match Britain and France.

The Scramble for Africa

• As late as 1870 Europeans controlled only coastal footholds in Africa. King Leopold II of Belgium's claims in the Congo, France's advance in West Africa and Britain's occupation of Egypt in 1882 set off a race.
• Bismarck hosted the Berlin Conference (November 1884 to February 1885). It recognised Leopold's Congo Free State, opened the Congo and Niger rivers to trade and laid down the principle of effective occupation, under which a power had to occupy territory and notify others to claim it. No African ruler was present, and by 1914 only Ethiopia, which defeated Italy at Adwa in 1896, and Liberia remained independent.

Dimensions

• Economic. Colonies were turned into producers of a few primary goods such as cotton, groundnuts, cocoa and copper, and buyers of manufactures. Local crafts declined, the drain of wealth went abroad through profits, salaries and pensions, and railways ran from mine to port.
• Political. Colonial borders were drawn on maps in Europe, often by straight lines, splitting peoples such as the Somali and Maasai and enclosing rival groups in one state. Many later civil wars and border disputes, from Nigeria to Sudan, have roots in these lines.
• Social. Colonial rule built a racial hierarchy, codified and sometimes hardened identities through censuses and indirect rule, and used forced labour, most brutally in Leopold's Congo.
• Cultural and intellectual. Western education created a new elite of lawyers, teachers and journalists, who used European ideas of liberty and nationhood against their rulers.
• International. Rivalry for colonies, such as the Fashoda crisis (1898) between Britain and France and the Moroccan crises (1905 and 1911), sharpened tensions that fed into the First World War.

In practice

Colonial Asia

• Britain held India, Burma, Ceylon, Malaya and Singapore, and France formed Indochina from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos by 1893. The Dutch ruled the East Indies, the United States took the Philippines from Spain in 1898, and Japan, itself the one Asian state to industrialise, annexed Taiwan (1895) and Korea (1910).
• China was never formally colonised but was carved into spheres of influence after the Opium Wars, with treaty ports, foreign concessions and extraterritorial rights. Siam (Thailand) stayed independent as a buffer between British Burma and French Indochina, partly through the reforms of King Chulalongkorn.

Forms of colonial control

Case: the Congo Free State (1885 to 1908). Leopold II ruled the Congo as personal property, and forced rubber collection, enforced by mutilation and hostage taking, caused enormous loss of life. Reports by Roger Casement (1904) and campaigns by E D Morel forced Belgium to annex the territory in 1908, an early case of international humanitarian pressure.

Case: Algeria as a settler colony. France took Algeria from 1830 and treated it as part of France, with European settlers holding the best land and full rights. Settler interests made decolonisation there a long war (1954 to 1962), unlike the negotiated exits elsewhere.

Issues and way forward

• Did empire pay? Hobson and Lenin linked empire to capital export, but historians such as D K Fieldhouse showed that most British overseas investment went to the Americas and the settler dominions rather than to tropical colonies, so strategic and political motives mattered as much as profit.
• Development or underdevelopment? Defenders of empire point to railways, ports, law and education. Critics such as Walter Rodney, in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), argue that these served extraction and blocked balanced growth, and the evidence of falling shares of world manufacturing in India and China supports the critics on the economic side.
• Legacies today. Arbitrary borders, single commodity economies and ethnic divisions shaped by colonial rule still affect many African and Asian states. The decision of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), at Cairo in 1964, to accept inherited borders kept the peace between states but left the internal tensions.
• Lessons. Colonialism shows how unequal power produces unequal exchange, which is why newly independent states sought economic self reliance, non alignment and a fairer world trading order.

Common confusions

• Colonialism and imperialism. Colonialism is direct settlement or rule of territory; imperialism is the broader extension of power, which can be informal, as in China.
• Protectorate and colony. In a protectorate a local ruler stayed in place while the foreign power controlled defence and foreign affairs; in a colony the foreign power ruled directly.
• Berlin Conference and the partition itself. The Conference set rules for claiming territory; most of Africa was actually divided by bilateral treaties and conquest in the following two decades.
• Hobson and Lenin. Hobson, a liberal, thought imperialism could be cured by raising consumption at home; Lenin saw it as an inevitable stage of capitalism.

For the exam

• Keyword bank: mercantilism, new imperialism, surplus capital, Scramble for Africa, effective occupation, Adwa, protectorate, sphere of influence, settler colony, indirect rule, social Darwinism, civilising mission, cash crops, arbitrary borders.
• Previous year questions: Practise the previous year questions on this topic →
• Use in an answer:
  • Introduction (data): In 1870 Europeans ruled about a tenth of Africa; by 1914 they ruled about nine tenths, and only Ethiopia and Liberia were free.
  • Introduction (scholar): Lenin called imperialism the highest stage of capitalism, arguing that the export of capital drove the powers to divide the world.
  • Conclusion: Colonial rule was designed to move resources from the colonised to the coloniser, and its borders and economies remain part of the present for many former colonies.
  • Conclusion: The colonial experience explains why the newly independent states of Asia and Africa insisted on sovereignty, self reliance and a fairer international order.