Imperialism

Summary - Though colonial empires dated back hundreds of years, the rapid drive for colonies at the end of the nineteenth century led Europe to gain political control of most of Asia and Africa. From 1880-1914 European nations scrambled to divide among themselves the entire continent of Africa, except Liberia and Ethiopia. Once European nations carved up empires, they quickly set up colonial governments to rule them and systems to make them profitable. European imperialism brought modern inventions and techniques of the Industrial Revolution to the non-European world, but to peoples in Africa and Asia Western expansion represented a profoundly disruptive attack on their society.


The basic goal of imperialism is to dominate other countries politically. economically, and socially. England(and most of Europe), however developed and adopted a new imperialism. This imperialism basically expressed that the dominate country would some into the other nation and show them their superior way of life in exchange for doing just about anything. Like England did to much of Africa; not only did they completely change and threaten Africa's culture, they made many Africans do hard physical labor(diamond mining). The effects of this imperialism was the rebel of many African tribal groups. For example, the Boer war that was fought between the Britsih and Dutch settlers(the boers) on the Zulu nation(the largest South Afican ethnic group during the time). This war was fought because of the British policy of slaves and land. Even though the Boers lost this war, it can be learned from this war that imperialism comes with a group or several groups that will disagree with the motives of the dominate country. Some motives(from Europe) may be the interest of natural resources that the weaker country possesses increasing their production of material goods and profit. Another motive was "For God" for they believed that their almighty culture, which included their religion of Christianity, should be given to the African people. In other words, they wanted to spread Christianity which allowed foreign people of Africa to march in there, settle, and finally claim that territory resulting in the expansion of that nation's territory. This attitude of acting higher than the rest leads into the final motive, that being superiority. Their belief that their culture was superior to all led them(Europe) to believe that their cultural values must be shared with the weaker countries of the world. Imperialism may have had the general idea of a "win-win" situation but had its obvious dissappointments in the system.