Imperialism's Global Effects

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for how European imperialism affected European and non-European societies (Skill 5.B; LO I).
• Account for KC-3.5.III.A: how imperialism produced diplomatic tensions among European states that strained the alliance systems.
• Account for KC-3.5.III.B: how imperial encounters shaped the styles and subjects of European artists and writers and provoked debate over the acquisition of colonies.
• Account for KC-3.5.III.C: how non-Europeans educated in Western values challenged European imperialism through nationalist movements and through modernization of local economies and societies.

Topic 7.7 traces imperialism's consequences on both sides of the colonial encounter. KC-3.5.III: imperial endeavors substantially affected society, diplomacy, and culture in Europe and produced resistance to foreign control abroad. The topic divides into three principal threads: diplomatic effects (KC-3.5.III.A), cultural and intellectual effects on Europe (KC-3.5.III.B), and effects on the colonized world including the rise of non-European nationalist and modernization movements (KC-3.5.III.C).

Diplomatic effects on Europe. KC-3.5.III.A: imperialism produced diplomatic tensions among European states that strained the alliance systems. The principal late-century imperial confrontations sat alongside the post-1871 European balance-of-power system covered in Topic 7.3 and pulled it in directions Bismarck's original design had not anticipated.

The Berlin Conference of November 1884 to February 1885 (covered in detail in Topic 7.6) established the diplomatic ground rules for the partition of Africa and channeled European competition into a regulated framework. The Conference largely succeeded at preventing direct great-power conflict over African territory through the late 1880s and 1890s, but it did so by accelerating the actual partition of the continent: powers raced to establish "effective occupation" before competitors could claim the same territory.

The Fashoda Incident of September-November 1898 illustrated the limits of the Conference's diplomatic management. A French expedition under Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand had marched from West Africa to the Upper Nile in a multi-year overland trek and arrived at Fashoda (modern Kodok in South Sudan) in July 1898. A British-Egyptian force under Lord Kitchener arrived in September after defeating the Mahdist Sudanese army at Omdurman. The two forces faced each other across the Nile for several months while London and Paris negotiated. France ultimately backed down (the public opinion in France was preoccupied with the contemporaneous Dreyfus Affair, and France was diplomatically isolated). The Fashoda Incident is conventionally read as the moment when France abandoned the dream of an east-west African empire and turned toward the Anglo-French rapprochement that produced the 1904 Entente Cordiale.

The Moroccan Crises of 1905 and 1911 produced more dangerous Franco-German confrontations. In March 1905, Kaiser Wilhelm II made an unannounced visit to Tangier and publicly endorsed Moroccan independence, in direct opposition to French ambitions to extend a protectorate over the country. The First Moroccan Crisis was eventually resolved at the 1906 Algeciras Conference, which largely confirmed French primacy in Morocco. In July 1911, the German gunboat Panther arrived at the Moroccan port of Agadir to "protect German interests" against French expansion (the "Panthersprung"); the Second Moroccan Crisis was resolved by the November 1911 Franco-German treaty exchanging German recognition of the French Moroccan protectorate for French cession of part of French Equatorial Africa to German Cameroon. The two Moroccan crises consolidated the Anglo-French alignment against Germany and contributed substantially to the climate of crisis that produced the First World War.

The South African (Boer) War of 1899-1902 added another dimension. The conflict between the British Empire and the two Boer republics (the South African Republic and the Orange Free State) over the rights of British uitlanders and the discovery of Witwatersrand gold (1886) produced a costly British victory but also extensive late-Victorian anti-imperial criticism (Hobson's Imperialism: A Study, 1902, drew on Hobson's reporting on the war for the Manchester Guardian). The British use of "concentration camps" to intern Boer civilians (where roughly 28,000 Boer noncombatants died of disease) intensified European public concern over imperial methods and reinforced the broader late-Victorian moral debate over imperialism.

Cultural and intellectual effects on Europe. KC-3.5.III.B: imperial encounters with non-European peoples shaped the styles and subjects of European artists and writers and provoked debate over the acquisition of colonies. The cultural effects were extensive and bidirectional.

European artistic and literary engagement with non-European cultures took several forms. The Orientalist scholarly and artistic tradition (the early-nineteenth-century French painters Eugene Delacroix and Jean-Leon Gerome; the late-Victorian British and French Egyptological enterprise after Napoleon's 1798 Egyptian expedition) had developed before the new imperialism but expanded substantially during the late-century period. Modernist European art absorbed African and Pacific motifs in distinctive ways: Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) famously incorporated visual motifs from African masks Picasso had seen at the Trocadero ethnographic museum in Paris; the early Cubist and Fauvist painters drew on African, Polynesian, and other non-European sources for what they called "primitive" aesthetic stimulus. The European literary tradition produced a substantial body of imperial-themed writing: Rudyard Kipling's Indian fiction (the Mowgli stories of The Jungle Book 1894; Kim 1901); H. Rider Haggard's African adventure novels (King Solomon's Mines 1885; She 1887); Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) as the principal late-Victorian critical reflection on the moral cost of imperial activity; E. M. Forster's later A Passage to India (1924) as the principal early-twentieth-century reckoning with the cultural distance between rulers and ruled.

The contemporary anti-imperial intellectual tradition was the explicit critical counterpart. J. A. Hobson's Imperialism: A Study (1902, covered in Topic 7.6) provided the principal British economic critique. V. I. Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) extended Hobson into a Marxist framework: imperialism was the necessary late stage of capitalism in which monopoly capital, bank capital, and industrial capital fused into "finance capital" requiring external outlets. The British Anti-Slavery and Aborigines' Protection Society (founded 1909 from earlier organizations dating to the 1830s anti-slavery movement) and the German Anti-Sklaverei-Bewegung sustained late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century European pressure against the worst imperial practices; E. D. Morel's Congo Reform Association (founded 1904 in Liverpool) and Roger Casement's official British report on the Congo (1904) produced the international scandal that eventually forced Belgium to take over the Congo Free State from King Leopold II in 1908.

Effects on the colonized world. KC-3.5.III.C: as non-Europeans became educated in Western values, they challenged European imperialism through nationalist movements and through the modernization of local economies and societies. The late-nineteenth-century educational and political contact between European colonizers and colonized peoples produced an unintended consequence: a Western-educated colonial elite that turned the universalist categories of European liberal-republican political thought against European imperial rule itself. Three principal cases illustrate the pattern.

The Indian National Congress, founded at Bombay in December 1885 by retired British civil servant Allan Octavian Hume and a group of Indian moderate reformers (Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee was the first president), initially sought gradual reform from within the British Raj. The early Congress demanded greater Indian representation in the colonial administration, expanded Indian access to higher civil service positions, and increased political consultation through expanded provincial legislative councils. By the early twentieth century, the Congress had radicalized: the partition of Bengal in 1905 (a divide-and-rule administrative reorganization perceived as anti-Indian) produced the Swadeshi movement and the principal Hindu-Muslim political split. By the time of the First World War, the Congress (alongside the All-India Muslim League founded 1906) had moved toward demands for full Indian self-government within the British Empire and (after the war) for full Indian independence. Mohandas Gandhi's leadership from 1915 onward shaped the twentieth-century mass nationalist phase. The 1858 Indian Mutiny (the Sepoy Rebellion, in which Indian soldiers in the East India Company army revolted; suppressed by 1859, leading to the British Crown's direct rule of India from 1858) had been a precursor of organized Indian resistance; the Congress represented the systematic political development of Indian nationalist thought.

Egyptian nationalism developed across the late nineteenth century. The 1879-1882 Urabi Revolt, led by army officer Ahmed Urabi against Khedive Tewfiq's pro-European policies and rising European financial control, was suppressed by British military intervention in 1882 (the Battle of Tel el-Kebir, September 1882) and produced the British occupation of Egypt that lasted (in formal or informal form) until 1956. Subsequent Egyptian nationalist development included the founding of the Wafd Party (1918, after the First World War) and the eventual Egyptian achievement of formal independence in 1922 (with continued British military presence). Egyptian intellectuals like Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905) and Rashid Rida (1865-1935) developed the Islamic-modernist and Arab nationalist intellectual frameworks that shaped twentieth-century Egyptian political thought.

The Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901 was a different kind of response. The Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists (the "Boxers"), originally an anti-Qing peasant movement, redirected its hostility toward European missionaries and Chinese Christians during the famine and economic distress of the late 1890s. The Qing court briefly supported the rebellion in summer 1900; an Eight-Nation Alliance (Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, the United States, Italy, and Austria-Hungary) intervened militarily and suppressed the rebellion by August 1900. The Boxer Protocol of 1901 imposed substantial indemnity on China and increased foreign privileges. The rebellion's failure contributed to the broader Chinese turn toward systematic political reform and (eventually) revolution: the 1911 Xinhai Revolution overthrew the Qing dynasty and established the Republic of China.

Meiji Japan represents the principal alternative model. The 1868 Meiji Restoration ended the Tokugawa shogunate (which had ruled Japan since 1603) and restored direct imperial rule under the young Emperor Meiji. The Meiji oligarchs (former samurai and court officials) pursued rapid modernization on European and American models: the 1871 Iwakura Mission toured European and American institutions; the Meiji Constitution of 1889 was modeled principally on the Prussian constitution; the Japanese army was reorganized on the Prussian model and the navy on the British; primary education was made compulsory in 1872; an industrial economy was built rapidly through state direction and zaibatsu (industrial-financial conglomerates). By 1894-1895 (the First Sino-Japanese War) Japan had defeated Qing China; by 1904-1905 (the Russo-Japanese War) Japan defeated the Russian Empire and acquired Korean and Manchurian influence. The Meiji case demonstrated that selective adoption of European modernization could allow non-European societies to resist European imperial control and (in Japan's case) to become an imperial power itself.

The Skill 5.B argument. Topic 7.7's suggested skill is 5.B (Making Connections: explain how a historical development relates to another historical development or process). The skill applies in two principal ways. First, students should make explicit connections between imperialism's diplomatic, cultural, and political effects on Europe (KC-3.5.III.A and KC-3.5.III.B) and European political-cultural life as Topics 7.2-7.5 have already developed it. Second, students should make explicit connections between European imperialism and the rise of late-nineteenth-century non-European nationalist and modernization movements (KC-3.5.III.C); the colonial encounter produced both European imperial control and the conditions for its eventual twentieth-century dissolution.

Three sources framing imperialism's global effects: Conrad's literary critique of imperial methods, the Indian National Congress's founding statement, and the Meiji-era Japanese imperial-rescript on education.

1. (Causation, Skill 5.B) Account for imperialism's principal effects on European diplomacy. How did imperial competition strain the post-1871 alliance system? Cite the Berlin Conference, the Fashoda Incident, and the Moroccan Crises.
2. (Causation, Skill 5.B) Account for imperialism's effects on European art and literature. How did imperial encounters shape the work of Conrad, Kipling, Picasso, and others? Use the Conrad excerpt as a starting point.
3. (Causation, Skill 5.B) Account for the rise of late-nineteenth-century non-European nationalist movements. Compare the Indian National Congress (1885), the Egyptian Urabi Revolt (1879-1882), and the Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901).
4. (Causation, Skill 5.B) Account for the Meiji-era Japanese alternative to European imperial control. Why was Meiji Japan able to modernize sufficiently to resist European imperialism and (eventually) to become an imperial power itself?
5. (Causation, Skill 5.B) Account for the late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century European anti-imperial intellectual tradition. Compare Hobson, Lenin, and the Congo Reform movement.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.