Transcript European History Lecture 3

COLLEGE - LIMASSOL
BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION
European History
Lecture 3
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The Age of Imperialism: The causes of the
New Imperialism.
The Exploitation of China and the awakening
of Japan.
The struggle for control in Africa.
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When one country rules a number of other
countries, or has great influence over them.
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Thanks to the Industrial Revolution (17501850), new kinds of machines were discovered.
Those new machines started to produce new
things.
People who had jobs could soon afford many
more clothes and shoes than artisans used to
own.
Everything was indefinitely cheaper.
This didn’t last long, so people had to keep
buying replacements.
They didn’t earn enough to buy all the things
the monstrous new machines produced.
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As all these clothes sat unsold, it was
pointless for the factory to keep on
producing more.
Factories were closing down.
The workers lost their jobs and they were
no longer able to buy anything, and even
less was sold.
The situation created is called Economic
Crisis.
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Every country tried to avoid this unpleasant
situation.
It was needed for every country to sell as
much as it possibly could of what its many
factories produced.
It had to sell their goods abroad.
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Not only in Europe, where there were
factories everywhere, but also in countries
where there were people who didn’t have
clothes or shoes yet.
In an effort of avoiding the economic crisis,
all the industrialized countries found
themselves falling over each other in a race
to get to remote and wild places.
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The industrialized countries tried to own colonies
in countries without factories.
The wilder they were, the better it was.
They needed them not only to sell their goods, but
also because those places often had things that
their own countries didn’t have, such as cotton for
making clothes and oil or petrol.
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The more of the ‘raw materials’ they brought from
the colonies to Europe, the more the factories were
able to produce, and the more eager was their
search for places where there were still people who
would buy their vast output.
People who were unable to find work in their
countries, could now emigrate to these foreign
places.
It became vitally important for the countries of
Europe to own colonies.
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More colonies =More factories.
More factories = More goods.
More goods = More colonies.
The demand isn’t driven by ambition or lust
for power, but by a genuine need.
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Disaster for the inhabitants.
Extreme cruelty in Belgium’s treatment of the
Congolese, and violence against men, women and
children, as evidenced in Britain’s totally
unprovoked aggregation in the Zulu War of 1879.
The British defeated the Boers in South Africa in the
Boer War of 1899. They dragged defeated forces in
the world’s first concentration camps and burned
their crops.
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The British did their best in dividing up the world.
The British had possessions in India, Australia and
North America for several centuries and colonies in
Africa where their influence in Egypt was
particularly strong.
From seventeenth century, Great Britain formed
and maintained an economic relationship with
India.
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Napoleon and William Pitt the Younger are dividing up the
world between Great Britain and France. It has been hailed as
the most famous of all British political cartoons:
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European superpowers had created vast colonial
empires in Africa.
In 1814, the Congress of Vienna took South Africa
from Holland and gave it to Britain.
France annexed Algeria after invading in 1830.
In 1831 Tunisia became a French possession.
In 1884-85 a conference was held in Berlin to come
to some agreement on the division of the
continent.
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France took most of West Africa
Britain took Kenya in the East and Nigeria in
the West
Portugal took Angola and Mozambique
Belgium took the Congo
Germany was given Cameroon, Togo,
Tanganyika and Zanzibar
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France colonised South East Asia and islands
in the Pacific were divided up between them
and the other powers.
Rivalry between the colonial powers became
bitter and, in 1898, Britain and France almost
came to blows over the town of Fashoda in
the Sudan.
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Germany was stronger and had more factories, so
its needs were greater.
The new German Empire and its excellent factories
entered the game, built a great navy and tried to
win more and more influence in Asia and Africa.
Bismarck succeeded in acquiring several large
stretches of land in Africa, together with some
islands in the Pacific.
The other countries look at it badly.
They all went on expanding their armies and
building bigger and bigger battleships.
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Britain traded English wool and Indian cotton
for Chinese tea and textiles; however, as
Chinese demand slackened, Britain sought
other means of attracting trade with China.
By the 1830s, Britain realised it could make
up the trade deficit with China by selling
Indian opium into the Chinese market,
making opium Britain’s most profitable and
important crop in world markets.
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Eventually, opium poured into China faster
than tea poured into British hands; soon
Chinese merchants, already addicted
themselves and buying for an addicted
population, paid British opium traders in pure
silver.
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Concerned with the sharp rise in opium
addiction and the associated social costs and
rise in criminal acts, the Chinese government,
led by aging Manchu dynasty, took action
against the British.
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In 1839, the Chinese destroyed British opium in the
port city of Canton, sparking the Opium Wars of
1839-1842.
Easily dominating the backward forces, the British
expeditionary force blockaded Chinese ports,
occupied Shangai, and took complete control of
Canton.
The 1942 Treaty of Nanking granted Britain
extensive trading and commercial rights in China,
marking the first in a series of unequal treaties
between China and European imperial powers.
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By the end of the century, after five wars between
China and various European powers, France,
Britain, Germany, Japan, and Russia held territorial
and commercial advantages in their respective
spheres of influence.
These spheres of influenced comprised territories,
ports, shipping lines, rivers etc in which one nation
held exclusive rights to profits and investment.
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In 1899, the United States, freshly anointed as an
international force by its crushing victory over
Spain in the 1898 Spanish-American War, objected
to the prevalence of spheres of influence. The US
advocated and pushed through a new Open Door
Policy, an effectively imperial policy that demanded
that all nations be given equal and complete rights
to Chinese markets.
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Europeans maintained extraterritoriality inside
thousands of Chinese port cities.
Extraterritoriality meant that foreigners were
exempt from Chinese law enforcement and that,
though on Chinese land, they could only be judged
and tried by officials of their own nation who
generally looked the other way when profit was the
goal.
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In 1900, the Boxer Rebellion took place.
The Boxers dedicated to ending foreign
exploitation in north China, killed scores of
European and seized the large foreign legation in
Beijing.
Reacting immediately, an international
expeditionary force of Japanese, Russian, British,
American, German, French, Austrian, and Italian
troops put down the revolt and sacked Beijing to
protect the interests of their respective countries.
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Afterwards, the European powers propped up
a weak central government for their own
economic benefit.
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A shocked mandarin in Manchu robes in the
back, with Queen Victoria (United Kingdom),
Wilhelm II (Germany), Nicholas II (Russia),
Marianne (France), and Emperor Meiji (Japan)
discussing how to cut up a pie with Chine
("China" in French) written on it.
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The Russians had no colonies overseas, but their
own empire was vast and they didn’t yet have many
factories.
The Japanese tried to stop them.
In a dreadful war that broke out between Russia
and Japan in 1905, the tsar’s mighty empire was
defeated, and forced to give some of its territory to
tiny, new Japan.
Now the Japanese also began building more and
more new factories for themselves, and they too
needed foreign lands, not only to sell their goods,
but also because there wasn’t enough room for
them in their tiny island kingdom.
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Japan's colonial boom was in part a response to the
actions of more established powers, and its
expansionism drew on the harnessing of traditional
Japanese values to more modern aspirations for
great- power status; not until the 1930s was Japan
to become a net exporter of capital.
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Austria entered the New Imperialism.
Austria wasn’t interested in conquering far-off
lands on the other side of the world, but it
needed people to buy the goods made in its
factories.
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Austria kept on trying to acquire new lands
towards the east, lands only recently liberated
from Turkish rule where there weren’t any
factories.
The small populations of newly liberated
eastern peoples, such as the Serbs, were
frightened of the great empire.
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1914: A Serb murdered the heir of the Austrian
throne, during his visit to Bosnia, in Sarajevo.
A war with Serbia was inevitable.
Russia was drown in, and Germany was involved as
Austria’s ally.
The whole world was at war with Germany, and the
two ‘central powers’, Austria and Germany, were
surrounded.
Result: The First World War.
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Which were the effects of the European
imperial adventure?
Gombrich, E., H. A little history of the world.
2nd edition, 2008.
 Kerr, G. 2010. A short history of Europe, from
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Charlemagne to the Treaty of Lisbon.
http://www.sparknotes.com/history/european
/1871-1914/section7.rhtml
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_East
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Imperialis
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www.google.com