The Loss of Freedom: Encounters with Imperialism WHAP/Napp
“Four dimensions of European imperialism confronted these societies. First, they faced the immense military might and political ambitions of rival European states. Second, they became enmeshed in networks of trade, investment, and sometimes migration that radiated out from an industrializing and capitalist Europe to generate a new world economy. Third, they were touched by various aspects of traditional European culture, as some among them learned the French, English, or German language; converted to Christianity; or studied European literature and philosophy. Finally, Asians and Africans engaged with the culture of modernity – its scientific rationalism; its technological achievements; its belief in a better future and its ideas of nationalism, socialism, feminism, and individualism. In that epic encounter, they sometimes resisted, at other times accommodated, and almost always adapted what came from the West. They were active participants in the global drama of nineteenth-century world history, not simply its passive victims or beneficiaries.
More than any other period, the nineteenth century was Europe’s age of global expansion. During that century, Europe became the center of the world economy with ties of trade and investment in every corner of the globe. Between 1812 and 1914, millions of Europeans migrated to new homes outside Europe. Missionaries and explorers penetrated the distant interiors of Asia and Africa. European states incorporated India, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the islands of the Pacific into their overseas colonial empires and seriously diminished the sovereignty and independence of the once proud domains of China, the Ottoman Empire, and Persia. Many newly independent states in Latin America became economically dependent on Europe and the United States.
Behind much of Europe’s nineteenth-century expansion lay the massive fact of the Industrial Revolution. That process gave rise to new economic needs, many of which found solutions abroad. The enormous productivity of industrial technology and Europe’s growing affluence now created the need for extensive raw materials and agricultural products. The demand for a wide variety of products – wheat from the American Midwest and southern Russia, meat from Argentina, bananas from Central America, rubber from Brazil, cocoa and palm oil from West Africa, tea from Ceylon, gold and diamonds from South Africa – radically changed patterns of economic and social life in the countries of their origin.” ~ Ways of the World
Main Points of Passage:
Notes:- European Imperialism
- Between roughly 1750 and 1950, much of the Afro-Asian-Pacific world was enveloped in a new wave of European empire building
- In mainland Asia and Africa, European conquests nowhere had devastating demographic consequences that so sharply reduced Native Americans
- Second wave of European colonialism conditioned by Industrial Revolution
- Europeans-overwhelming firepower with repeating rifles/machine guns
- India and Indonesia, conquest grew out of earlier contact with trading firms
- Particularly in India, British East India Company, rather than British government directly, played leading role in the colonial takeover
- Fragmentation of Mughal Empire facilitated European penetration
J. For Africa, mainland Southeast Asia, and Pacific islands, colonial conquest came later, in second half of nineteenth century, and more abruptly
K. “Scramble for Africa” pitted European powers against one another as they partitioned continent among themselves in about twenty-five years (1875-1900)
L. Most difficult regions to subdue were those decentralized societies
M. In Australia and New Zealand, conquest was accompanied by European settlement and diseases reduced natives by 75 percent or more
N. Japan’s takeover of Taiwan and Korea bore similarities to European actions
O. Westward expansion of U.S. and Russian penetration of Central Asia
P. Filipinos acquired new colonial rulers when U.S. took over from Spain following the Spanish-American War of 1898
Q. 13,000 freed U.S. slaves migrated to West Africa, where they became, ironically, a colonizing elite in the land they named Liberia
R. Ethiopia and Siam (Thailand) were notable for avoiding colonization
S. Yet shortage of European administrators and difficulties of communicating across cultural boundaries made it necessary to rely local intermediaries
T. Yet colonial governments and private missionary organizations had an interest in promoting a measure of European education
U. From this process arose a small Western-educated class
II. Responses and Attitudes in the Age of Imperialism
- Indian Rebellion of 1857-1858, sometimes referred to as Sepoy Mutiny
- Triggered by introduction into colony’s military forces of a new cartridge smeared with animal fat from cows and pigs
- Crushed in 1858, rebellion greatly widened racial divide in colonial India
- Convinced British government to assume direct control over India
- And Europeans were exceedingly reluctant to allow even highly educated Asian and Africans to enter higher ranks of colonial civil service
- Colonies that had large European settler population, pattern of racial separation was much more pronounced than where few whites settled
- Most extreme case South Africa
- Racial fears were aroused and extraordinary efforts to establish race as a legal, not just a customary, feature of South African society
- Racial system provided for separate “homelands,” schools, residential areas, public facilities what would become known as Apartheid
- In African colonies, Europeans identified, sometimes invented, tribes
- Europeans preferred “traditional” rural society, with established authorities and hierarchies, but without slavery and sati (widow-burning)
- Subsistence farming, in which peasant families produced largely for their own needs diminishedcash crop farming was encouraged
- A flood of inexpensive textiles from Britain’s new factories ruined the livelihood of tens of thousands of India’s handloom weavers
- Cruelties of forced labor occurred during early twentieth century in Congo Free State, then governed personally by Leopold II of Belgium
- Forced villagers to collect rubber, which was in demand for bicycle and automobile tires, with a reign of terror and abuse that cost millions of lives
- Eventually abuses were publicized in Europe, forcing Belgian government to take control of Congo in 1908, ending Leopold’s reign of terror
- A variation on theme of forced labor took shape in so-called cultivation system of Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia) during nineteenth century
- Peasants were required to cultivate 20 percent or more of their land in cash crops such as sugar or coffee to meet their tax obligation to the state
Complete the Review Quilt Below (Place Key Points in Each Box):
Second Wave of Colonialism: / British East India Company: / Sepoy Mutiny: / Mughal Empire:Scramble for Africa: / Australia and New Zealand: / Spanish-American War of 1898: / Liberia:
Ethiopia and Siam: / Western-Educated Elite in Colonies: / Apartheid: / Sati:
Subsistence Farming: / Impact of British Textiles: / Leopold II: / Belgian Congo:
Cultivation System: / Effects – Imperialism/ Europe: / Effects – Imperialism/ Colonies : / Industrial Revolution/ Imperialism:
Questions:
- In what different ways did the colonial takeover of Asia and Africa occur?
- Why might subject people choose to cooperate with the colonial regime? What might prompt them to rebel or resist?
- What was distinctive about European colonial empires of the nineteenth century?
- How did the power of colonial states transform the economic lives of colonial subjects?
- The purpose of the Berlin Conference of 1885 was
(B)For the representation of colonized peoples to learn cutting-edge German industrial techniques
(C)To set quotas and agreements surrounding the growth of the German navy
(D)To negotiate settlements among Western rivalries over the partition of Africa
(E)To study the ideas of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
- The India Congress Party’s early membership consisted heavily of middle-class individuals, including M.K. Gandhi, trained in which profession?
(B)Engineering
(C)Law
(D)Policing
(E)Civil administration
- Which of the following does NOT belong in a list of contested settler societies?
(B)India
(C)South Africa
(D)Kenya
(E)Hawaii /
- Which answer choice contains regions that were nominally independent but nonetheless endured significant Western informal political and economic influence by 1914?
(B)China, Persia, the Middle East, Latin America
(C)Persia, West Africa, South Asia, Latin America
(D)South Asia, the Middle East, China, Latin America
(E)West Africa, Persia, the Middle East, Latin America
- Which sector of the colonized economy had experienced the least expansion by 1914?
(B)Mining
(C)Export crop cultivation
(D)Heavy industrial capacity
(E)Raw material extraction
- Which reform was most emblematic of growing British interest in transforming Indian social relations in the nineteenth century?
(B)Prohibition of sati
(C)Expansion of education for girls
(D)Building interest in the sport of cricket
(E)Construction of trade schools to train a new Indian industrial working class
Thesis Statement: Change Over Time: Western Europe: 1500 – 1950 C.E. ______