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Imperialism

Imperialism

Proponents justified European colonization using a variety of explanations, from a belief in nationalism, a desire for economic health, a sense of religious duty, and a belief they were biologically superior. These various motives for establishing overseas empires would lead to conflicts in Asia and a scramble to colonize Africa.

Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895)

Japan asserted its nationalist pride through incursions into Korea. This irritated China, a country that had exerted a strong presence in Korea for centuries. The conflict grew. Japan's victory gave it control of Korea. Japan also seized Taiwan, which was known as Formosa from the time of Portuguese colonization in the 16th century until the end of World War II.

Phrenologists

People who studied skull sizes and shapes, believed that a smaller skull size proved the mental feebleness of Africans, indigenous Americans, and Asians. These ideas have been proven false.

Charles Darwin

British scientis whose 19th century theory of evolution by natural selection stated that over a million of years, biological competition had "weeded out" the weaker species in nature and that the "fittest" species were the ones that survived.

Social Darwinism

Some thinkers adapted Darwin's theory of biological evolution to society, creating a theory of "survival of the fittest."

David Livingstone

From Scotland, he worked in Sub-Saharan Africa to end the illegal slave trade.

East India Company (EIC)

The English monarch granted this company a royal charter in 1600 giving it a monopoly on England's trade with India. After driving the Portuguese out of India, the company traded primarily in cotton and silk, indigo, and spices.

Dutch East India Company

In 1602 the Dutch government gave this company a monopoly on trade between the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa and the Straits of Magellan at the southern tip of South America. This company concentrated on the islands around Java, replacing the Portuguese who had controlled the region. Corruption and debt led the government to take control of the company's possession in 1799, creating the Dutch East Indies (today's Indonesia).

Suez Canal

Completed in 1869, this canal connecting the Red Sea with the Mediterranean Sea.

Corvée Laborers

Most of the labor done on the Suez Canal was done by 1.5 million Egyptians. Many of them were unpaid workers who were forced to work on the project as a form of taxation.

Sierra Leone

Established in 1787, this was a home for freed people from throughout the British Empire who had been enslaved.

Settler Colony

France drove the Ottomans out of Algeria in 1830. By 1870 Algeria had become a _______ ________, attracting Spanish, Italian, and Maltese as well as French immigrants.

"Scramble for Africa"

Tensions mounted among industrialized European nations as they competed for natural resources in Africa. Leaders feared that the _______ _______ _______, the competing efforts of Europeans to colonize Africa, would lead to war.

Berlin Conference

A meeting of European powers to provide for the orderly colonization of Africa. No Africans were invited to the conference. European powers peaceably agreed to colonial boundaries and to the free movement of goods on Africa's major rivers such as the Niger River and the Congo River.

Afrikaners

The descendants of 17th century Dutch settlers, who moved east of the Cape Colony, where they came into conflict with indigenous groups, including the Zulus, with whom they fought several wars.

Boer Wars (1880-1881, 1899-1902)

Throughout the 19th century, the British and Afrikaners continued to fight over land. This conflict came to a boil in the _________ _______. These conflicts were bloody and brutal. In the end, the British army drove the Afrikaners and the Africans from their lands, forcing many into refugee camps.

Concentration Camps

These settlements, which were segregated by race, came to be known as ____________ ____________. Medical care and sanitation were very poor, and food rations were so meager that many of the interned died of starvation. Once news arrived in Britain about the wretched conditions of the camps, activists tried to improve the lives of displaced refugees. However, while white camps received some attention, conditions in black camps remained terrible. Of the 100,000 blacks interned in these camps, nearly 15,000 perished.

King Leopold II of Belgium

He oversaw the invasion and pacification of the Congo in central Africa in order to persuade the Belgian government to support colonial expansion.

Abyssinia

By 1900, the only African countries unclaimed by Europeans were _________ and Liberia, a country founded by formerly enslaved people from the United States.

Liberia

Because _________ had a dependent relationship with the United States, it was not fully independent. Italy attempted to conquer Abyssinia in 1895, but the native forces were too strong for the Italians.

Seven Years' War

Portuguese, France, and England competed for control of India's spices, gems, and trade with regions to the east, Portugal established a coastal trading port on the southwestern coast, in Goa, in the early 16th century. However, it never extended its control inland. France established trading posts in the 17th century. However, its loss to Britain in the global conflict known as the ________ _________ _________ drove the French out of India.

Spheres of Influence

China did not experience imperialism in the same way that South Asia or Africa did. It maintained its own government throughout a period of European economic domination. As a result of superior military strength, European nations carved out ________ _________ _______ within China over which they had exclusive trading rights and access to natural resources.

Taiping Rebellion

This rebellion began in 1850, failed civil servant applicant Hong Xiuquan and starving peasants, workers, and miners attempted to overthrow the Qing Dynasty. With the help of some warlords along with French and British intervention, the Qing's prevailed in 1864.

Empress Dowager Cixi

Encouraged the Boxers and in 1900 ordered that all foreigners be killed. However, most of the estimated 100,000 people who were killed were Chinese Christians.

Boxer Rebellion

Only about 200-250 foreigners died during this rebellion. The empress and the Qing court suffered a humiliating defeat that undermined their legitimacy. Western powers and influence continued to erode Chinese sovereignty in subsequent years.

Colonization Society

Established in 1893, leaders began plans to establish colonies in Mexico and Latin America. Japan set up an empire in East Asia that included parts of China, Korea, Southeast Asia, and Pacific islands that lasted from the 1890s until the end of World War II.

Penal Colony

After the loss of its American colonies, Britain began to consider the possibility of establishing various kinds of settlements in Australia, finally deciding to locate a ________ ________ there. In 1788 the first convicts, along with some free settlers, arrived in Australia, and the east coast became known as New South Wales.

Maori

Indigenous people of New Zealand.

Trail of Tears

During the 19th century, the United States continued taking land from indigenous peoples, as Europeans had done since Columbus arrived. One notorious episode was the forced relocation of Eastern Woodlands peoples from the Southeast to a new Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma. So many Native Americans died from this exposure, malnutrition, disease, and exhaustion, that this forced migration became known as the _________ __________ ___________.

Monroe Doctrine

Issued by James Monroe in 1823, this doctrine stated that European nations should not intervene in the affairs of the countries in the Western Hemisphere. Implied in this doctrine was a desire to be an imperial power in the Americas. This desire played out in the U.S. war with Mexico (1845-1848), through which the United States gained vast territories in the Southwest from Mexico.

Manifest Destiny

White Americans believed that they had a natural and inevitable right to expand to the Pacific Ocean.

Spanish-American War

The U.S. victory in this war in 1898 brought Guam, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines under U.S. control.

Roosevelt Corollary

President Theodore Roosevelt, a proponent of Social Darwinism, was especially eager to expand U.S. influence throughout the Western Hemisphere. The 1904 __________ ____________ to the Monroe Doctrine stated that if countries in Latin America demonstrated "instability," the United States would intervene. It did several times. For example, in 1904 Roosevelt sent U.S. troops to occupy a Caribbean island nation, the Dominican Republic, until it repaid its foreign debts.

Great Game

Russia continued to push into Central Asia during the 19th century, leading to an intense rivalry between the Russian and British empires as they competed unsuccessfully for dominance in Afghanistan.

Túpac Amaru II

José Gabriel Condorcanqui was a cacique (hereditary chief) in southern Peru. He was descended from the last Inca ruler and took on this name. Born around 1740, he continued to identify with his Inca heritage in spite of having received a formal Jesuit education. In 1780 he arrested and executed a colonial administrator, charging him with cruelty. This action led to the last general Indian revolt against Spain, which at first was supported by some criollos (Spaniards born in America). The revolt throughout southern Peru and into Bolivia and Argentina before him and his family were captured in March 1781. They were taken to Cuzco, the former capital of the Inca empire. There he was forced to watch as his wife and sons were executed before he was tortured and executed himself.

Benito Juárez

In 1863, a group of Mexican conservatives conspired with Emperor Napoleon III of France to overthrow the liberal government of __________ ___________, a full-blooded Zapotec.

Sepoys

Indian soldiers under British employ, known as ________, made up the majority of the British armed forces in colonial India by the mid-19th century.

Indian Rebellion of 1857

In 1857, the British began using rifle cartridges that had been greased with a mixture of the fat of cows and pigs. Hindus, who view the cow as sacred, and Muslims, who refuse to slaughter pigs, were both furious. Both were violent revolts, known as the __________.

Raj

The British colonial government, known as the _____.

Indian National Congress

Under the Raj, many Indians attended British universities. In 1885, several British-educated Indians established the _________ __________ _________. Though begun as a forum for airing grievances to the colonial government, it quickly began to call for self-rule.

Aboriginal

The __________ people have been in Australia for an estimated 50,000 years and have the oldest continuous culture on Earth. At the time of European settlement, there may have been as many as 1 million people in 500 clans, speaking 700 languages.

Pan-Africanism

The idea that peoples of African descent have common interests and should be unified.

Sokoto Caliphate

In West Africa in the 18th century, rulers often mixed Islamic and traditional religious practices. In 1804, a group of intellectuals led by Usman dan Fodio started a drive to purify Islam among the Hausa tribes of the region. He created a caliphate with its seat at the new town of Sokoto. This caliphate established the slave trade as a means if economic growth at a time when the British were trying to stop it. The British navy attempted to intercept the ships of this caliphate, free the enslaved people, and relocate them in their colony Sierra Leone. This caliphate was the largest African empire since the 16th century. It was finally subdued in 1903 when the British made it part of their colony of Nigeria.

Xhosa

The native _______ people did not want to be ruled by Europeans, whether Dutch or English.

Zulu

In the 1870s, the British fought the ______ Kingdom, located on the South African coast of the Indian Ocean, which had become a well-organized and centralized state.

Asante Empire

A pre-colonial West African state that emerged in the 17th century in what is now Ghana.

Yaa Asantewaa

A mighty warrior queen, led a rebellion against the British. It was the last African war led by a woman, and it resulted in the deaths of 2,000 Asente and 1,000 British.

Cecil Rhodes

Founder of De Beers Diamonds, he was an especially enthusiastic investor in a railroad project that was to stretch from Cape Town, in the Cape Colony of South Africa, to Cairo, Egypt.

Guano

Bat and seabird excrement, is rich in nitrates and phosphates. These make it an excellent natural fertilizer. Because of the dry climate in Peru and Chile, vast quantities of this had accumulated before people began mining it in the 19th century. Between 1840 and 1880, millions of tons of this were dug by hand and loaded onto ships for export, often by indentured Chinese or Polynesian laborers.

Export Economies

The demand for raw materials that could be processed into manufactured goods and shipped away — often back to the providers of raw materials — turned colonies into ___________.

Rubber

Made from the latex sap of trees or vines. It softens when warm and hardens when cold. In 1839, Charles Goodyear developed a process known as vulcanization that eliminated these problems.

De Beers Mining Company

A diamond monopoly that controlled the demand and supply of the diamond industry.

Apartheid

In 1890, Cecil Rhodes became the prime minister of the Cape Colony where his racist policies paved the way for the _________, or racist segregation, that plagued South Africa during the 20th century.

Monocultures

The planting of similar crops due to their similarities with one another.

Opium Wars (1839-1842)

Two wars fought between Western Powers and China (1839-1842 and 1856-1858) after China tried to restrict the importation of foreign goods, especially opium; China lost both wars and was forced to make major concessions.

"Banana Republics"

The United Fruit Company allied itself with large landowners to pressure governments to maintain conditions that would be favorable for the U.S. company. In a short story, the writer O. Henry coined this term to describe small Central American countries under the economic power of foreign-based corporations. These republics were politically unstable states with an economy dependent upon the exportation of a limited-resource product, such as bananas and minerals.

Great Famine (1845-1849)

A series of mass starvation, disease, and emigration in Ireland between 1845 and 1894.

Mohandas Gandhi

Leader of the Indian independence movement and advocate of nonviolent resistance. He became leader of the Indian National Congress in 1920. He appealed to the poor, led nonviolent demonstrations against British colonial rule, and was jailed many times.

Natal Indian Congress

An organization that aimed to fight discrimination against Indians in South Africa. The Natal Indian Congress was founded by Mahatma Gandhi in 1894. A constitution was put in place on 22 August 1894.

Chinese Exclusion Act

The parliament of the province of Victoria passed this act in 1855 that limited the number of Chinese who could come ashore from each ship. Many Chinese got around this law by landing instead in South Australia.

White Australia Policy

The new attorney general stated that the government's policy was to preserve a "white Australia." This policy, as it was known, remained in effect until the mid-1970s.