Nineteenth-Century Imperialism and Global Trade

Vocabulary practice cards covering nineteenth-century global trade, Western imperialism in Asia, the Meiji Restoration, and the Scramble for Africa.

Free Trade

Trade across borders without barriers, which contributed to an increase of around $2000\%$ in the value of trade goods between 1800 and 1900.

Civilizing Missions

Western imperialist efforts to introduce education, modern medicine, and Christianity to colonized regions such as Hawaii.

Formal Empires

Empires where a home country exercises direct territorial and governmental control over colonies, such as Britain ruling Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and India.

Informal Empires

Arrangements where a dominant nation exerts extensive economic and political control over a region without establishing direct colonial rule, such as Britain in Argentina or the United States in Liberia.

Liberia

An African polity formed by Americans for emancipated slaves, which developed a social caste system placing descendants of American slaves above indigenous Africans.

Goodyear Tire Company

The American company that sponsored the informal colony in Liberia to gain access to raw rubber for tires, conveyor belts, and machine cushioning.

Emperor Quanlong

The Chinese emperor who sent a formal letter to King George III refusing British trade by asserting that Chinese culture and society had already achieved perfection.

British East India Company

A company closely tied to the British Parliament that governed portions of India and extracted opium from the Indian Subcontinent to sell into Chinese markets.

Laudanum

A nineteenth-century medicinal tincture made of opium diluted in alcohol and taken in water to treat ailments ranging from stomachaches to female hysteria.

First Opium War

An 1842 conflict initiated after China banned opium imports, seized an East India Company warehouse in Canton, and burned several hundred thousand pounds of British opium.

Treaty of Nanki

The agreement ending the First Opium War that ceded Hong Kong to Great Britain from 1842 until 1997 and opened Chinese ports to Western merchants and missionaries.

Matthew Perry

The American sea captain who sailed into Tokyo Bay in the 1850s and forced Japan to open its borders and markets to Western trade.

Emperor Meiji

The Japanese emperor who took power at age 20 and ruled until 1912, leading the westernization, industrial modernization, and military restructuring of Japan.

Meiji Restoration

The late nineteenth-century modernization of Japan that preserved traditional customs while adopting a German-style army, German medicine, and a British-style navy.

Russo-Japanese War

The 1904 conflict in which Japan defeated Russia in a surprise attack, gaining control of Korea and proving a non-Western nation could defeat a Western power.

Leopold the Second

The King of Belgium who acquired and governed the Congo as a personal, highly profitable commercial empire under the public pretext of humanitarian and charitable work.

Congo Free State

A private colony held by Leopold II where the native population was enslaved to extract timber, ebony, ivory, and rubber under fixed quotas enforced by hand amputations.

Cecil Rhodes

An English explorer and founder of the Rhodes Scholarship who promoted British colonization across Africa with the ambition of building an empire from The Cape to Cairo.

Congress of Berlin

A diplomatic conference where European powers partitioned Africa using arbitrary north-south territorial lines that disregarded existing tribal and linguistic borders.

Boers

Dutch-speaking, white African settlers who inhabited Southern Africa since the seventeenth century and resisted British annexation of their independent territories.

Boer War

An 1899 to 1902 conflict between Great Britain and the Boers over the gold and diamond reserves of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State.

Lizzie Van Pelt

A 16-year-old Boer girl photographed suffering from deliberate starvation inside a British concentration camp during the Boer War.

Apartheid

The South African policy of racial separation that originated from the desire of Dutch-descended Afrikaners to preserve their language and cultural identity separate from Britain.