Africa and Asia by the Mid19th Century and the Final

Establishment of the
European Global Empire
Chapters 24 and 26 of The Earth and Its Peoples discuss the general process of the
European global colonial empire building and the changes in Africa and Asian
from the late 18th century to the early 20th century as well as the changes in
Western Europe in the late 19th century. This week, I will focus on the Western
global empire building in the classroom lecture and quickly go over the materials
on the changes in Africa and Asia along with the related chapter outline and
MCQs.

I. Changing Situation in Africa and Asia by

the Mid-19th Century
Following the Seven Years War, Europeans speeded up their intrusion in Africa and
Asia. Correspondingly, changes in these two continents also occurred. In different
areas, African and Asian peoples made different responses to the increasingly
influential Europeans/Westerners.
1. Africa: the End of Slave Trade and the Boer Migration
In Africa, the most important changes by the mid-19th century were the end of
Atlantic slave trade, the rise of Zulu state, the migration of Boers, and the rise of
Sokoto Caliphate in Western Africa, as well as the Egyptian modernization attempt.
The Atlantic slave trade reached its height in the 18th century. Slave hunters
began to enter inland Africa to capture slaves. Historians estimated that, among
more than 10 millions of slaves reaching the Americas, two thirds of them crossed
the Atlantic Ocean from 1700 to the early 19th century. Nevertheless, starting in
the early 19th century, this large-scale human trafficking dwindled, largely because
of the influence of the Enlightenment and the French revolution which emphasized

equality and the rise of the industrial capitalism which required free labors as well
as Christian revivalism. As a result, the antislavery movement became increasingly
influential in Europe.
Here, Britain played an important role in legally ending this immoral and cruel
slave trade. Influenced by those antislavery reformers (many of them were
religious humanitarians like John Wesley and William Wilberforce), the British
parliament abolished the slave trade in 1807. After the Napoleon War was over, the
British Royal Navy began patrolled in the Atlantic Ocean to intercept the slave
ships and prevented them from crossing the ocean. This patrol helped reduce the
number of the crossing-Atlantic slave ships, because the British navy was the most
powerful one in the world. In the early 1830s, the British further abolished slavery
in all of their possessions. These measures not only promoted the US abolitionist
movement but also substantially curbed the slave trade. Although some Spanish
and Portuguese continued to send slaves to the Americas, particularly Cuba and
Brazil, the Atlantic slave trade on the whole began to decline and largely ended in
the 1860s.
Just as the four-century slave trade had profound influences on the African
societies, the sudden decline of the slave trade had its impact on Africans in the
slave coastal areas. These Africans had been engaged in slave trade for several
hundred years and their societies were organized for slave hunting. With the
decline and final end of slave trade, they lost their most important income source.
These African states had to find new forms of production and trade. Some societies
were unable to shift their economic focus and crumbled. But some survived and
even prospered. For example, the Ashanti federation established in todays Ghana
area in the 18th century successfully changed from trading slaves to exporting
palm oil and other agricultural goods and maintained its power.==>Generally
speaking, it is FALSE to argue that the decline of slave trade after the
19th century freed all African societies in the slave coastal areas and greatly
promoted their prosperity.
In South Africa, the major changes were the rise of the Zulu State and the
migration of Boers.
The textbook discusses Shaka Zulu (p. 658). Among the Nguni people in South
Africa (todays Zulu land), a new leader, Shaka, gained authority in 1818. See the
picture below:

He created a formidable military force of regiments organized on lineage and age

lines. Shaka's Zulu chiefdom became the center of a new political and military

organization that absorbed or destroyed rivals. Shaka was assassinated in 1828, but
his successors ruled over a still-growing polity. The rise of the Zulu and other
Nguni chiefdoms marked the beginning of the mfecane, a time of wars and
wandering. Defeated peoples fled into new regions and used Zulu tactics to create
new states, among them the Swazi and Lesotho. The Zulus remained powerful until
defeated during the 1870s by the British. The basic patterns of conflict between
Europeans and Africans took form during this era.
In the Dutch colony at Cape Town, established in 1652, the settlers developed large
estates worked by slaves. Colonial expansion led to successful wars against the San
and Khoikhoi. These Dutch descendants were called Boers. By the 1760s the Boers
crossed the Orange River and met the expanding Bantu, followed by competition
and war over land. Britain occupied the Dutch colony in 1795 and gained formal
possession in 1815. British efforts to limit Boers expansion were unsuccessful,
and frequent fighting occurred between the Boers and Africans. After 1834 many
Boers, seeking to escape British control, migrated into inland South Africa. Be sure
to understand, the British abolition policy and landholding restriction on Boers
became the key reasons for Boers migration. Within two decades, the Boers
established two states in inland area, see the map below:

Here, the rise of the Zulu state and the related mfecane substantially destroyed the
inland African societies. As a result, when Boers migrated, they did not
encountered effective resistance from the local Africans. Even if there are some
resistance from the remaining Africans who mainly used spears as weapons, the
Boers quickly crushed them with the rifles. In this way, the rise of Zulu in the
1820s facilitated the successful migration of the Boers in the 1830s-1850s.
In other parts of Africa, there were also important changes we need to mention.
Inland West Africa was in political chaos after the collapse of the Songhai empire.
Beginning in the 1770s, Muslim reform movements swept the western Sudan, the
most important of which was the rise of the new Sokoto Caliphate. In 1804,
Usuman Dan Fodio (1754-1817), a Fulani Muslim, inspired a religious revolution
that won control of most of the Hausa states. A new and powerful kingdom
developed at Sokoto, which was known as the Sokoto Caliphate (1809-1906). The
goal of Dan Fodio was to create a theocratic state controlled by its imams, Islamic
religious leaders who would both purify and enforce the true faith of Muhammud.
In this way, the Fulani leaders established a highly centralized and bureaucratized
state in which Dan Fodio and his followers took the title of sultan and
Commander of the Faith.
In East Africa, Egypt under the leadership of Muhammud Ali (1769-1849)

nominally as an Ottoman Pasha (governor or viceroy) attempted to modernize

itself and acquired autonomous status from Ottoman after Ali came in 1800.
Muhammud Ali was the first to use Western methods and technology for
modernization. He combined the Western technical expertise with Islamic and
cultural traditions. His reforms included the irrigation projects, the encouragement
of industry, and a more efficient taxation system. By the mid-19th century,
Egyptian modernization was well under way, but later Egypt was partly occupied
by the British because of its huge debt to them.
Generally speaking, by the mid-19th century, the Europeans were still unable to
explore interior Africa. But after the 1850s, inland Africa was no longer a major
barrier for their exploration. One major reason was that, by the mid century, they
had been able to effectively control malariathe most common cause of the fever
that killed strangers in Africaby securing a steady supply of quininewhich was
originally from Peru and could protect people from malariaafter the Dutch took
the seeds and developed plantation of quinine trees in Indonesia. As a result,
exploration of inland Africa became safer. Several adventurers like Dr. David
Livingstone conducted successful explorations into the inland Africa and collected
the detailed information on inland Africa.
2. The Retreat of the Islamic Civilization
By the early 19th century, the Islamic empires had substantially declined in the
face of the European challenge.
Starting in 1699 when the Ottoman surrendered Hungary to Austria after several
years of bloody fighting, the Ottoman empire lost control more and more territory
including North Africa, the Black Sea area, and Lebanon. By the 19th century, two
European powers Austria and Russiacontinued to place political, military, and
economic pressures on the declined Ottoman.
Safavid had been overthrown by the Afghanistan invaders in the 1720s. Although
in the 1730s Nadir Khan Afshar restored Persian independence, his dynasty was
short-lived. The conflicts between the Persians and the Afghanistan people
continued. The Russians and the British also utilized Persian chaos as an
opportunity to expand their influence there.
After Aurangzeb died in 1707, the Mughal Empire crumbled. Local governors
(nabobs or nawabsafter the British conquest, the term had the new meaning and
referred to the British who went to India to make fortunes through graft and
exploitation and then returned to Britain to live richly, as the textbook mentions)
and princes (rajas) became independent or autonomous and fought against each
other. The Mughal emperors barely maintained their nominal control. The whole

empire was plunged into turmoil. The British East Indian Company quickly
expanded its influence and began to conquer the subcontinent in the Seven Years
War.
To respond to the European challenge, the Ottoman Empire started its own
Westernized modernization reform with the help of the British who tried to use
Ottoman to check Russias southward expansion. (See Chapter 24, pp. 603-08),
these reforms sustained the empire until the early 20th century, but rival solutions
also caused tension:
Selim III's modest military and administrative reform attempts angered officials
and the Janissaries; he was deposed and killed in 1807. Mahmud II was more
successful. With the help of European advisors, he built a professional army that
destroyed the Janissaries in 1826. Mahmud II then launched far-reaching reforms
patterned on Western models. Between 1839 and 1876, the period of the Tanzimat
reforms, university education was reorganized on Western lines, postal and
telegraph systems were introduced, and railways were constructed. Newspapers
were established, and in 1876 a European-type constitution was promulgated. The
many changes opened the empire to European influences and threatened some
groups. Artisans lost out to the foreign competition. Women gained little from the
reforms as Islamic patterns continued.
Generally speaking, the Westernized reforms strengthened the states but
threatened the dynasty, because Western-oriented officials, military officers, and
professionals viewed the sultanate as a barrier and demanded for further reforms.
As a result, the internal factional struggles placed the empire in a weak condition.
Although the Egyptians and Ottomans adopted Westernized reforms, most
Muslim remained suspicious of imitating the West, as this approach meant that
Islam was not the true faith. They admitted that the Muslim world was falling
behind the West. But the reason for such a decline, to them, was not their rejection
to the Western advanced technology but Muslims abandonment of what
Muhammud said: particularly, many Muslims advocated the mystic Sufi faith
which emphasized devotion and passion for salvation by Allah instead of following
Koran, the Five Pillars, and Sharia. So the solution to the Islamic revival was to go
back the ancient way.
In the Islamic area, many Muslims drew this conclusion. Their response was
typically shown in the Wahhabi reform. It was promoted by Muhammud ibn
Abdul-Wahhab (1691-1792) and his followers were often referred to as
Wahhabis.Rejecting any external innovations or tradition, the Wahhabi reform
demanded for the exact obedience to the Koran and the Sacred Law. The
Wahhabi reform laid foundation for modern Islamic fundamentalism.

3. India: Conquest and Rebellion

After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the British East Indian Company (EIC)
seized prosperous and wealthy Bengal and continued its expansion based on their
forts at Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay. The EIC followed a pattern begun by the
French and relied on Indian troops (sepoyseither Muslims or Hindus) trained in
European military style. Successful intervention in disputes between Indians
brought the British increasing territory. By 1818, the EIC controlled most parts of
India.
Clearly, the decline of the Mughal empire and Indian disunity contributed to
British success. And the stranger effect and the consequent native support for the
EIC another key reason for the EIC successful conquest.
But the EICs rule in India ended with the Indian Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 (just
one hundred years after the battle of Plassey. Scholars for a long time have debated
on the nature of the rebellion. Many Indian historians saw the rebellion as a
modern nationalist uprising, while many Western scholars, particularly the
British, simply regarded the uprising as a mutiny (not a modern nationalist
movement). Here I would like to adopt a middle way: the rebellion was not a
modern nationalist movement, because by the Western nationalist ideology had
been introduced into India until the late 19th century; but it was a military outbreak
with obvious nationalist elements: the rebellion aimed to expel the British and reestablish the old Mughal empire.
The reason for the rebellion was that all major Indian social groups became
discontent with the EIC rule: The remaining Indian princes (rajas) who cooperated
with the EIC and in return could keep their own land and title became discontent
with the EIC when the Company decided in the 1840s to take all of the land of
these rajas and compensate them with fixed stipends. Most conservative elements
of the Indian population were disturbed by the British social reforms (like the
abolition of sati), the introduction of railroads and technology, the establishment of
Western-style schools, and the vigorous activities of missionariesall these, to
many Indians, fundamentally endangered their old tradition. And the sepoys,
working for the EIC, also resented the EIC which forced them to continue to
conquer new territories outside India with which they were not familiar
without enhancing their benefits.
Under the circumstances, one event directly provoked the rebellion. In 1857, the
EIC introduced to the sepoys a new cartridge that allegedly was greased with the
cow and pig fat against moisture. When asked to use teeth to tear up the greased
wrap paper, the sepoys refused to use it, as the Muslims saw pig as foul and the
Hindus regarded cow as sacred. And the rebellion broke out in May 1857 and
quickly spread to most northern portions of India. See the map below:

It took London several months to reassemble the troops. After late 1857, a large
number of British troops landed in India. Also, the British government changed the
EIC policy by allowing the Indian princes who did not participated in the rebellion
to keep their land and titles. As a result, many influential princes, particularly in the
south, did not join the rebellion. Meanwhile, although controlling the north, the
rebels were unable to coordinate with each other but fought separately against the
British. By mid-1858, the rebellion failed.
After crushing the rebellion, the British government decided to end the EIC rule in
India and put the subcontinent in a direct imperial rule. A viceroy was sent to India
on behalf of the royal government in London to manage the colony. The colonial
administration was staffed almost exclusively by the British. And Indians could
serve low-level government positions. It was in a few decades after the rebellion
that the Indians used the nationalist ideology to organize their political party and
launch their nationalist movement.
4. East Asia: the Opium War (1840-1842)
The Opium War marked that East Asia was opened by the Western gunboats. The
textbook discusses this war. Here I would like to highlight the reasons and the
consequence of the War.
Traditionally, the Chinese rejected the large-scale foreign trade because of their
self-sufficient economy and their Central-Kingdom concept. The economic selfsufficiency made them believe they already had everything they needed and
anything foreign was unnecessary. With the Central-Kingdom mentality, they
believed they lived in the center or best area of the world and everything in this
Central Kingdom was the best in the world. So they did not need any foreign thing
that was inferior. They conducted a limited foreign trade only in the city of
Canton in south China. And the British EIC started to conduct China trade in the
end of the 17th century. And soon the British became the largest trading partner
with China among the Western countries. Nevertheless, till the early 19th century,
the Chinese-British trade balance had been favorable to the China side and British
had to use a large number of silver to buy the Chinese goods. This is because the
British needed the Chinese goods such porcelain, silk and tea, while the Chinese
showed little interest in the British goods.
To change the unfavorable trading balance, the EIC finally found one goods the
Chinese definitely would likeopium. With India as a base, the EIC in the 18th
century ignored the Chinese ban and began to smuggle opium to China. The

continuous importation of opium to China finally reversed the trade balance in

Britains favor. But to the Chinese, the opium importation not only led to outflow
of silver but also endanger the Confucian tradition, as an opium addict would no
longer behavior in a proper way in the Confucian society. Finally, in 1839, the
Chinese government decided to use tougher measures to the opium importation.
The British were asked to turn in all of the opium they had to the Chinese Canton
authority in. As a result, 30,000 chests (1 chest = 133.33 lbs) of opium were
destroyed by the Chinese. The British government utilized the Chinese destruction
of the British opium as an excuse to launch war against China in 1840.Here,
be sure to understand that the Chinese destruction of opium was not the
fundamental reason for the war. The fundamental reason for the war was the
Chinese self-sufficient economic structure conflicted with the British demands
for an expanding market on the basis of the laissez faire doctrine.
The War lasted for two years and ended with the Chinese defeat on sea and land.
One reason for the Chinese defeat is the Chinese military inferiority: they used
spear, bows, and arrows to deal with the British advanced firearms and steamboats.
But the fundamental reason lies in the Chinese political ignorance. Obsessed with
the Central Kingdom concept, the Chinese knew nothing about the changing
situation in the world and had no willingness to know. As a result, when the British
gunboats arrived, the Chinese were totally ignorant about the British ambition,
goals, and strategy. The Chinese defeat became inevitable.
The Chinese government sued peace in 1842 and signed the Treaty of Nanjing with
the British. Soon, other Western powers like France and the United States also
came and signed similar treaty with the Chinese. All these treaty were called
unequal treaty. The major clauses included:
-the opening of more port cities for foreign trade;
-fixed tariff (all imported goods subjected to tariff no more than 5% of the value of
the goods;
-the cession of Hong Kong to the British;
-the right of extraterritoriality (foreign citizens violating the Chinese laws should
be trialed only by the foreign consulate in the port cities;
-official toleration of Christianity and missionary activities; and
-the Most-Favored-Nation (MFN) treatment according to which any privilege the
Chinese granted to one foreign power became a privilege granted to all.
The Opium War showed that East Asia was finally opened by the foreign gunboats.
Most typically, China became a semi-colonial country which maintained its
nominal sovereignty but was controlled politically, militarily, and economically by

the foreign powers. In the late 19th century, China tried its modernization reforms
(the self-strengthening movement and the 1898 reform) but failed. One key reason
for such a failure was that it was very hard for the Chinese to make further changes
in their sophisticated tradition and systems. They only introduced Western
technology but rejected the Western values and system.

II. The Lecture Part: The Building of

European/Western Global Colonial Empire.
Chapter 26 of The Earth and Its Peoples discusses how a European-dominated
world order established. Here I would highlight some general motives and tools of
the industrial powers in their global colonial empire building and then give you a
brief overview on their colonial power building in Asia and Africa as well as Latin
America.
1. New Imperialism: Motives and Tools ==>Explain its motives.
*New Imperialism differed from Imperialism: not only rule or conquer the
dependent states but also completely transform them => Define New
Imperialism. How did it differ from old imperialism?
*Economic motives: demand raw materials and export industrial/manufactured
goods and capital to overseas markets
*Political motives: gain national prestige and diffuse domestic social tension
*Cultural motives: export a superior Western civilization to the conquered
society
*Methods: technologies of transportation (steamboat), war (machine guns), and
communication (telegraph) => What methods did the imperialists use to build
their global empire?
*Consolidation of global unity: by linking all parts of the world together under the
Western rule => Explain the significance of New Imperialism and colonial
system.
2. New Empires in Asia and Latin America

*European advance into Central Asia (Russia and Britain) and Southeast Asia
(British in Burma and French in Indochina)
*Japan (in East Asia) and the United States(Hawaii, the Philippines, and the
Caribbean) became new imperialist powers =>How did they become new
imperialist powers?
*Economic imperialism in Latin America: Economic dependence on European
powers but maintaining its political independence (not European
colony). => How different from Asia and Africa?
3. The Scramble for Africa ==> List the major European colonies in Africa
*European advance into interior Africa (1875-1900) after a series of adventure and
exploration
*French got large areas of West Africa, Algeria, and Morocco, while British seized
large areas in East Africa and South Africa ==>The two largest colonial powers
in Africa
*Portuguese held traditional trading posts: Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea
*Germans and Italians came late: only got southwest Africa and Tangayikain East
Africa (German colonies), and Libyaand parts of Somaliland in East Africa (Italian
colonies)
*British rule based on social exclusiveness (following the Dutch approach)
while French rule based on assimilation (following the Spanish
approach)=> How different?
4. Two ways to resist new imperialism ==> What were they?
*Traditional colonial wars and rebellions in Africa (the Mahdist movement in
Sudan and the Ethiopian resistance against Italy, for examples) and Asia (the Boxer
Rebellion in China)
*Progressive reform movements (most common in Asia: for example, the Persian
Revolution of 1905 and the Young Turk revolt in 1908)

Below are the outlines of Chapters 24 and 26:

CHAPTER 24
Land Empires in the Age of Imperialism,
18001870
I.

The Ottoman Empire

A.

Egypt and the Napoleonic Example

1. In 1798, Napoleon invaded Egypt and defeated the Mamluk forces he

encountered there. Fifteen months later, after a series of military defeats, Napoleon
returned to France, seized power, and made himself emperor.
2. His generals had little hope of holding on to power and, in 1801, agreed to
withdraw. Muhammad Ali, the commander of a military detachment sent by the
Ottoman sultan to restore imperial control, emerged as the victor in the ensuing
power struggle.
3. Muhammad Ali used many French practices in an effort to build up the new
Egyptian state.
4. He established schools to train modern military officers and built factories to
supply his new army.
5. In the 1830s, his son Ibrahim invaded Syria and started a similar set of
reforms there.
6. European military pressure forced Muhammad Ali to withdraw to the presentday borders of Egypt and Israel.
7. Muhammad Ali remained Egypts ruler until 1849, and his family held onto
power until 1952.
B.

Ottoman Reform and the European Model, 18071853

1. At the end of the eighteenth century, Sultan Selim III introduced reforms to
strengthen the military and the central government and to standardize taxation and
land tenure. These reforms aroused the opposition especially of Janissaries and the
ulama.

2. Tension between the Sultanate and the Janissaries sparked a Janissary revolt
in Serbia in 1805. Serbian peasants helped to defeat the Janissary uprising, but
went on to make Serbia independent of the Ottoman Empire.
3. Selim suspended his reform program in 1806, too late to prevent a massive
military uprising in Istanbul in which Selim was captured and executed before
reform forces could retake the capital.
4. The Greeks gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1830. Britain,
France, and Russia assisted the Greeks in their struggle for independence and
regarded the Greek victory as a triumph of European civilization.
5. Sultan Mahmud II believed that the loss of Greece indicated a profound
weakness in Ottoman military and financial organization. Mahmud used popular
outrage over the loss of Greece to justify a series of reforms that included the
creation of a new army corps, elimination of the Janissaries, and reduction of the
political power of the religious elite. Mahmuds secularizing reform program was
further articulated in the Tanzimat (restructuring) reforms initiated by his successor
Abdul Mejid in 1839.
6. Military cadets were sent to France and Germany for training, and reform of
Ottoman military education became the model for general educational reforms in
which foreign subjects were taught, foreign instructors were employed, and French
became the preferred language in all advanced scientific and professional training.
7. Educational reform stimulated growth of the wealth and influence of urban
elites. The reforms also brought about unexpected cultural and social effects that
ranged from the introduction of European clothing styles to the equal access to the
courts for all male subjects, to equalization of taxation.
8. The public rights and political participation granted during the Tanzimat were
explicitly restricted to men. The reforms reduced the legal position of women,
especially regarding their rights to hold property while at the same time, the
development of a cash economy and competitive labor market drove women from
the work force.
C.

The Crimean War and Its Aftermath

1. Russias southward expansion at the expense of the Ottoman Empire led to

the Crimean War. An alliance of Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire defeated

Russia and thus blocked Russian expansion into Eastern Europe and the Middle
East.
2. The Crimean War brought significant changes to all combatants. The Russian
government was further discredited and forced into making additional reforms,
Britain and France carried out extensive propaganda campaigns that emphasized
their roles in the war, and the French press promoted a sense of unity between
Turkish and French society.
3. The Crimean War marked the transition from traditional to modern warfare.
The percussion caps and breech-loading rifles that were used in the Crimean War
were the beginning of a series of subsequent changes in military technology that
included the invention of machine guns, the use of railways to transfer weapons
and men, and trench warfare.
4. After the Crimean War, the Ottoman Empire continued to establish secular
financial and commercial institutions on the European model. These reforms
contributed to rising trade, and thus to a shift of population from rural to urban
areas and the development of professional and wage laborer classes, but they did
not solve the regimes fiscal problems. By 1856 the Ottoman state was hugely
dependent on foreign loans.
5. The decline of Ottoman power and wealth inspired a group of educated urban
men known as the Young Ottomans to band together to work for constitutionalism,
liberal reform, and the creation of a Turkish national state in place of the Ottoman
Empire. A constitution was granted in 1876, but renewed hostilities with Russia
meant that it was suspended within a year.
II.

The Russian Empire

A.

Russia and Europe

1. In 1700, only three percent of the Russian population lived in cities, and
Russia was slow to acquire a modern infrastructure and modern forms of
transportation.
2. While Russia aspired to Western-style economic development, fear of
political change prevented real progress.
3. Nonetheless, Russia had more in common with the other European nations
than did the Ottoman Empire.

4. Slavophiles and Westernizers debated the proper course for Russian

development.
5. The diplomatic inclusion of Russia among the great powers of Europe was
countered by a powerful sense of Russophobia in the west.
B.

Russia and Asia

1. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Russian Empire had reached the
Pacific Ocean and the borders of China. In the nineteenth century, Russian
expansion continued to the south, bringing Russia into conflict with China, Japan,
Iran, and the Ottoman Empire.
2. Afghanistan ultimately served as a buffer between Russian interests in Central
Asia and British interests in India and South Asia.
C.

Cultural Trends

1. Russia had had cultural contact with Europe since the late seventeenth
century.
2. The reforms of Alexander I promised more on paper than they delivered in
practice.
3. Opposition to reform came from wealthy families who feared reform would
bring about imperial despotism, a fear that was realized during the reign of
Nicholas I.
4. The Decemberist revolt was carried out by a group of reform-minded military
officers upon the death of Alexander I. Their defeat amounted to the defeat of
reform for the next three decades.
5. Heavy penalties were imposed on Russia in the treaty that ended the Crimean
War. The new tsar, Alexander II, was called upon to institute major reforms.
6. Under Alexander II, reforms and cultural trends begun under his grandfather
were encouraged and expanded. Notably, he abolished serfdom in Russia in 1861.
7. The nineteenth century saw numerous Russian scholarly and scientific
achievements, as well as the emergence of significant Russian writers and thinkers.

III.

The Qing Empire

A.

Economic and Social Disorder

1. When the Qing conquered China in the 1600s, they restored peace and
stability and promoted the recovery and expansion of the agricultural economy,
thus laying the foundation for the doubling of the Chinese population between
1650 and 1800. By 1800, population pressure was causing environmental damage
and contributing to an increasing number of itinerant farmhands, laborers, and
merchants.
2. There were numerous sources of discontent in Qing China. Various minority
peoples had been driven off their land, and many people regarded the government
as being weak, corrupt, and perhaps in collusion with the foreign merchants and
missionaries in Canton and Macao. Discontent was manifest in a series of internal
rebellions in the nineteenth century, beginning with the White Lotus rebellion
(17941804).
B.

The Opium War and Its Aftermath, 18391850

1. Believing the Europeans to be a remote and relatively unimportant people, the

Qing did not at first pay much attention to trade issues or to the growth in the
opium trade. In 1839, when the Qing government realized the harm being done by
the opium trade, they decided to ban the use and import of opium and sent a highranking official to Canton to deal with the matter.
2. The attempt to ban the opium trade led to the Opium War (18391842), in
which the better-armed British naval and ground forces defeated the Qing,
exposing Chinas real military weaknesses, and forced them to sign the Treaty of
Nanking. The Treaty of Nanking and subsequent treaties signed between the Qing
and the various Western powers gave Westerners special privileges and resulted in
the colonization of small pockets of Qing territory.
C.

The Taiping Rebellion, 18501864

1. The Taiping Rebellion broke out in Guangxi province, where poor farmland,
endemic poverty, and economic distress were complicated by ethnic divisions that
relegated the minority Hakka people to the lowliest trades.
2. The founder of the Taiping movement was Hong Xiuquan, a man of Hakka
background who became familiar with the teachings of Christian missionaries in

Canton. Hong declared himself to be the younger brother of Jesus and founded a
religious group (the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace or Taiping movement) to
which he recruited followers from among the Hakka people.
3. The Taiping forces defeated imperial troops in Guangxi, recruited (or forced)
villagers into their segregated male and female battalions and work teams, and
moved toward eastern and northern China. In 1853, the Taiping forces captured
Nanjing and made it the capital of their Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace.
4. The Qing were finally able to defeat the Taiping with help from military
forces organized by provincial governors like Zeng Guofan and with the assistance
of British and French forces.
5. The Taiping Rebellion was one of the worlds bloodiest civil wars and the
greatest armed conflict before the twentieth century. The results of the Taiping
Rebellion included 20 to 30 million deaths, depopulation and destruction of rich
agricultural lands in central and eastern China, and suffering and destruction in the
cities and cultural centers of eastern China.
D.

Decentralization at the End of the Qing Empire, 18641875

1. After the 1850s, the expenses of wars and the burden of indemnities payable
to Western governments made it impossible for the Qing to get out of debt. With
the Qing government so deeply in their debt, Britain, France and the United States
became active participants in the fiscal and economic recovery efforts that
followed the Taiping Rebellion.
2. The real work of recovery was managed by provincial governors like Zeng
Guofan, who looked to the United States as his model and worked to restore
agriculture, reform the military, and industrialize armaments manufacture. The
reform programs were supported by a coalition of Qing aristocrats, including the
Empress Dowager Cixi, but they were unable to prevent the Qing Empire from
disintegrating into a number of large regions in which provincial governors
exercised the only real authority.
IV. Conclusion
1. All of these empires faced similar challenges, like the maintenance of political
order and revenue collection, while simultaneously reckoning with problems
caused by population growth and internal discontent.

2. Subjects of the Ottoman, Russian, and Qing Empires did not consider
European economic pressure a challenge during the first half of the nineteenth
century.
By the 1870s, however, European challenges to the empires had become
widely realizedfor the Ottoman and Russian Empires during the Crimean War,
and for the Qing Empire during the Opium War.
3. Although historians view economic pressure as the force that weakened the
empires, rulers of the Ottoman, Russian, and Qing Empires themselves considered
their greatest challenge to be the military superiority of the Europeans.
CHAPTER 26
Varieties of Imperialism in Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and Latin America,
17501914
I.

Changes and Exchanges in Africa

A.

Southern Africa

1. Serious drought hit the coastlands of southeastern Africa in the early

nineteenth century and led to conflicts over grazing and farming lands. During
these conflicts, Shaka used strict military drill and close-combat warfare to build
the Zulu kingdom.
2. Some neighboring Africans created their own states (such as Swaziland and
Lesotho) to protect themselves against the expansionist Zulu kingdom. Shaka ruled
the Zulu kingdom for little more than a decade, but he succeeded in creating a new
national identity as well as a new kingdom.
3. The Cape Colony, taken from the Dutch in the Napoleonic wars, was valuable
to Britain because of its strategic importance as a supply station on the route to
India. In response to British pressure, the descendants of earlier French and Dutch
settlers (the Afrikaners) embarked on a great trek to found new colonies on the
fertile high veld that had been depopulated by the Zulu wars.
4. Southern Africa had long been attractive to European settlers because of its
good pastures and farmland and its mineral wealth. The discovery of diamonds at
Kimberley in 1868 attracted European prospectors and Africans; it also set off the
process by which the British Cape Colony expanded, annexing Kimberley and
defeating the Xhosa and the Zulu.

5. Cecil Rhodes used his British South Africa Company to take over land in
central Africa, where he created the colonies of Southern Rhodesia and Northern
Rhodesia.
6. British control over South Africa was consolidated when Britain defeated the
Afrikaaners in the South African War (18991902). In 1910, the European settlers
created the Union of South Africa, in which the Afrikaaners emerged as the ruling
element in a government that assigned Africans to reservations and established a
system of racial segregation.
B.

West and Equatorial Africa

1. In West Africa, movements to purify Islam led to the construction of new

states through the classic Muslim pattern ofjihad. The largest of these reform
movements occurred in the Hausa states and led to the establishment of the Sokoto
Caliphate (18091906).
2. The new Muslim states became centers of Islamic learning and reform.
Sokoto and other Muslim states both sold slaves and used slaves to raise food, thus
making it possible for them to seclude free Muslim women in their homes in
accordance with reformed Muslim practice.
3. In West Africa, the French built a railroad from the upper Senegal River to the
upper Niger to open the interior to French merchants. In the Congo Basin, King
Leopold II of Belgium claimed the area south of the Congo River, while France
claimed the area on the northern bank.
C.

The Berlin Conference

1. German chancellor Bismarck called the Berlin Conference on Africa in 1884

and 1885 to lay out the framework under which Africa would be occupied by the
European nations. In practice, the division and occupation of Africa met with
resistance and required many years of effort.
2. In West Africa, the new colonial powers took advantage of and developed the
existing trade networks. In equatorial Africa, where there were few inhabitants and
little trade, the colonial powers granted concessions to private companies that
forced Africans to produce cash crops and to carry them to the nearest navigable
river or railroad.
D.

Modernization in Egypt and Ethiopia

1. In Egypt, Muhammad Ali (r. 18051848) carried out a series of modernizing

reforms for Egypt that combined Western methods with Islamic religious and
cultural traditions.
2. Muhammad Alis grandson Ismail placed even more emphasis on
westernizing Egypt. Ismails ambitious construction programs (railroads, the new
capital city of Cairo) were funded by borrowing from French and British banks.
These projects were financed with high-interest loans from European creditors and
Egypt ultimately sold shares of the Suez Canal to Great Britain to lower their debt.
3. French and British bankers lobbied their governments to intervene in Egypt to
secure their loans. In 1882, the British sent an army into Egypt and established a
system of indirect rule that lasted for seventy years.
4. The British worked to develop Egyptian agriculture, especially cotton
production, by building a dam across the Nile at Aswan. The economic
development of Egypt only benefited a small group of elite landowners and
merchants, and it was accompanied by the introduction of western ways that
conflicted with the teachings of Islam.
5. In the mid- to late nineteenth century Ethiopian kings reconquered territory
that had been lost since the sixteenth century, purchased modern European
weapons, and began to manufacture weapons locally. An attempt to hold British
officials captive led to a temporary British occupation in the 1860s, but the British.
E.

Transition from the Slave Trade

1. In 1808, news of slave revolts like that on Saint Domingue and the activities
of abolitionists combined to lead Britain and the United States to prohibit their
citizens from participating in the slave trade. The British used their navy to stop the
slave trade, but the continued demand for slaves in Cuba and Brazil meant that the
trade did not end until 1867.
2. As the slave trade declined, Africans expanded their legitimate trade in gold
and other goods. The most successful new export was palm oil, which was
exported to British manufacturers of soap, candles, and lubricants. The increased
export of palm oil altered the social structure of coastal trading communities of the
Niger Delta, as is demonstrated in the career of the canoe slave Jaja, who became a
wealthy palm oil trader in the 1870s.

3. The suppression of the slave trade also helped to spread Western cultural
influences in West Africa. Missionaries converted and founded schools for the
recaptives whom the British settled in Sierra Leone, while black Americans
brought Western culture to Liberia and to other parts of Africa before and after
emancipation in the United States.
F.

Secondary Empire in Eastern Africa

1. When British patrols ended the slave trade on the Atlantic coast, slave traders
in the Atlantic trade began to purchase their slaves from the East African markets
that had traditionally supplied slaves to North Africa and the Middle East. Zanzibar
Island and neighboring territories ruled by the sultan of Oman were important in
the slave trade, the ivory trade, and the cultivation of cloves on plantations using
slave labor.
II.

India Under British Rule

A.

East India Company

1. In the eighteenth century, the Mughal Empire was defeated and its capital
sacked by marauding Iranian armies, while internally the Mughals deputies
(nawabs) had become de facto independent rulers of their states.
2. British, French, and Dutch companies staffed by ambitious young company
men established trading posts in strategic places and hired Indian troops (sepoys)
to defend them. By the early 1800s, the British East India Company had pushed the
French out of south India, forced the Mughal Empire to recognize company rule
over Bengal, and taken control of large territories that became the core of the
Bombay Presidency.
3. The British raj (reign) over India aimed both to introduce administrative and
social reform and to maintain the support of Indian allies by respecting Indian
social and religious customs.
4. Before 1850, the British created a government that relied on sepoy military
power, disarmed the warriors of the Indian states, gave free reign to Christian
missionaries, and established a private land ownership system to ease tax
collection. At the same time, the British bolstered the traditional power of princes
and holy men and invented so-called traditional rituals to celebrate their own rule.

5. British political and economic influence benefited Indian elites and created
jobs in some sectors while bringing new oppression to the poor and causing the
collapse of the traditional textile industry.
6. Discontent among the needy and particularly among the Indian soldiers led to
the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857. The rebellion was suppressed in 1858, but it gave the
British a severe shock.
B.

Political Reform and Industrial Impact

1. After the rebellion of 18571858, the British eliminated the last traces of
Mughal and company rule and installed a new government administered from
London. The new government continued to emphasize both tradition and reform,
maintained Indian princes in luxury, and staged elaborate ceremonial pageants
known as durbars.
2. An efficient bureaucracy, the Indian Civil Service (ICS), now controlled the
Indian masses. Recruitment into the ICS was by examinations that were
theoretically open to all, but in practice, racist attitudes prevented Indians from
gaining access to the upper levels of administration.
3. After 1857, the British government and British enterprises expanded the
production and export of agricultural commodities and built irrigation systems,
railroads, and telegraph lines. Freer movement of people into the cities caused the
spread of cholera, which was brought under control when new sewage and filtered
water systems were installed in the major cities in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
C.

Indian Nationalism

1. The failure of the rebellion of 1857 prompted some Indians to argue that the
only way for Indians to regain control of their destiny was to reduce their countrys
social and ethnic divisions and to promote a Pan-Indian nationalism.
2. In the early nineteenth century, Rammouhan Roy and his Brahmo Samaj
movement tried to reconcile Indian religious traditions with western values and to
reform traditional abuses of women. After 1857, Indian intellectuals tended to turn
toward western secular values and western nationalism as a way of developing a
Pan-Indian nationalism that would transcend regional and religious differences.

3. Indian middle-class nationalists convened the first Indian National Congress

in 1885. The congress promoted national unity and argued for greater inclusion of
Indians in the Civil Service, but it was an elite organization with little support from
the masses.
III.

Southeast Asia and the Pacific

1. British defeat of French and Dutch forces in the Napoleonic Wars allowed
Britain to expand its control in Southeast Asia.
2. The British established a series of strategic outposts in Southeast Asia. Raffles
established the free port of Singapore in 1824, Assam was annexed to India in
1826, and Burma was annexed in 1852. Malaya, Indochina and northern Sumatra
followed, falling to the British, French and Dutch respectively.
A.

Australia

1. The development of new ships and shipping networks contributed to the

colonization of Australia and New Zealand by British settlers who displaced the
indigenous populations.
2. Portuguese mariners sighted Australia in the early seventeenth century, and
Captain James Cook surveyed New Zealand and the eastern Australian coast
between 1769 and 1778. Unfamiliar diseases brought by new overseas contacts
substantially reduced the populations of the hunter-gatherers of Australia and the
Maori of New Zealand.
3. Australia received British convicts and, after the discovery of gold in 1851, a
flood of free European (and some Chinese) settlers.
B.

New Zealand

1. British settlers came more slowly to New Zealand until defeat of the Maori,
faster ships, and a short gold rush brought more British immigrants after 1860.
2. The British crown gradually turned governing power over to the British
settlers of Australia and New Zealand, but Aborigines and the Maori experienced
discrimination.
C.

Hawaii and the Philippines, 18781902

1. By the late 1890s, the U.S. economy was in need of export markets and the
political mood favored expansionism. The United States annexed the Hawaiian
Islands in 1898.
2. In the Philippines, Emilio Aguinaldo led an uprising against the Spanish in
1898. He might very well have succeeded in establishing a republic if the United
States had not purchased the Philippines from Spain at the end of the SpanishAmerican War.
3. In 1899, Aguinaldo rose up against the American occupation. The United
States suppressed the insurrection and then tried to soften its rule by introducing
public works and economic development projects. After introducing some
measures of self-government, the United States announced in 1916 that the
Philippines would become independent, though it took until 1946 for that to
happen.
IV. Imperialism in Latin America
A.

American Expansionism and the Spanish-American War, 1898

1. The United States had long held interest in Cuba; American businesses had
invested in Cuban sugar and tobacco production. When Cubans began a revolution
against Spanish rule, the United States ultimately aided the Cubans against Spain.
2. After defeating Spain in the Spanish-American War, the United States took
over Puerto Rico, while Cuba became an independent republic subject to intense
interference by the United States.

B.

Economic Imperialism
1. The natural resources of the Latin American republics made them targets for a
form of economic dependence called free-trade imperialism.
2. British and U.S. entrepreneurs financed and constructed railroads to exploit
the agricultural and mineral wealth of Latin America. Latin American elites
encouraged foreign companies with generous concessions because this appeared to
be the fastest way both to modernize their countries and to enrich the Latin
American property-owning class.

C.

Revolution and Civil War in Mexico

1. Upon independence in 1821, Mexican society was deeply divided; a few

wealthy families of Spanish origin owned 85 percent of the land, while the
majority of Indians and mestizos were poor peasants.
2. Concentration of land ownership increased after independence as wealthy
families and American companies used bribery and force to acquire millions of
acres of good agricultural land, forcing peasants into wage labor, and debt.
3. In 1910, General Porfirio Diaz (18301915) had ruled for thirty-four years.
Diazs policies had made Mexico City a modernized showplace and brought wealth
to a small number of businessmen, but his rule was also characterized by
discrimination against the nonwhite majority of Mexicans and a decline in the
average Mexicans standard of living.
4. The Mexican Revolution was a social revolution and not the work of one
party with a well-defined ideology; it developed haphazardly, led by a series of
ambitious but limited men, each representing a different segment of Mexican
society.
5. Francisco I Madero (18731913) overthrew Diaz in 1911, only to be
overthrown in turn by General Victoriana Huerta in 1913. The Constitutionalists
Venustiano Carranza and Alvaro Obregon emerged as leaders of the disaffected
middle class and industrial workers, and they organized armies that overthrew
Huerta in 1914.
6. Emiliano Zapata (18791919) led a peasant revolt in Morelos, south of
Mexico City, while Francisco (Pancho) Villa organized an army in northern
Mexico. Neither man was able to rise above his regional and peasant origins to
lead a national revolution; Zapata was defeated and killed by the Constitutionalists
in 1919, and Villa was assassinated in 1923.
7. The Constitutionalists took over Mexico after years of fighting, an estimated 2
million casualties, and tremendous damage. In the process, the Constitutionalists
adopted many of their rivals agrarian reforms and proposed a number of social
programs designed to appeal to workers and the middle class. The Mexican
Revolution lost momentum in the 1920s, though, with few of the proposed reforms
ever actually enacted.
D.

American Intervention in the Caribbean and Central America, 19011914

1. The United States often used military intervention to force the small nations
of Central America and the Caribbean to repay loans owed to banks in Europe or
the United States. The United States occupied Cuba, the Dominican Republic,
Nicaragua, Honduras, and Haiti on various occasions during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.
2. The United States was particularly forceful in Panama, supporting the
Panamanian rebellion against Colombia in 1903 and then building and controlling
the Panama Canal.
V. The World Economy and the Global Environment
A.

Expansion of the World Economy

1. The Industrial Revolution greatly expanded the demand for spices, silk,
agricultural goods, and raw materials in the industrialized countries. The growing
need for these products could not be met by traditional methods of production and
transportation, so the imperialists brought their colonies into the mainstream of the
world market and introduced new technologies.
2. One dramatic result of colonization was rapid environmental change as farms
and plantations replaced forests and traditional agricultural zones.

B.

Free Trade
1. Britain in this period was more interested in trade than in acquiring territory.
Most of the new colonies were intended to serve as ports in a global shipping
network that the British envisioned in terms of free trade, as opposed to the
previous mercantilist trade policy.
2. Whether colonized or not, more lands were being drawn into the commercial
networks created by British expansion and industrialization. These areas became
exporters of raw materials and agricultural goods and importers of affordable
manufactured products.

C.

New Labor Migrations

1. Between 1834 and 1870, large numbers of Indians, Chinese, and Africans
went overseas as laborers. British India was the greatest source of migrant laborers,
and British colonies (particularly sugar plantations) were the principal destinations
of the migrants.

2. With the end of slavery, the demand for cheap labor in the British colonies,
Cuba, and Hawaii was filled by Indians, free Africans, Chinese, and Japanese
workers. These workers served under contracts of indenture that bound them to
work for a specified number of years in return for free passage to their overseas
destination; a small salary; and free housing, clothing, and medical care.
3. This new indentured labor trade reflected the economic and industrial
dominance of the West, but it was not entirely a one-way street. These migrants
were trying to improve their lives, and many of them succeeded.
VI. Conclusion
1. What stands out in this period is not just the military and political strength of
Europe and the United States, but their domination of global commerce as
they moved into Southeast Asia and Africa for a variety of economic
reasons.
2. These colonial exchanges could be mutually beneficial in some ways.
Consumers now gained access to cheaper manufactured goods, and African
and Asian resources reached the global market. These interactions could also
be profoundly disruptive too, as they produced significant environmental
change and also undermined local, small-scale manufacturers.
3. The rest of the world was not simply an appendage to the West though.
Local cultures remained vibrant and many in Asia and Latin America
retained control of their own destinies.