{"id":176,"date":"2019-07-31T18:55:29","date_gmt":"2019-07-31T18:55:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/mwhcccs\/chapter\/imperialism\/"},"modified":"2024-01-12T23:29:20","modified_gmt":"2024-01-12T23:29:20","slug":"imperialism","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/mwhcccs\/chapter\/imperialism\/","title":{"raw":"Imperialism","rendered":"Imperialism"},"content":{"raw":"
\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_136\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"873\"]\"Britannia Britannia carrying a large white flag labeled \"Civilization\" with British soldiers and colonists behind her, advancing on a horde of natives, one carrying a flag labeled \"Barbarism\".[\/caption]\n\n<\/div>\n
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\n\nThe 19th century and the turn of the 20th century are often described as a period when the power of many land-based empires diminished and nationalism became the most important organizing principle for societies around the world. Actually, powerful nations in Europe and America pursued overseas empires and expanded into Africa and East Asia, until a wave of \"decolonization\" after World War Two. And even then, \u201cempires\u201d have remained as important as ever in the late 20th and the 21st century, although the power of the new empires that have been successful has been largely economic rather than political. \u200b\n\nConsider the decline of the empires we\u2019ve already become familiar with in earlier chapters, in Asia, Europe, and the Muslim world. They were territorial empires that had used military conquest to impose political control over wide expanses of land adjacent to their ancestral homelands. They existed by providing a degree of civil and economic order, in exchange for taxes on the agricultural produce of the agrarian populations they conquered. These empires usually left their citizens more or less alone to speak their own languages, practice their own religions, and observe their own cultural traditions. Occasionally they took captives from conquered lands, like the janissaries of the Ottoman Empire.\n\n\"SpanishThe Portuguese and Spanish began establishing the first European overseas empires in Azores and Canary Islands in the late 1400s, extending their overseas imperial project into the Americas after 1492.\u00a0 In the process, the Spanish defeated several land-based indigenous empires such as the Aztecs, Inca, and Maya, and replaced the native rulers with Spanish Viceroys.\u00a0 The British, French, Dutch, and others soon followed the Iberians into the Caribbean and North America.\u00a0 All the European colonies in the Americas were controlled by their respective \u201cmother\u201d countries, sending resources like silver and gold and agricultural products (especially sugar) to Europe, and often required to trade only with the \"mother\" economy.\u00a0 As we will see, Europeans continued this model of overseas empires in the 1800s as Africa and parts of Asia came to be dominated by outside imperial powers.\n\nHowever, the new project of economic \"neo-imperialism\" also appeared in the 19th century, especially in the new republics of Latin America.\u00a0 In this case, supposedly independent countries that had recently won their independence from the Spanish and Portuguese empires, were economically dominated by European and U.S. investors, still providing raw materials for the \u201cGreat Powers\u201d in exchange for finished industrial goods.\u00a0 As presented later, nearly all of these new nations became indebted to European banks and faced the humiliation of \u201cgunboat diplomacy\u201d in which U.S. and European powers took over custom houses to force payment of loans.\n\nBefore World War One, the decline of land-based empires was nearly complete, while overseas empires flourished.\n
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