9.2 Imperialism, Nationalism, and Global Resistance

9.2 Imperialism, Nationalism, and Global Resistance

The nineteenth century was fundamentally defined by two interlocking global forces: nationalism and the New Imperialism. While nationalism reorganized European state borders by asserting that distinct cultural groups had an innate right to political self-determination, the industrial revolution provided Western powers with the technological, military, and economic supremacy to project imperial dominance across Africa, Asia, and Oceania. This imperial expansion, however, was neither uncontested nor unidirectional; indigenous societies resisted, negotiated, and in some notable cases, modernized their own institutions to defend national sovereignty.

---

1. Nineteenth-Century European Nationalism: Unification and Fragmentation

Following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the concept of the nation-state supplanted dynastic loyalty. Rather than serving a hereditary monarch or empire, political legitimacy became tied to the nation—a community sharing a common language, historical memory, culture, and territory.

Italian Unification (Il Risorgimento)

For centuries, the Italian peninsula remained politically fragmented into rival city-states, papal lands, and foreign-dominated kingdoms. The movement for Italian national resurgence (Risorgimento) coalesced around four key figures:

• Giuseppe Mazzini: The ideological heartbeat of Italian nationalism who founded Young Italy (1831), inspiring a generation with democratic, republican visions of a unified peninsula.
• Count Camillo di Cavour: The pragmatic Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia (appointed 1852). Cavour pursued diplomatic realism, modernizing Piedmont's economy, constructing railways, entering the Crimean War to gain British and French goodwill, and forming a secret military alliance with Napoleon III of France to defeat Austrian forces in 1859, thereby annexing Lombardy.
• Giuseppe Garibaldi: The charismatic military commander who led the volunteer army of Redshirts in the daring Expedition of the Thousand (1860). Garibaldi swept through Sicily and southern Italy, overthrowing the Bourbon monarchy of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. In a profound gesture of patriotic unity, Garibaldi surrendered his southern conquests to King Victor Emmanuel II.
• King Victor Emmanuel II: Monarch of Piedmont-Sardinia, proclaimed King of a unified Italy in March 1861. Italy acquired Venetia following the Austro-Prussian War (1866) and annexed Rome in 1870 when French troops withdrew during the Franco-Prussian War, making Rome the national capital.

German Unification and the Balance of Power

Prior to unification, German-speaking lands comprised dozens of sovereign principalities loosely organized in the German Confederation, dominated by the rivalry between Catholic Austria and militaristic, Protestant Prussia.

• Otto von Bismarck and Realpolitik: Appointed Minister-President of Prussia in 1862 by King Wilhelm I, Bismarck bypassed the liberal Prussian parliament to collect taxes and modernize the Prussian army. Bismarck practiced Realpolitik—pragmatic, ruthless statecraft focused strictly on expanding Prussian state power through calculated diplomatic alliances and force, famously proclaiming that Germany's destiny would be settled not by speeches and majority resolutions, 'but by iron and blood' (Blut und Eisen).
• The Three Wars of Unification:
  1. Second Schleswig War (1864): Prussia allied with Austria to seize the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein from Denmark, setting the stage for planned friction with Vienna.
  2. Austro-Prussian War / Seven Weeks' War (1866): Utilizing breech-loading needle guns and rapid railway mobilization, Prussia decisively crushed Austria at the Battle of Königgrätz (Sadowa). Bismarck treated Austria leniently to prevent future vengeance, expelled Austria from German affairs, annexed northern territories, and established the Prussia-dominated North German Confederation.
  3. Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871): To draw the reluctant Catholic southern German states into a unified Reich, Bismarck provoked France into declaring war by editing and leaking the Ems Dispatch (a diplomatic telegram from King Wilhelm to the French ambassador) to make it appear as a mutual insult. The Prussian-led German coalition surrounded and captured Emperor Napoleon III at Sedan. Paris fell after a grueling siege.
• The Proclamation of the German Empire (1871): On January 18, 1871, the German princes gathered in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles to crown King Wilhelm I as German Emperor (Kaiser). The unified German Empire annexed the mineral-rich French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, imposed a massive 5-billion-franc indemnity on France, and instantly established Germany as the supreme continental industrial and military superpower, obliterating the 1815 Congress of Vienna balance of power.

Nationalist Fragmentation in Multi-Ethnic Empires

While nationalism unified Italy and Germany, it fractured the polyglot dynastic empires of Central and Eastern Europe:

• The Austrian Empire: Shattered by its defeat against Prussia, the Habsburg monarchy was forced to concede the Compromise of 1867 (Ausgleich), creating the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. Emperor Franz Joseph ruled both realms, but Austria and Hungary maintained separate parliaments. This dual system left millions of Slavic peoples (Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes) disenfranchised and resentful.
• The Ottoman Empire and the Balkan Powder Keg: The declining Ottoman Empire—frequently labeled the 'Sick Man of Europe'—gradually lost control over its Christian Balkan territories. Aided by Russian Pan-Slavism, Greece had achieved independence in 1830, followed by Serbia, Romania, and Montenegro gaining formal independence at the Congress of Berlin (1878). Intricate nationalist rivalries among the Balkan states, coupled with Austro-Hungarian and Russian imperial maneuvering, turned the Balkan peninsula into the explosive 'powder keg of Europe.'

---

2. Motives and Ideologies of the New Imperialism (c. 1870–1914)

Between 1870 and 1914, European powers, joined late by the United States and Japan, brought nearly a quarter of Earth's land surface under colonial control. This New Imperialism differed from early modern mercantilist colonization by its speed, depth of political administration, and total economic integration.

Economic Drivers

• Industrial Raw Materials: Second Industrial Revolution factories required raw materials that could not be grown or mined in Europe: natural rubber from the Congo basin and Amazon for electrical insulation and tires; petroleum for combustion engines; copper for electrical wiring; cotton for textile mills; tin for canning; and palm oil from West Africa for industrial machinery lubrication.
• Captive Export Markets: Facing domestic underconsumption and tariff barriers among industrialized rivals, European manufacturers sought captive colonial populations to absorb surplus manufactured commodities.
• Capital Investment: Wealthy financiers sought high-return investments in colonial infrastructure, such as railways, ports, mines, and plantation agriculture.

Geopolitical and Military Impulses

• Naval Coaling Stations and Strategic Chokepoints: Industrial navies required fortified naval coaling depots worldwide. Controlling strategic maritime chokepoints became a national security priority—exemplified by Great Britain's acquisition of the Suez Canal (opened 1869; British financial control acquired in 1875; military occupation of Egypt in 1882) to secure the vital maritime lifeline to British India.
• Interstate Competition and National Prestige: Acquisition of overseas colonies became the ultimate badge of great-power status. Germany, France, Italy, and Britain engaged in competitive annexation to prevent rivals from dominating unclaimed territories.

Cultural and Ideological Justifications

• Social Darwinism: Theorists such as Herbert Spencer misapplied Charles Darwin's biological principles of natural selection and 'survival of the fittest' to human societies and racial groups. Social Darwinists argued that European conquest of non-Western peoples was a scientifically inevitable outcome demonstrating the biological and cultural superiority of the white race.
• The 'Civilizing Mission' and Racial Paternalism: Imperialist literature depicted colonization as a philanthropic moral burden. In his 1899 poem The White Man's Burden, British author Rudyard Kipling exhorted the United States and European nations to rule over colonized peoples ('half devil and half child') to impart Western education, Christian faith, modern medicine, and sanitation.

---

3. The Scramble for Africa and Indigenous Resistance

In 1870, less than ten percent of the African continent was under European control, mostly confined to coastal trading enclaves. By 1914, European empires had partitioned over ninety percent of the continent.

The Berlin Conference (1884–1885)

Alarmed that aggressive Belgian and French claims along the Congo River basin could ignite a general European war, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck convened the Berlin Conference (1884–1885). Fourteen states attended, including the United States and the Ottoman Empire; no African leaders or representatives were invited.

• The Principle of Effective Occupation: The conference established that a European power could claim sovereignty over an African territory only if it established physical administrative control, garrisons, and economic utilization ('effective occupation'), and formally notified other signatory powers.
• Arbitrary Cartography: This rule ignited the frantic Scramble for Africa. European diplomats drew geometric boundaries across maps with complete disregard for indigenous ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and ecological realities. They divided cohesive ethnic groups (e.g., the Somali, Yoruba, and Maasai) across separate colonial borders while forcing historic enemies into single administrative units, sowing the structural seeds for chronic post-colonial civil conflict.

Extractive Regimes: The Congo Free State

King Leopold II of Belgium established the Congo Free State (1885–1908) not as a Belgian colony, but as his private corporate fiefdom, masquerading as a philanthropic anti-slavery enterprise. Leopold's agents extracted wild rubber and ivory through horrific forced labor:

• Villagers who failed to meet rigid rubber quotas were subjected to hostage-taking, village burning, starvation, and systematic limb amputations (cutting off hands and feet).
• Historians' estimates of the population loss vary widely; some run as high as 10 million Congolese dead from violence, exhaustion, famine, and disease. International whistleblowers (such as E.D. Morel and Roger Casement) and missionary photographs exposed the atrocities, forcing the Belgian parliament to seize the territory from the king in 1908, reorganizing it as the Belgian Congo.

Southern Africa and the Boer War

In southern Africa, the British Cape Colony expanded inland, encroaching upon the Boer (Afrikaner) republics—the Transvaal and the Orange Free State—founded by Dutch-descended settlers who had trekked north to escape British rule. The discovery of immense diamond deposits at Kimberley (1867) and gold on the Witwatersrand (1886) spurred British imperialists (led by Cecil Rhodes) to subjugate the Boer republics.

• The Second Boer War (1899–1902): The Boers utilized mobile guerrilla warfare against British forces. The British Empire retaliated with a brutal scorched-earth policy, burning Boer farmsteads, slaughtering livestock, and interning over 100,000 Boer women, children, and African laborers in overcrowded concentration camps, where over 26,000 Boers and 14,000 Africans died of disease and malnutrition. Britain eventually annexed the territories, establishing the self-governing Union of South Africa (1910), which laid the legislative foundation for racial segregation (Apartheid).

African Resistance: The Zulu and Ethiopia's Triumph at Adwa

Africans mounted vigorous resistance against European encroachment:

• The Anglo-Zulu War (1879): Under King Cetshwayo, the disciplined Zulu army armed primarily with assegai (short stabbing spears) and cowhide shields stunned the British Empire at the Battle of Isandlwana, annihilating a modern British column. Although British technological superiority in Martini-Henry rifles and Gatling guns ultimately crushed the Zulu Kingdom at Ulundi, the conflict shattered myths of European invulnerability.
• The Battle of Adwa (1896): When Italy attempted to establish a protectorate over Ethiopia through the duplicitous Treaty of Wuchale, Emperor Menelik II mobilized a united Ethiopian army of over 100,000 troops. Crucially, Menelik had spent decades playing European powers off one another, purchasing state-of-the-art French and Russian rifles and modern artillery. On March 1, 1896, at the Battle of Adwa, Ethiopian forces routed the invading Italian army, forcing Italy to sign the Treaty of Addis Ababa recognizing unconditional Ethiopian sovereignty. Along with Liberia, Ethiopia remained one of only two independent African states throughout the colonial era.

---

4. Imperial Expansion and Transformation in Asia

In Asia, Western imperialism manifested through direct territorial governance in India and commercial, semi-colonial subordination in China, while inspiring a radical modernization drive in Japan.

The British Raj in India

Great Britain gained control of India through the commercial enterprise of the British East India Company (EIC), which utilized native mercenary soldiers (sepoys) and exploited divisions among Mughal and regional princely rulers.

• The Sepoy Mutiny / Indian Rebellion of 1857: Tensions exploded when Indian soldiers learned that new Enfield rifle cartridges were greased with animal tallow (fat from cows, sacred to Hindus, and pigs, taboo to Muslims), requiring soldiers to bite the greased cartridges to load them. The rebellion was fueled by deep resentment over the British policy of the 'doctrine of lapse' (annexing princely states lacking direct male heirs), Christian missionary proselytization, and the destruction of traditional Indian handicraft textile industries. The rebellion spread across northern and central India before being ruthlessly suppressed by British forces.
• Direct Crown Rule (The British Raj): In the aftermath, Parliament passed the Government of India Act of 1858, abolishing the East India Company and transferring administrative authority directly to the British Crown, with a British Viceroy governing India and Queen Victoria proclaimed Empress of India in 1876.
• Colonial Legacy: British rule constructed extensive irrigation canals, telegraph systems, and the largest railway network in Asia, but subordinated the Indian economy to imperial interests. Traditional Indian artisan weavers were ruined by duty-free British manufactured textiles, and cash-crop export agriculture (cotton, jute, tea, opium) displaced food crops, exacerbating devastating famines (such as the 1876–1878 famine that killed millions). In 1885, educated Indian elites founded the Indian National Congress (INC), initially petitioning for civil service access before evolving into the leading vanguard for Indian self-determination.

Western Encroachment in Qing China

During the eighteenth century, the Qing Dynasty confined Western trade to the southern port of Guangzhou (Canton) under the strict Canton System, demanding payment exclusively in silver for Chinese tea, porcelain, and silk.

• The Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860): To reverse a massive silver trade deficit, the British East India Company illicitly smuggled processed opium grown in India into China, creating millions of addicted Chinese subjects. When Qing official Lin Zexu confiscated and destroyed over 20,000 chests of British opium at Humen, Britain dispatched gunboats and troops, devastating Chinese coastal defenses.
• The Unequal Treaties and Spheres of Influence: The Treaty of Nanjing (1842) forced China to pay a heavy indemnity, open five 'treaty ports' (including Shanghai) to British merchants, and cede the island of Hong Kong to Britain; the supplementary Treaty of the Bogue (1843) granted British subjects extraterritoriality (foreign citizens accused of crimes on Chinese soil were tried in their own consular courts rather than under Chinese law). Subsequent treaties with France, the United States, and Russia expanded these concessions, carving China into foreign spheres of influence where external powers monopolized railway construction, mineral extraction, and river navigation.
• Domestic Upheavals and Fall of the Qing:
  • The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864): Led by Hong Xiuquan, who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ, this millenarian peasant revolt sought to overthrow the Manchu Qing Dynasty, abolish private property, establish communal land ownership, and end foot-binding. The war claimed an estimated 20 to 30 million lives before provincial Qing armies and Western mercenaries suppressed it.
  • The Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901): The Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists ('Boxers'), an anti-foreign, anti-Christian secret society, launched an uprising to expel all foreigners from China, slaughtering foreign missionaries and Chinese Christian converts and besieging Beijing's diplomatic quarter. An Eight-Nation Alliance (Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the US, Japan, Italy, Austria-Hungary) occupied Beijing, ransacked the Forbidden City, and imposed the crushing Boxer Protocol indemnity of 1901.
  • The 1911 Xinhai Revolution: Discredited by foreign subjugation and military humiliation, the two-thousand-year-old imperial system collapsed in 1911. Revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen founded the Republic of China based on his 'Three Principles of the People' (Nationalism, Democracy, and People's Livelihood).

Japan's Modernization: The Meiji Restoration

In 1853, American Commodore Matthew Perry sailed four US naval steamships ('Black Ships') into Edo (Tokyo) Bay, forcing the isolationist Tokugawa Shogunate under gunboat diplomacy to sign the Treaty of Kanagawa (1854), which opened two ports to American ships; the Harris Treaty (1858) then added trade rights and extraterritoriality.

• The Meiji Restoration (1868): Recognizing that isolation meant colonization, reform-minded samurai overthrew the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1868, restoring nominal executive authority to the young Emperor Meiji and embarking on a deliberate campaign of rapid Westernization encapsulated in the slogan Fukoku Kyōhei ('Enrich the Country, Strengthen the Armed Forces').
• Comprehensive Transformation:
  • Abolished the feudal domain system and stripped the samurai of their class privileges and right to carry swords.
  • Established universal primary education, sent the Iwakura Mission (1871–1873) to study Western institutions, and dispatched students abroad to study science, engineering, and law.
  • Constructed modern infrastructure: national telegraph networks, railways, deep-water ports, and steamship lines.
  • Industrialized through state-subsidized enterprises, subsequently selling factories to private family-owned industrial conglomerates known as zaibatsu (e.g., Mitsubishi, Mitsui).
  • Promulgated the Meiji Constitution (1889), establishing a constitutional monarchy modeled on imperial Prussia, reserving supreme military command for the Emperor.
  • Built a modern army and navy based on universal male conscription, trained by Prussian army officers and the British Royal Navy.
• Imperial Emergence: Japan rapidly demonstrated its modern military strength:
  • First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895): Japan easily defeated Qing China, forcing Beijing to recognize Korean independence, pay a massive indemnity, and cede Taiwan and the Liaodong Peninsula to Japan (the Triple Intervention of Russia, Germany, and France soon forced Japan to return Liaodong).
  • Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905): Japan launched a surprise attack on the Russian Pacific Fleet at Port Arthur and decisively crushed the Russian Baltic Fleet at the Battle of Tsushima. The Treaty of Portsmouth (1905), mediated by US President Theodore Roosevelt, recognized Japan's dominance over Korea and southern Manchuria. Japan became the first Asian nation in modern history to defeat a European great power in a major war, and it formally annexed Korea in 1910.

---

Comparative Overview: Imperial Approaches and Anti-Colonial Resistance