Imperialism and its Onslaught - Study Notes

Lesson summary

Industrial growth and better transport created a global economy between 1870 and 1914. The demand for markets and raw materials sent the capitalist powers racing for colonies, and their rivalry, together with Germany's feeling that it had been denied its rightful place, ended in the First World War. The war led to the Russian Revolution and the League of Nations, while discontent with the peace and the Great Depression helped fascists take power in Italy and Germany.

13.1 Rise of imperialism

• Mercantilist period (1600-1700): accumulation of capital; Holland, France and England became colonial powers.
• Free trade: Physiocrats demanded it; de Gournay coined laissez-faire; Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) attacked mercantilism. England adopted free trade in 1833.
• Monopolies: trusts control production of a good from raw material to sale; cartels are associations of independent firms to restrict competition. Cartels gave German producers leverage.

13.2 Scramble for colonies

• Colonies served as markets for surplus goods and sources of raw materials. America seized the Philippines from Spain in 1898.
• In 1876 barely 10 percent of Africa was under European rule; by 1900 practically all of it. Leopold II took the Congo (1876); France took Tunis (1881), Ivory Coast (1891), Dahomey (1892), Madagascar (1895); Britain secured Egypt (1883); Germany took Togoland, the Cameroons, South-West and East Africa (1884-1890). Liberia, Morocco and Abyssinia stayed un-annexed.
• Breech-loading rifles and Gatling guns gave Europeans the edge.
• Export of surplus capital (for example English loans for Indian railways) joined industry and finance. Hobson defined imperialism as the search for foreign markets and investments for surplus wealth.
• Crashes in Vienna and New York caused a depression in the mid-1870s. Germany's Tariff Act of 1879 spread protectionism; Britain revoked trade treaties with France and Germany in 1898. The powers began an arms race.

13.3 World War I

Pre-war power politics

• Kaiser William II sought colonies and built the Berlin-Baghdad railway.
• France wanted Alsace and Lorraine back and Morocco; Russia wanted the Bosporus and Dardanelles; Italy wanted Austrian and Turkish lands.
• Japan (Meiji era 1867-1912) won the Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), gaining Formosa, Port Arthur and Liaotung by the Treaty of Shimonoseki, but lost Liaotung to the Triple Intervention (1895). It allied with England (1902), defeated Russia (1904-05; Treaty of Portsmouth, US mediation), annexed Korea (1910) and gave the Twenty-One Demands to Yuan Shih-kai (1915).

Causes and course of the war

• Immediate cause: Archduke Franz Ferdinand killed at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 by Princip. Austria declared war on Serbia on 28 July; Germany on Russia and France on 1 August; Britain entered on 4 August after Germany violated Belgian neutrality.
• Central Powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Bulgaria. Italy joined the Entente in May 1915.
• Battles: Marne (6-13 September 1914) saved Paris, as the French government moved to Bordeaux; Tannenberg, a Russian loss to Hindenburg; trench warfare along a 650 km front; Verdun and the Somme (1916); Jutland (May 1916), the largest naval battle; Gallipoli (1915-16) failed; Cambrai (1917), first large-scale use of tanks (340).
• U-boats and Q-ships: 880,000 tons sunk in one month; Britain used over 200 disguised decoy ships.
• End: Lusitania sunk May 1915 (128 Americans); USA declared war April 1917; Russia signed Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918); Germany surrendered 11 November 1918.

Peace settlement

• Paris Peace Conference opened January 1919 (Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau), based on Wilson's 14 points.
• Versailles (28 June 1919, Hall of Mirrors): Alsace-Lorraine to France; Saar mines to France, Saar under the League until a 1935 plebiscite; Danzig under the League; colonies became mandates; Rhineland occupied and demilitarised; army of 100,000; reparations of 33 billion dollars (1921).
• Other treaties: St. Germain (Austria), Trianon (Hungary), Neuilly (Bulgaria), Sevres (Turkey).

13.4 Russian Revolution

• Causes: autocratic Tsars; serfs (over 500 riots under Nicholas I; freed by Alexander II in 1861 without land); late industrialisation; Nihilists; Marxism.
• Lenin (1870-1924): at the 1903 London congress his majority became the Bolsheviks; the minority, Mensheviks.
• Nicholas II: war with Japan 1904; Bloody Sunday (23 January 1905, Father Gapon); Duma created; Rasputin murdered 1916.
• 1917: strikes from 23 February; Tsar abdicated; Provisional Government under Kerensky; slogans 'All power to the Soviets' and 'Bread, Peace and Land'; Bolsheviks seized power on 7 November, government formed 8 November under Lenin.
• Results: land as social property, nationalised banks and industry, equal rights for women; no impact of the Depression on the USSR.

13.5 League of Nations

• Wilson's brainchild; five bodies: Assembly, Council, Secretariat (Geneva; first Secretary General Sir Eric Drummond of Britain), Permanent Court of Justice (The Hague), ILO.
• Successes: Aaland Islands to Finland (1920), Upper Silesia (1921), Greece-Bulgaria (1925).
• Failures: Vilna (1920), Italy-Greece dispute (1923), Manchuria (1931), Ethiopia; Germany left 1933, Italy 1937, Russia expelled 1939; dissolved 1946.

13.6 Great Depression and 13.7 Fascism

• US stock market crash on 24 October 1929; banks failed, loans to Germany stopped, the Bank of England went bankrupt. Nations turned to protectionism and devaluation.
• Italy: Mussolini, editor of Avanti, joined the Fascist Party (1919); March on Rome (October 1922); Matteotti murdered after 1924 elections; Il Duce dictator (1926); Lateran Treaty (1929); invaded Ethiopia (1935).
• Germany: Weimar Republic under Ebert (1919-1925) and Stresemann; Ruhr occupied 1923; Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in prison; Hindenburg made him Chancellor in 1933; Third Reich, Gestapo under Himmler, propaganda under Goebbels; about 6 million Jews killed in the 'Final Solution'.