The Scramble for Africa - Professor Richard J Evans FBA

well good evening everybody in my last lecture I described the resumption of European global expansion from the 1820s to the 1870s after the fall of the first pre-industrial laying the American colonial empires in the previous half-century from 1800 to 1878 some six and a half million square miles have been added to Europe's overseas possessions and if you add together Europe and the other parts of the globe which European states owned or had owned at some time in the previous past you can calculate that in 1800 they covered something like 55% of the land surface of the globe by 1878 this proportion had expanded to 67% or indeed to justify it wants it had taken place in many cases if not most the expansion was pretty much haphazard and unplanned often driven by factors that European states found it difficult if not impossible to control the activities as I described the last time of traders missionaries and explorers disrupted local political arrangements and getting into trouble and with indigenous states and tribes from which they had to be rescued the light seemed to have gone out are you happy with that okay all right economic policies and that brought state power into open up closed areas to free trade mostly dominated by the British all of this made possible by the advent of British European some extends American economic technological and military superiority against which states in other parts of the globe mostly found it increasingly difficult to compete and since on planned haphazard but seemingly inexorable process to which the Cambridge historian Sir John Seely referred when he made his famous statement that the British Empire was acquired in a fit of absence of mind but already by the time he said this in 1883 things begin to change in fact the publication of very book in which he made this claim the expansion of England was itself part of the change between 1878 in 1914 European empires grew even faster than they had before Europe added more than eight million six hundred thousand square miles to its overseas territories by the outbreak of the first world war these covered including past colonies eighty-four percent of the land surface of the globe at the overwhelmingly dominant colonial power through the first three quarters of the century Britain second or third ranked empires of France Holland Spain Portugal along with Russia with its rapid expansion in Central and Northeast Asia these are joined in this period I'm talking about today by Belgium Germany in Italy so in the 1880s Europe in the world entered what's been called the era of high imperialism how do we explain this change it's why the sudden change in the 1880s from this haphazard acquisition of territories to this planned and deliberate scramble fallen I've called it this lecture that's gone for Africa but in fact as us show it covered other parts of the globe - well over the decades of course beginning already before the First World War a variety of explanations was advanced early on writers like Hobbs born but sorry so Hobson Hobson Hobson Lennon at Bob's born tends to follow Lennon in this and rosa luxemburg sought to ascribe economic causes to the expansion of Europe they argued variously that colonies were needed as they hadn't been previously to provide raw materials for European industry or markets for its products or new areas in which to invest surplus capital in an era when monopolies and cartels were ossifying european capitalist economies and reducing profit margins alternatively social democratic writers then and more recently suggested Kentucky in Germany that the acquisition of colonies is used by conservative governments as a way of diverting rising working-class discontent expressed in the growth of mass socialist parties which demanded the overthrow of capitalism and diverting that revolutionary impetus into nationalists and colonialist enthusiasm this is the theory of social imperialism in key European countries so the argument goes democratic or near democratic franchises arrived in this period said Frances universal adult suffrage male suffrage since the 1850s Germany it came in the late 1860's there particularly with spread to the whole of Germany with Bismarck's a new Reich in 1871 in Britain it came with a Reform Act of 1867 and 1884 all of these developments were in this view product to the rise of industry in Europe resulting from the fact of industrialization urbanization the rise of the working class shown here in a punch cartoon the advent of mass politics these are central features of the European scene in this argument by the end of the 1870s but it's a real problem of timing here when we apply these theories to the period of the Scramble for colonies in the 1880s and the mid 8 to mid 1880s capitalism in Europe did not reach the stage of innopolis and cartels until the 1890s or even later snow can evidence that profit margins in Europe were declining in the 1880s on the contrary European economies are recovering from the sharp downturn of 1873 to 1875 extension the vote does not seem to have led to the rise of popular pressure groups for Imperial acquisitions until after the turn of the centuries in bretons it spurred the Boer War that it really famous jingoism movement that popular enthusiasm for empire really takes takes grip in the 1880s also European powers didn't the government's didn't seem to think that they needed to divert working-class enthusiasm revolution into and 3004 empire on the contrary they thought they could defeat socialism through a repression Bismarck's Germany socialist movement was banned from 1878 to 1890 in the early 3rd Republic in France 1970s and 80s politics still dominated by the repressive police atmosphere after the uprising of the Paris Commune in 1871 key players in the imperial game like Italy had a very limited electorate the working-class weren't enfranchised their foot in this period the 1870s and 80s the extent of the franchise in Germany was not accompanied by the rise of mass politics which again didn't really come until the 1890s so so neither the economy economic nor the social imperious theories really help to explain what happened in the 1880s of course on the general level certainly was a change in the international atmosphere at the end of the 1870s 1879 German government ended era of free trade by introducing an import duties to protect domestic grain producers that's the suppression of the Paris coming it shows you the kind of violence in which socials was repressed in 1870s continuing and police measures up to the 1880s free trade ended as part of this more conservative turn in European government to the 1870s international rivalries certainly intensified as a steady expansion of European possessions overseas began to create collisions between European powers example in West Africa orbiting the British the French and the Belgians and the growing penetration of indigenous economies by European merchants and traders that I've already talked about in this series of lectures increasingly produced crises on the ground where European powers felt they had to respond but still when all of this is said when you look at these slightly more long-term developments it does remain extraordinary striking how quickly how suddenly European powers decided to divide Africa and significant parts of the Pacific amongst themselves in the 1880s and the key factor here well it's this it's a Bismarck during a French cartoon here is mark and his foreign policy a Bismarck didn't actually like the idea of colonies at all for their own sake he thought they'd lead to unnecessary trouble and expense I am no man for colonies quote unquote but he did think the Declaration of interests over particular areas uncolonized areas of the world a particular potential corners if you like could be useful bargaining chip in the European power game he was obsessed in the eighteen seventies and eighties with trying to make sure that his achievement in United Germany United Germany in 1871 was not overturned by rival powers particularly France as he said to an explorer in 1888 your map of Africa is really quite nice but my map of Africa lies in Europe here is Russia here's France and we're in the middle that's my map of Africa in 1883 this marks intervention an already volatile colonial situation turned a set of existing problems into a mad scramble for territory now of course my Vil reasoned interventions have been building up key underlying factor here is the decay gradual decay of Ottoman power ready severely dented by the French conquest of Algeria in 1830 the Ottoman Empire originally stretched from Turkey Anatolia through the Middle East to right along the whole region of North Africa and it had been chipped away bit by bit through the 19th century the French have acquired Algeria in 1830 in Tunisia next door the more or less autonomously governing local ottoman official known as the bay be why he's a magnificent official uniform borrowed heavily from European banks to try and modernize his country but he borrowed - it's a familiar stories and he borrowed too much and he couldn't repay the debts so in 1857 the British and French consuls joined later by the Italians got the power of supervising his administration which passed in 1869 - an international financial commission desires job it was to oversee the Tunisian debt problem was that the bay there's another familiar story here actually the base government was unable to pay taxes nobody wants to pay them just like in Greece today so European powers at the same time European powers forced down tunisian import tariffs until they're so low there's about 3 percent that the country was flooded with European exports and its own industry began to collapse so this twin problem of not being able to collect taxes and the economy declining led to increasing jockeying for position amongst the three powers on the Commission and then it will exploded when the Italians announced they were going to annex Tunisia this prompted French to send their own army from Algiers to Tunis in 1881 which led to Muslim rebellion which led to complete French occupation of the bay continued honest local ruler here we are 1881 the French invasion of Congress of Tunisia remember they seized it from the Ottoman Empire the decay of Ottoman control in North Africa not further sources of conflict between European powers with relatively few resources the desert province of Libya remained under control of the Ottomans throughout the empire throughout the throughout the century unlike today nobody seemed to want to invade it but Egypt was far richer and resources especially cotton under the Khedive Mehmet Ali had become independent by the late 1840s Mehmet Ali was fully committed to economic modernization he imported European specialists to try and help and in 1854 as part of this program the government commissioned a former french french consul fed in under lesseps to set up a company to build a canal across the serious isthmus here's a construction in process it employed over one and a half million workers and it lasted 15 years canal open in 6 1869 were fully completed two years later here's another hugely expensive investment and it didn't make a lot of money to stop the Mehmet's our methodologies the success of the Khedive Ismail had invested so much money in it that he went bankrupt in 1878 and the inevitable debt Commission dominated by the French and British was set up to sort things out and when Mehmet started causing troubles he was sorry when as well started courting trouble he was simply deposed and replaced by a more pliant success as a familiar pattern and it sparked again as in Tunisia a widespread revoke revolt led by a senior officer in the Egyptian army colonel arabe who whose followers resented growing non-muslim interference in Egyptian affairs and the behave of the new puppet Khedive who seen his rugged dictatorial here's the rather dramatic picture of the urabe Arabia revolt put down at the Battle of Teleca beer here by a British force in 1882 since a French National Assembly probably wisely refused to grant for a French expedition the bridge is effectively drawn into occupying Egypt on their own through through suppressing this revolt which endangered the Suez Canal and they stayed on then because another revolts began in Sudan launched by a Muslim holy man the mufti which threatened to threat to explode over cross into Egypt again this is the uprising that led in 1885 to the famous incident of the death of General Gordon at the Sudanese capital of the Khartoum Gordon was an officer in the Egyptian army working for his male passions not a British officer but nevertheless the British sent a expeditionary force to rescue him he came too late he withdrew Sudan was left in peace Egypt did not become a British colony but it remained under the debt contrition Commission's control and this is now the site of increasingly irritated anglo-french rivalry stirred up by the Germans of course you had a seat on the Commission as well so handling French clashes then in North Africa and these are exploited in 1884 by Bismarck who backs the French Bismarck same to draw the French away from thoughts of revenge over Germany for the loss of alsace-lorraine by encouraging them to seek imperial conquests elsewhere and to be more ambitious in North Africa and you also thought rather strangely that this would demonstrate the British not desirable it was to have the Germans as their friends and to be nice to them um so rather strange backing the French trying to persuade the British that they should be nice to the Germans there's also elections coming up in the Reichstag Bismarck meet the support of the powerful national liberals who were allied to mercantile trading interests in Hamburg and elsewhere so he began now in 1884 to claim colonies or do rather to declare a German Protectorate over key areas Angra back we know and suffice Africa the German flag has weighed in May 1880 for a slightly fuzzy contemporary picture there they are raising the flag then togoland the Cameroon's in West Africa in July 1884 bismarck declares protectorate of New Guinea in December 1884 East Africa Tanganyika in February 1985 don't string of them and it's time to treated the king of Samoa giving Germany preferential rights in Samoa over other European powers that King thought it prudent to sign when he saw a German warship at anchor off the island typically the moving forces on the ground here are explorers it's goosed up Nachtigal in West Africa and Carl Peters and come back to him in a minute in East Africa it's explorers like those two traders and planters tickling you Guinea but get all the wars they're not followed by any significant involvement by the German state does not simply science peace basically I declare a protectorate the Germany over anger requena and gotaga Nico and that's about it and so what he did by this is to demonstrate that you didn't actually need to occupy territory in order to annex it he didn't bother sent troops part from little expedition to raise the flag and this of course persuaded everybody that annexation was much easier than a much cheaper than they thought it might be and these this string of annexations and Protectorate is declared by Bismarck created something like a panic as European states rushed to annex their own favorite territories before someone else got there first to underline his friendship with France he agreed with the French government to call a conference on Berlin Berlin on colonial claims which met from November 884 to February 1885 here it is it's Bismarck you can see there at the bottom of the right of the big picture in the background talking anime to somebody now this focused in practice almost entirely on the Congo where it recognized the claim of level ii king of the belgians to treat it as his own private property it also ratified French claim to the northern bank of the Congo River but apart from this it achieved absolutely nothing if this is not the place where the Scramble for Africa is all sorted out in other words it's very limited but its declaration the conference declared a claim to a colony required effective occupation caused some alarm so therefore all the powers simply ignored it in any case effective occupation applied only to coastal areas and they also ignored its insistence that free trade had to be applied to major river like the Congo the organiser still by laying down some ground rules even if they're ignored in practice the conference effectively declared the Scramble had begun so the mere fact of a conference being held on colonial sessions the first one international conference it's sort of a the starting pistol fired to get going so in 1885 the British declared a protected over the Nigerian coast and the French rivalry with Britain stimulated by quarrels over Egypt led its local administrators in West Africa to push forward with the idea of an empire stretching from Algeria to the Congo 1889-90 they signed treaties with the British defining the boundaries of the two sets of possessions all only on paper because of the hinterland in West Africa except of example in northern Nigeria it's controlled by quite powerful and well-organized Islamic states wallop oral Germans were stuck with Togo and Cameroon and Southwest Africa since neither Bismarck nor any German motion firms had any real interest in going further these are again for Bismarck these are pawns in the diplomatic game in East Africa however East Africa Tanganyika this formidable character Cole Peters explorer founded the Society for German Colin so she concluded treaties in its name with a variety of local rulers in 1884 and he wasn't happy with his marks reluctance to declare colonies protectorates and involve the German state so effectively blackmailed him he went to Bismarck and said look if you don't give a charter for my East Africa company I'll sell everything in East Africa to King Leopold well that was something that Bismarck didn't want he wanted the support of national liberals who backed patos and gave in soon painters went back to Africa in 1835 and started annexing territory all over the place and the British actually had to expel him from Uganda because he was about to Alex a gander but he got into really bad trouble when the activity is company led in 1899 to rebel by Arab planters which the German government supported by the British rather reluctantly led assent sent troops to suppress which then led to the declaration of a German East Africa as a full colony under German state control and then a deal was done at the same time whereby Heligoland has got a rock in the North Sea just of the German coast with a couple of small settlements on it was British possession that became a German possession and Zanzibar became a British possession pedis is pretty well finished by stories of his scandalous behavior reaching Germany particularly in 1892 when it became known that he had one of his African mistresses yoga yar hanged when he discovered she was having an affair with his manservant mabrook and man so it was Hank - and both her home villages were burned to the ground which led to a local revolt which again German troops had brought in to suppress Paris would be called home 1897 dishonorably discharged from government service for the loss of his pension rights he only escaped criminal criminal prosecution like so many continental criminal at those days by fleeing to London a convinced racist and social Darwinist Paytas lady became a hero to the nazis who wanted him with a propaganda film made at the beginning of the Second World War a films that of course conveniently ignored his many crimes and cruelties and presented him as a standard bearer for German civilization starring then extremely famous Hans Albers and lead leading actor in in Germany in the nineteen thirties exchanges and ebar for Heligoland reflected a major British concern that the new route to India opened up by the Suez Canal should probably be protected by string of British possessions and coaling stations along the East African coast in 1886 1919 the exchange was underpinned by British recognition of German East Africa in exchange for German recognition finally a British control of it Ugandan in effect the rest of East Africa not the most um peak which had been a Portuguese colony since the 16th century but the British too had to contend with an imperial adventurer who went very much his own way and cause trouble in London in the shape of Cecil Rhodes sent from England South Africa as a child to improve his health Rhodes became a businessman by the end of the 1880s atwater all diamond mines of South Africa and effectively acquired a world monopoly on the supply of diamonds and he began pushing northwards from South Africa turning mining concessions from local indigenous powers but his ambitions that weren't just economic he too is a convinced imperialist like Carl Peters he believed in the superiority of what he called the anglo-saxon race amongst whom he included the Germans incidentally when he set up the Rhodes Scholarships there were two also though I meant to be for white anglo-saxon males that include not only Canadian South Africans New Zealand's Australia's Americans but also Germans were that it gets it from the club in nineteen 14 he wanted I go Saxon rule over Eastern Central Africa to stretch from Cairo to the Cape his a critical cartoon outlining his ambitions of one foot in Cairo and one in the Cape but he wanted these colonies to have a large measure of self-government and he opposed what he saw as excessive interference from London and all these views helped him become prime minister at the Cape Colony 1890 he got support aboard settlers by passing laws to allow them to force Africans off their land British gun were happy enough to allow his British South Africa company to occupy and control major areas of Central Africa as well because missionaries get into trouble there by 1894 the protectorates had been declared over much of the region while the other European powers interests in Africa apart from the British French Germans was Italy well backed by Germany the Italians got the territory in the Horn of Africa to give them ports where Italian ships again could refuel before or after going for the Suez Canal in the 1880s they didn't have any real interest however in genuine colonies of return to them in a moment to show how this developed bit later on but not really the terms are not really part of the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s so in any case the the partition of Africa by the end of the 80s was very largely to participate by partition on paper only it's reflected not not least in the many artificial straight lines which form the boundaries between colonies protectorates and spheres of influence between the various European powers you can see the Italians in the Horn of Africa French got desert there in the northwest and parts of the coast both of Congo something on its own remaining Portuguese colonies to the south and then a lot of dark-colored British ones going down the eastern coast Abyssinia remains unconquered as does Liberian one or two Spanish colonies there as well mostly deriving from trading or curling station eastern and southern Africa is mostly British and French minor adjustments were made to be made in the French the British in northern Nigeria the Upper Nile for shoulder in 1898 we're a military clash between the two powers the camp was a distinct possibility till the French feeling rather inferior in military strength prudently withdrew but in the face of superior British forces here we are the the French at Fashoda being forced to abandon their claims as also northern Africa where Italy agrees with France on the settlement of claims in Libya Morocco 1900 or all intents and purposes the Scramble for Africa was over by the end of the 1880s the kind of few postscripts in the 1890s it's paralleled by a similar rush for influence and control in Asia and the Pacific sports in much the same way as Bismarck's claimed over territory here it's New Guinea and the islands which became known as the Bismarck Archipelago in 1880 five to six the British and French recognize these claims in return for German acceptance of some British claims of a part of New Guinea and the Southern Pacific and French claims of the eastern Pacific as another division that spawns nation 98 when the Spaniards lose control over their possessions in the Pacific as a result of war with us a French troops came into Indochina in 1880 five to six again to come back bandit treat piracy and nascent uprisings bringing an Anton king and Cambodia in to go with cochin-china the existing French possession to single French colony ruled by a government general again the British were looking about Wisconsin this so they occupied upper Burma in 1885 with Siam remaining independent as kind of buffer zone British and French were rivals in Madagascar but standoff river resolved in 1890 when the bridges recognized a french protectorate so by this time the rapid expansion of European empires is more or less complete by right about eighteen the eighteen 90s it's a global scale happens above all in the 1880s in a very short space of time it's not quite quite global however it's one major part of the world you can see it doesn't come under direct European rule if you count out the Americas which I talked about in the earlier lecture but this expansion in Africa and in Asia had certainly had its limits and the major most obvious one here is China now the Chinese Empire particular after the opium wars which I already talked about in this series where was generally thought to be a decaying right for chopping up it had failed to resist European economic penetration in force to the opium wars it was rich populist promising in terms of economic exploitation and investment and from 1850 to 1864 China was convulsed by what is in effect a civil war the Taiping rebellion is the largest war anywhere in the globe in the 19th century the deaths of up to 20 million people by the mid the late 1860's china has been able to recover but not before losing control over Manchuria to the Russians from 1875 China was ruled by the Empress Dowager though through her son as he placed him under house arrest money said he wanted to reform things here she is the Empress Dowager deeply conservative contrasting strongly with her Japanese equivalent the Meiji Emperor who was restored in quotes through in a conflict between 1866 1870 by reformers who decided that is no you just sitting around you've got to change things drastically centralized Japanese government consciously adopt Western technology industry and institutions to prevent happening what what was happening in China happening in Japan in 1870 the teenage Emperor was really just a figurehead here received formal formal welcome since it's in the middle to emissaries of the Western powers who've been banned from Japan during previous centuries Japanese envoy's set forth across the world to learn an important Western industrial educational and political ways and in a very short space of time Japan was well on the way to becoming a major economic and particularly military power not just capable of defending itself against foreign incursions but increasingly keen to join the imperial scramble for territory first opportunity which presented itself was Korea described by a German military adviser to the Japanese government as a dagger pointing at the heart of Japan it's nominally independent but for a long time to be under Chinese control disturbances broke out in 1894 a Chinese sent an army to put them down Japanese then sends an invasion force considering this an affront of a threat which put down the body on or poorly armed badly organized Chinese forces how did this drew European attention to the growth of Japanese military might has seen in this punch cartoon if Chinese on it China writes back having been defeated by the much smaller part of Japan something that people at this point in the mid-90s felt was very much surprising Koreans and the Chinese are forced to recognize a transfer of career to the Japanese spear of evidence leading to its annexation in 1910 so once again China's the loser and all of this again particularly defeat by Japan in the mid 1890s mid European powers see China as ripe for exploitation it surely meant the final stages of dissolution of the Chinese emperor Empire so now the European powers took a strong interest in carving up China what they wanted above all was same thing as usual free access to Chinese markets best way to do this is carving out 99-year leases turn on what we called treaty ports hong kong was the most obvious one these extraterritorial in other words they're not subject to chinese law the Chinese courts that free trade ports or they charge such low tariffs make no difference their basis for permitting activities in the hinterland by missionaries first of these ports have really taken out after the Opium Wars but biting in after 1895 is a massive expansion of treaty ports until there are more than 80 owned by a wide variety of European powers British had Fong Kong Shanghai ports leased to the French Russians Germans even the Italians concessions taken out by the Japanese the USA Portugal Belgium even the Congo Free State had one often several different European powers shared the same port mr. Jensen can see there are different different ports but Minister varies you can also have also Hungarian Empire even has a a bit of this particular port so as the ports extended that influence in that part the end seemed inevitable but of course the rapid penetration of China by European powers missionaries and merchants led to the inevitable reaction nationalist movement began to emerge known as a society of righteous and harmonious fists or the boxers for short dedicated to reversing these unequal treaties giving the Europeans all these rights trading rights taking out chunks of the coast and putting them on European law or even getting rid them all together it's a millenarian movement the followers of the boxers believe that if they train themselves rigorously that they be joined by mass armies of ghosts who would expel the foreigners from China here's a painting on the left of one of the boxes his of actual photograph from a boxer on the right with their banners and their and their weapons first of all the Dowager Empress didn t know to do about this but then she decided to throw her weight behind the boxes they laid siege to the legation quarter of Beijing more than two thousand Chinese Christians were put to death across the country a number of European missionaries merchants and officials as well these became known as the Chou these martyrs is a contemporary religious painting of them eight foreign nations involved in the conflict it greed something had to be done and they sent twenty thousand troops to Beijing to recapture the city some of the more curious episodes of European imperialism in the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century not just European either because here you have for example British and Japanese forces fighting side-by-side in one of the major engagements of of the campaign the victorious troops of all the armies looted and pillaged on a massive scale are said to be mass rapes of Chinese women in the occupied city boxers or men thought to be boxers was summarily executed particularly by Japanese Germans arrived too late to take part in the fighting they did their share of looting all the same as they embarked at Bremerhaven for the long journey kaiser wilhelm ii told them no quarter will be given prisoners will not be taken just as a thousand years ago the Huns under their king a tiller made a name for themselves one team today makes them seem mighty and history and legend may the name german be affirmed by you in such a way in china that no chinese will ever dare again to look even askance at a German and the speech or rather of course the use of the word hun has come back to haunt Germany in the First World War the Allies imposed on the Imperial Chinese government financial reparations that would have taken to the end of 1920s to repay for the damage done to the European property the long predicted carbot of China never never happened though here you have a Miss Li a French cartoon where you have various and Queen Victoria the Kaiser various European Posen takes the French and so on trying to carve the Russians carving it up to the horror of the Chinese but it didn't actually take place because the European powers had received quite a shock from the uprising this is the reaction provoked just by treaty ports on the edge of China then things would be a whole lot worse of European power to take over the try to take over the whole country any further advances into the hinterland territorial acquisition seemed ill-advised after the Boxer Rebellion and two of the powers involved to the eight powers in fighting against the boxes the Russian Russians Japanese were serious rivals for territorial gains in Manchuria where more than a quarter of foreign investments in the Chinese Empire were held peaceful argument over partition of Manchuria was out of the question factor 2 States went to war over to 1985 even agreed the other states would not have allowed them to share the spoils between themselves the Imperial Chinese government had actually held together it hadn't disintegrated it's more profitable for Europeans to continue lending it money high interest rates rather than spending money and taking over its business and to use the imperial tax collection service seemed quite efficient for the to collect debts rather than setting up a kind of British East India Company's Dial tax collection service of their own so the USA proposing open-door policy everyone apart of the Russians accepted in the meantime the powers concluded series of bilateral treaties promising not to acquire any further territory in China so 1902 the anglo-japanese alliance which committed Britain to remaining neutral if Japan was attacked but other power or to join with the Japanese if to our powers are involved this treaty enlarged into is widely celebrated in the UK presented to the electorate as a typical example to wisdom of conservative foreign policy both the Conservatives who gave you the lines and the Alliance is with the Japanese is barely recognisable in the solar sailer chat with the right on the right 1906 the Japanese Russia Japanese war in which Britain remained neutral had put the rush put the Russians out of the reckoning in China along with their allies the French the British German Americans stayed content with just economic gains for Chinese the humiliation of all of this is too much to bear in 1911 the Ching dynasty was overthrown a revolution 1st January 1912 the Chinese Republic was declared beginning the long and arduous road to natural recovery is the century ago exactly the Chinese Revolution Chinese and yen standoff freely between European powers and each other and European powers and potential object of colonization but elsewhere in the world some European powers even had to retreat unrest in Cuba rise of a nationalist movement reports of atrocities committed by expand assure others try to retain control over what was Spain's most valuable overseas possession by this time for the USA into what was Spain that resulted in 1898 not only in Cuba being seeded Americans if only temporarily but also us at us to take over a Puerto Rico the Pacific the Philippines and Guam this remark really marked the arrival of America on the scene as a world power celebrated quite self-consciously in cartoons and articles across the States here's a American magazine showing the Americans trying on their new hat world power and expansion it's also the effective end of the Spanish in front of the Pacific Spain actually now recognizing that once old the Caroline Mariana and paleo Islands to Germany the Germany that she was after the Philippines as much too big a prize this shake-up was completed by the division of Samoa by Germany in America in return for British disengagement acquisition of Tonga since small islands from the Germans and Solomon's and disputed areas of Africa so also shows how that Imperial rivalries could also be settled relatively easily by negotiation between the different powers they weren't so important that they would lead to massive conflicts between European powers its characteristic of the whole way in which colonial disputes were settled in the 19th century settled by the concert of Europe or by bilateral negotiations it's not something that spills over into European politics as of the Spanish all they got by personal war was Spanish Morocco West Africa Guinea Spanish Sahara Canary Islands huge shock to the Spanish political system the consequences were to work themselves through up to the 1930s and it's Morocco that reconquest the Morocco under the table primo de Rivera in the 1920s created a large reactionary self-confident China Spanish army in Morocco which eventually was a spearhead for the nationalist uprising in the Civil War they considered democracy and Parliament had lost the Empire were very angry about it and the Americans of course claim that acquired all this territory not for money or glory but on behalf of humanity for Humanity's sake the claim of course that was to be repeated in comparable circumstances many times later in the century but at worst the most dramatic humiliation suffered by European state and the quest for Empire was not not Spanish not by the Italians it's far worse than that of Spain in 1848 or the rights of the Japanese war for Russia in 1905 Europeans probably had a rather ambivalent attitude towards China they recognized the depth and sophistication of Chinese civilization Chinese patterns models porcelain and rest of it could be very fashionable they recognize all that alongside the weakness of the Chinese state but there's no such reservations when it came to thinking about Africa which is universally despised in Europe by the 1890s was backward and uncivilized and Italy as you've seen it already taken control of parts of thing the Horn of Africa you can see Eritrea and the Italian Somaliland so they the kind of now beginning to encroach upon the independent Empire Abyssinia from from two sides now so the Italians didn't think there was any serious opposition and why not the quite a nice territory by invading Ethiopia they and tried to extend their influence of in Ethiopia nation not in at the beginning of the 1890s here the warlord menelik ii formidable character after conquering the provinces of Tigre and Jairo declared himself Emperor in 1889 I could do the Treaty of friendships imprudent reduce over the Italians whose only doorstep but unfortunately the treaty said different things in the two different languages the Italian version gave the Italians control over Eritrea rights a protectorate over Ethiopia the Amharic Ethiopian version merely said that medellin could use italian diplomats in his foreign policy if he wanted to after this discrepancy was discovered disputes over treaty intensified two men elect formally repudiated in 1893 at this point rather cunningly he began to stockpile european weaponry some have actually bought from the italians he sent delegations in petersburg meconium out of the sensation that must have created in the Czar's court when this exotic Ethiopian delegation of nobles arrived but this resulting in disaster agreeing to send Russian military advisors to the Ethiopian army in 1894 the Italians dearly began military action which escalated until on the 1st of March 1896 a major battle was fought at a tower and the run-up to the battle 15,000 Italian troops many of them rule conscripts equipped with outdated guns Footwear that soon cut off in the rough rocky terrain advanced in three columns that soon became separated because the Italians didn't have proper maps I just happened again incidentally in 1941 where they invaded Greece without proper maps maps have got lost in the mountains this is a serious problem because the three columns are now met by no fewer than a hundred thousand Ethiopian troops the Ethiopian regime has got a feudal system where by conscripts were raised through the estates of the nobles from the local peasants and they were supplied with the modern rifles they had apparently 42 Russian field guns specially adapted for mountainous terrain and according to one account even maximum machine guns acquired from the French here's an Ethiopian drawing of the battle you can see all sides armed to the teeth with the most modern possible weaponry one of the Italian columns are treated in the wrong direction became trapped in a ravine where the Ethiopian cavalry slaughtered them in their thousands egged on by the commander with cries of reap reap if there were at the harvest and a crucial moment menlik brought in 25,000 fresh reserves surrounded the other two columns forcing them to retreat heavy losses altogether 7,000 Italian troops and aerotrain auxiliaries Ascari's were killed 3,000 taken prisoner the rest abandoned the field along with 11,000 rifles all their artillery and most of their supplies it's a massive humiliation telling prisons are pretty well treated but 800 of the Ascari's there are trans are condemned as traitors by the Ethiopians who chopped off their right hands and left feet on the battlefield and left and they're in large heaps to rot or be eaten by vultures it was didn't do to tangle with menelik ii Italians are forced to recognize Ethiopian independence Malik was satisfied and preferred courses he not to follow up his victory by dancing into Eritrea in Italy people ripped up railway lines in case the government sent reinforcements and pelted Prime Minister crispies house with rocks until he was forced to resign so national trauma Italy is exposed to universal ridicule as in this French cartoon from the ever useful potential now as the great French cartoon magazine here we are the Ethiopians beating Crispian to a pulp writers and thinkers like vilfredo pareto launched a furious critique of the indecisiveness and incompetence of parliamentary government and advocated a national rebirth under authoritarian rule little over two decades Mussolini was in power partly as a result of thinking like this and in 1935 he avenged the defeated a tower by invading Ethiopia once more this time defeating Emperor's troops of a safe distance by dropping poison gas bombs from aeroplanes in the meantime liberal nationalists in Italy were determined to demonstrate their country's colonial credentials by expanding I swear there's a diplomat at the time I might've been it was a Bismarck I think he said problem with the Italians that they have a large appetite but poor teeth although it was that the Congress of Berlin in I think 1878 the Russian Foreign Minister said I see the Italians are demanding more territory they must have lost another battle the chance of the Italians came in 1911 an international crisis broke out over the nominally independent Sultanate of Morocco here France and succeeded in getting international acceptance of its influence in view of the increasing disorder that strength threatening its neighboring colony of Algeria German objections in 1906 backfired effectively reinforcing this situation and in 1911 Sultan appealed for French military assistance in putting down rebellion the German said a gunboat to Agadir to force a climb down but the British intervene of the French side and forced Germany to accept a French protectorate over Morocco they offer them a bit of territory transferred from the French Congo to the German colony of Cameroon its compensation so while all this is going on so called second moroccan crisis which is a lot of evidence of which is one of one of these colonial crises is in fact is solved reasonably peacefully but what's going on the Fotolia opportunity they invaded Libya it's a it's exactly a century ago happened in September 1911 they declared war on the territories nominal sovereign power the Ottoman Empire the war's notable for the first example of aerial reconnaissance and aerial bombardment by the Italians Italian pilot that dropped the bomb out of the side of the plane pretty in November 1911 pre-auction exactly a century ago and the first time in history armored cars are deployed as well but nobody's injured by the bombs but it's a significant precedent the Italians the wars not a walkover and they shall setbacks prompted them to send more and more forces so that has 150,000 troops in Libya the Turks recruited Arab salaries couldn't build up the forces to more than 30,000 and gradually the superior Italian numbers and weaponry drove the Turks back an Italian fleet annihilated the optimal Navy of Beirut and the Italians occupied the Dodecanese islands in the Aegean Sea which they like in fact that the Treaty of Russia at the end of the war gave Italy control over Libya and turn returned to the islands being given back though in fact the treaty ceremony rather fanciful depiction here but it kallen didn't give them back in fact kept them up to the Second World War so the Dodecanese were Italian control from 1911 right until 1943 when the Germans took them over and then the British after that and the logical study of some of the islands asked them older Islanders who did most what they felt about the different occupiers and the general consensus with Italians all right it would get on with them when you know you were going to have a cup of coffee with them at a local cafe well the German silver bastards but you knew you were you stood with them the British were the worst because you never knew what they were thinking the Islanders so it's the Otello turkish war and this is oof extremely significance is the start of the run-up to the first world war because the defeat of the Turks by the Italians convinced the Balkan nations the time had come to get independence and the Ottomans sparked the first Balkan war beginning the final dissolution of the Ottoman Empire that whole process got swallowed up in the war its first of all more so by 1914 than to come to conclusion the process of colonial acquisition is more or less complete at least hardly any part of the world untouched many parts of Arabia China Ethiopia Mongolia Persia Cylons bets had never experienced European rule taken together colonial possessions of Europe in the USA included were 50 covered 50% of the world's population so what it led to this unprecedented unequal global balance of power almost obvious example is the Industrial Revolution freeing of power from natural sources of energy the development of steam power and later the internal combustion engine backed by continued scientific advances navigation and literature technology the imbalance of forces in a sense she was starkly illustrated by the Bible underman in which a tango Egyptian army led by Kitchener defeated the Sudanese modest force in what's really a massacre twenty-three thousand Sudanese killed or wounded four hundred and thirty four three zero on the British side if an indigenous state wants to defeat Europeans it had to follow the example of Ethiopia Japan and get hold of European weaponry or hardware itself modern weaponry of course the product of the great leap forward of European prosperity and Industry Science and Technology and in comparison to other parts of the world but far from being a lever to inevitable after 1500 this didn't really take over this global imbalance didn't take over till really the second half of the nineteenth century and it's also the product of European peace things might have been very different of the European nations had carried on fighting each other and exporting their conflicts to other parts of the globe like they've done in the 18th century peace underpinned by British naval hegemony allowed spread a communication networks Telegraph cables sea lanes and trade routes into continental railways all allowing the imperial powers to establish a dense network of communications with their possessions in other parts of the globe global trade expanded almost exponentially under these conditions in a way that would have been impossible had the major industrial powers been fighting each other mass European migration Americas and other parts of the world helped build a globalized economy which at this time Europe and the USA were the main beneficiaries European states are also mostly politically better organized and more effective in mobilizing their resources this complies to Italy when compared with say the Ottoman Empire State like China or Ethiopia which did successfully resist European conquest can only do so if it wasn't divided by deep religious conflicts if it has an effective central administrative system if it had a functioning of internal communications and these states are relatively few and far between and if Europe had acquired new colonial territories in the first half of the 19th century in a fit of absence of mind to curtsy John Seely and the same is no longer true by 1900 beginning in the 1880s European states became hungry for colonies a world of global empires is created as a result a world in which European states as we've seen freely exchange territories between each other separated by whole continents and many thousands of miles of ocean yet it's also a world in which to a large extent Europeans only have formal control on paper some areas like India European control reached a high degree of effectiveness by the second half of the century but in Africa in particular it's only a paper control accepted on a very thin strip of coastline and the paper control then was converted into real control and the methods that European states used to achieve this will be the subject of my next lecture which is on the 24th of January thank you very much

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 59,697

Rating: 4.7466664 out of 5

Keywords: Empire, Colonial History, History of Empire, African History, Africa, History, British Empire, Modern History, European Empire, European History, German Empire, Japanese Empire, History lecture, History Talk, Empire Lecture, Empire talk, Richard Evans, Richard J Evans, Richard J. Evans, Professor of Modern History, Cambridge Professor, Wolfston College, Gresham, Gresham College, Gresham Professor, Professor of Rhetoric, Free education, Public lecture

Id: Z-YuLzzHQlg

Length: 58min 53sec (3533 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 14 2011