Transcription
Hello, welcome back to our lecture series for Western Civilization 102. We are focusing our attention on the years after the unification of Germany and the unification of Italy, so about 1871 all the way up until the start of World War II in 1914. And our topic for today is, the lecture title is called New Imperialism.
In fact, I mentioned before, but imperialism is, uh, an aggressive expansion, um, the policy of extending a country's authority by basically establishing influence, taking over the economy of that country. Creating colonies would be an example of imperialism as well. Of course, you know this, these colonies or territories, they don't have to have any anything in common with Britain or France or Spain. Okay, we're going to see that not just Britain, but France and Spain and and Russia, Prussia, Austria, all of these European countries will kind of be in a competition with each other here right before World War I to gain these territories. Not only for maybe using their natural resources, and of course, these areas are in underdeveloped countries, mostly in Africa and Asia. They that they were definitely carved up here in this period of new imperialism. But maybe to control natural resources, of course, to have a trade, um, for wealth. So this imperialism is actually going to be one of the causes of World War I. This competition among European powers creates tension in Europe.
Also, the unification of Germany and Italy will alter that very important balance of power. You've heard that used quite often in previous lectures. Congress of Vienna, very important to keep a balance of power. Well, when we have a United Germany and Italy, it changes all that. And we'll see, of course, um, not just with the imperialism, but we have a complicated system of alliances that formed before World War I. And of course, when Bismarck is, um, forced out, this complicated system of alliances will fall apart, and Germany will not fare well, obviously, as a result of that.
Nationalism also played a role in World War I as well. You know, Serbians were inflamed by nationalism, ended up assassinating the Archduke of Austria, his name was Ferdinand. And of course, Germany, being Austria's ally, declared war on Serbia's ally, which was Russia. And you'll learn more about, of course, the events leading up to World War I in a future lecture. But nationalism also caused dissent and problems in Europe as well.
Now, we start to see here with imperialism, and that you'll learn, of course, that not only did was European countries competing with each other for trade and for markets for their goods, but there was also, you know, for a certain extent, they felt superior and maybe felt they needed to help and and put put their way of government and their civilization onto these societies. And so we see mostly the continents of Asia and Africa will be exploited by these countries trying to compete with each other. Um, not to mention, you know, there's new, uh, the transportation systems better, right? Now, so that it's quite easier to get goods to market, even from far away from the actual main continent in Europe.
Britain was dominating Egypt during this period. Um, and, you know, we're going to see that Britain is at first isolated. But, you know, Britain's traditional enemy is France. But you'll see that Britain's enemy will become Germany. And one reason why Britain's enemy becomes Germany is because Germany will antagonize Britain, especially in South Africa. Britain controlled the southern tip of Africa. There were some Dutch settlers there called the Boers. There will be fighting. The Germans will support, of course, the Boers there in South Africa, and you have tension that will grow between Britain and Germany.
Um, we also, of course, will see, um, the French will be in Indochina, which is will play a huge role when it comes into Vietnam, which is Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam makes up French Indochina, as it's called. That is imperialism, and that was France establishing colonies. Different European countries were involved in Asia as well. Um, even the United States will get in on this imperialistic late 19th century imperialism. We will expand our territories, for example, Puerto Rico, Philippines, Guam, Hawaii. We are also expanding as well. It's not just Europe. Russia, of course, had gone even as far as taking over Alaska. But of course, the United States, if you remember your American history, United States will purchase that from Russia as well. The British war in Hong Kong, which was actually until quite recently. Japan annexed Korea. So it was basically this, the situation is ripe. And then it's the Balkans. Huge. When you start learning about the events leading to World War I, the Balkans area will play the role in pushing everybody over the edge, so to speak, and and starting World War I.
So let's learn more about new imperialism in Europe. The late 19th century witnessed a new wave of imperialism, a second wave, if you will, sometimes called the new imperialism. The first wave of European imperialism had really begun in the 1490s with the discoveries and exploration of the Portuguese and of course the Spanish with Columbus. The colonial New World had grown from the 15th to the 18th centuries, as well as European expansion into the Far East. But that wave really ended with the American Revolution and the French Revolution, both because of the breakaway of the American colonies in North America from Great Britain, and also because during the French revolutionary era, the Latin American colonies in Central and South America broke away from Spain.
Before 1800, there had been a large number of settlers in North America. Only afterwards, however, there began to be much more expansion into colonial Asia, colonial Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and of course, into the Pacific. The British really lost interest to some extent in their old empire after the American and French revolutions. One also sees a distinct difference in the way they treated colonies that were populated primarily by white or Caucasian individuals and those who were populated by other ethnic groups. They also changed their whole approach to empire with the advent of free trade in the beginning of the 19th century. So by the mid-19th century, there were many people in Britain who were interested in letting some of the old colonies go or at least releasing them. Partly what wound up happening is the beginning of that long process that eventually led to the transition from the British Empire to the British Commonwealth.
During the period between 1870 and the outbreak of World War I, several of the colonies ceased to be true colonies and became what we know as dominions. The first of these was Canada. Canada had come into the possession of the British after the French and Indian War with the Treaty of Paris of 1763. In 1867, Britain passed something called the British North America Act, which allowed Canada to take on what is known as Dominion status. In Dominion status, what Canada did is that it gained control over all of its own internal affairs. It still looked to Britain for foreign policy. In fact, that continued to be true to a very considerable extent all the way down to World War II, and only recently has Canada formally become a fully independent state, although it has behaved like one for quite some time. Even today, for example, you still find the queen on Canada's money. But in 1760, or 1867 rather, Canada began to function as a Dominion.
The next state to do this was Australia. Australia began to achieve some measure of self-government, uh, in the the late 19th century, and so also did New Zealand, its neighbor, uh, in the antipodes. The final state to achieve Dominion status was North Africa, uh, or South Africa, I'm sorry, which did so right before World War I. So these are the four original dominions, very large territories in every respect, Canada being the largest, uh, South Africa being the smallest, but also territories where the ruling class, after the achievement of dominion status, was in every respect Caucasian.
Now, the one notable exception to the rule was India. India, of course, remained the real jewel in the crown of the British Empire. The fact of the matter is that when Great Britain lost the North American colonies in the American Revolution, uh, it had not lost its most valuable territory. Indeed, the Caribbean islands were probably worth more in terms of trade at the time, but far more valuable was India. And India continued to be treated as a colony. India was, of course, a special case in a number of ways. For instance, it had not been created by England or later Great Britain, per se, but by a semi-private company, the East India Company. And indeed, the East India Company had ruled almost like an independent state in India for a number of years. It was not until the late 18th century that the British government began to impose some restrictions on the East India Company's power in India with a series of reform acts that occurred during and shortly after the time of the American Revolution.
But the East India Company remained very powerful. And what called, uh, Britain's attention once more to the problems that this could cause was that in 1857, uh, there occurred in India what is known as the Great Mutiny, or what is sometimes referred to as the Sepoy Rebellion. The the Mutiny was in one sense the the product of a short-term difficulty, but in another sense, it went to a very deep-seated resentment on the part of the Indian people of being subjected by the company. Uh, prior to 1857, a great many individuals in India had served in the British army, the so-called Sepoys. And what triggered the Mutiny in 1857 was actually what turned out to be a gigantic misunderstanding. The cartridges that were used in the rifles employed by the Sepoys required individuals to bite the cap off the cartridge before putting the powder into the weapon. And a rumor spread in 1857 that the cartridges were being greased with either the fat of pigs or that of cattle.
Now, for Hindus, cattle are sacred, and therefore for Hindu troops to bite the cap off that was greased with the animal fat of a cow would have been unacceptable. Muslims do not ingest pork, and for Muslim Indians, the same problem would have occurred with pork fat. So this is what actually triggered the rebellion. The irony is is that neither pork fat nor cattle fat was being used at the time. They were using paraffin. But once the rebellion started, it turned into much more than this, and it took Britain over a year to put down this rebellion. There were atrocities on both sides, and once it was over, the British realized that they could no longer allow the East India Company to have the kind of power it had before. So, in fact, Parliament took over control of the administration of Indian affairs in 1858. They appointed a Secretary of State for India and gave much more power to the Viceroy of India, so that the power of the EIC was greatly reduced.
Now, this improved relations significantly in India between the British and the local people, but it didn't entirely eliminate the problems in India. There was a growing middle class that became increasingly more politicized in the later 19th century. Uh, in 1886, some of these individuals founded a political party known as the National Congress Party, and by 1907, they were demanding independence. The National Congress Party, by the way, is the party that would later give rise during the interwar period to Mohandas Gandhi, among other people. At the time, though, it it remained willing to negotiate with the British. And when World War I broke out, in fact, the National Congress Party and India in general remained loyal to the British Empire. However, India is the notable exception to the move away from colonial to dominion status, and the demand for independence would re-emerge between World War I and World War II and would actually come to fruition shortly after World War I, I'm sorry, World War II.
Now, with the new imperialism, what we see is a revived interest in colonial expansion. First of all, in Britain, from about 1870 on. A lot of this is owing to the growing prominence of Benjamin Disraeli, the leader of the Conservative Party in the period after 1870. To a lesser extent, the members of the Liberal Party also shared some interest in imperialism, but the Liberals were more divided than the Conservatives in Britain at the time. In 1875, Disraeli purchased a controlling interest in the Suez Canal Company, allowing for the British to control the Suez Canal, linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea and providing easier access to the Gulf of Aden and ultimately to the Indian Ocean. In 1876, Parliament passed legislation that allowed Queen Victoria to be given the title of Empress of India. And other nations began showing a similar interest as well.
But there was more than just adding new elements to old empire in the period after 1870. There was rapid expansion into Africa with what is sometimes called the Scramble for Africa. There was expansion of European influence in Asia and even into the Pacific. And there was at the time a new rationale for imperialism. Back in the early wave of imperialism that began in the 1490s, you could sum up the motives as some have have somewhat humorously done as God, glory, and gold: the desire to spread Christianity, the desire to win renown, and the desire to get rich. In the late 19th century, all those motives were still there. Wherever, uh, colonial expansion went, Christian missionaries also went with them. Uh, explorers often indeed went for glory, becoming famous as a result of their work, and of course, some of them, not all of them, not most of them, got rich. But there were new rationales for imperialism in this period.
Uh, one of these was nationalism. The rapid development of nationalism in the 19th century made it necessary, in the eyes of many European great powers, to have an empire. You see Britain seeking to expand its empire, France seeking to expand its empire, Germany seeking to acquire an empire, and so on. And it's all part of a new, more aggressive, more strident, more competitive nationalism that is not just patriotism in action, not just national pride, but in fact, a kind of aggressive, my country is better than your country sort of competition.
A second reason for imperial expansion, and this is tied somewhat to nationalism, is strategic advantage. There were portions of the world that each country wanted to have a foothold in so that they were not at a strategic disadvantage militarily relative to the other great powers. This is why, for example, we see all countries expanding to some extent into the Pacific, but also into Africa and Asia. Allied with that was economic expansion, which had new motivations now, not just the search for gold and silver, not just the search for easily, uh, profitable resources, but an expansion looking for new products like rubber, for example, like oil, for example, and also expansion seeking to create new markets.
But behind this lay several ideological motives as well. One of these indeed was Christianity, the desire to spread Christianity of different varieties, as a matter of fact, into areas where Christianity had not been spread. A second, and again, largely positive motive, was something called The White Man's Burden. Now, in in today's way of thinking, there is a great deal of condescension, uh, in entailed in that label. But when Rudyard Kipling invented that term, The White Man's Burden, his intentions were good, uh, even if his perceptions were a little bit skewed. The idea that lay behind this was that European civilization was superior to that of other civilizations, and therefore it was The White Man's Burden to share that civilization with everyone else, with Africans, with Asians, and so on, and by the way, whether they wanted it shared or not.
They're also lay behind this, though, some more sinister, less positive motivations. One of these, ideological in nature, was social Darwinism. Now, I want to stress that social Darwinism is not the same thing as Darwinism. Darwinism, the scientific ideals of Charles Darwin, which we will explore when talking about the Second Scientific Revolution, have to do with biological evolution. Social Darwinism, which Darwin himself did not endorse, is a socio-political concept which suggests that different ethnicities are in competition to evolve, in competition to survive with one another, and that therefore it is perfectly all right for the strong nations of the world, in this case the Europeans, to exploit or even annihilate those who are less strong. Along with this, of course, sometimes comes a profit motive that is truly rapacious in nature. So all of these things are seen as justifications for the new imperialism.
Now, where does the new imperialism take us and how does it take us there? Well, one place is into Asia, and one of the targets, one of the many targets for the new imperialism of the late 19th century, was China. China, of course, is an enormous country, a very densely populated country, one of the two most populated countries in the world at the time, the other being India. And China, of course, is a nation with great resources and also a nation with potentially great markets. John D. Rockefeller, the great American oil magnate, used to fantasize about being able to sell just a pint of kerosene to every Chinese person. That would have been quite an accomplishment and made him an even richer man than he was. But China, up until this point, had proved relatively impenetrable for Western nations to to seeking to trade, uh, with the Chinese. There had been only limited contact in recent centuries, and in fact, that contact had been reduced in the century or so leading up to the wave of new imperialism.
In 1757, the Manchu Dynasty had closed all ports except the southern Chinese port of Canton to European trade. One reason for this is that the Chinese regarded Europeans as barbaric. You know, there's this concept that sociologists have of of ethnocentrism, that is, of regarding your own culture as superior to others, and kind of the flip side of that is xenophobia, the fear of foreigners or the dislike of foreigners. And everybody experiences that to a certain extent. We often in our own society tend to see it most in ourselves, but it was very much present in the Chinese in the 18th and 19th century. If you look at a map of the world made in China at the time, China is in the middle, and everything else is around it. And in the view of China, there was little that the outside world had to offer that China might want. On the other hand, outsiders were seen as a potentially corrupting influence. Therefore, the only port into which any goods could be brought was through Canton, and there was an increasing desire on the part of European nations to change that.
Well, that change occurred in the oddest way imaginable, not through trade and the sort of goods that we would necessarily think of today, but trade in the form of a deadly narcotic, because the opening up of China to Western trade occurred as the result of a bizarre little episode known as the Opium War. Opium, of course, is a narcotic made from the Opium poppy. This is why you can't get regular poppies anymore on Veterans Day, you get the little paper one instead. The regular ones are potentially the source of narcotics. Opium itself is the drug from which morphine is made. Morphine, in turn, can be manufactured into heroin. So opium itself does everything that heroin does, just a little bit slower. It is highly addictive. It also will kill you fairly quickly if you use it on a regular basis. But it was entirely legal in the Western world in the 19th century. In London, for example, there were opium dens where people could go to smoke opium, and while these were looked down upon, they were not illegal.
This source of most of the opium used in the 19th century was India. One of the many products that India produced, along with tea, for example, was in fact the Opium poppy. And in the 19th century, India was producing more opium than the world could consume. Now, as it happens, and as the British knew, there were a fair number of customers for opium in China. There was fairly widespread opium addiction there already, and a fair number of British traders imagined being able to open up China to trade in opium, thereby unburdening Indian producers of their excess product and making a fortune in the process. And if you are a completely heartless, immoral marketer, there's nothing quite like marketing opium, because once a customer, always a customer. At any rate, the upshot of this is that the British began secretly bringing opium into the port of Canton and storing it in warehouses on land.
Now, the Chinese were very suspicious of this. They realized quickly that something fishy was going on, and they were very, very strict at the time about what they would allow to go on in Canton. For example, uh, they would not allow European women to come ashore at all. They would only allow European men to come ashore during the day, and they kept a very close eye on what was being brought in. Well, not surprisingly, they fairly quickly realized that European traders were bringing in, along with other goods, large quantities of opium, and they tried to put a stop to it. The upshot of this was a war, a war in which Britain went to war with the Chinese in order to open up the port of Canton to the trade in opium, as well as other things. Not surprisingly, Britain, which had a vastly superior navy to that of China, won this war, which was fought between 1839 and 1842, and China was indeed forced to open up its ports to the British and to other European great powers.
Now, as it happened, opium is not the only thing that comes in. Other Western goods did as well, and so did Western ideas. And one of the first things that happened is that Christian missionaries began coming to China in much larger numbers. Now, China has a way of taking Western ideas like Christianity in the 19th century, or Marxism in the 20th century, and sort of reformulating them into Chinese culture. That's pretty much what happened in the 19th century with Christianity. But one utterly unintended consequence of this was the development of a bizarre cult in which a a group of Chinese became followers of a Chinese man who claimed to be the Son of God, who claimed to be the younger son of Jesus Christ, and who led a rebellion against the Manchu Dynasty that came to be known as the Taiping Rebellion.
Now, the Taiping rebels had two goals, or two earthly goals, at least. One was to overthrow the Manchu Dynasty, and the other was to kick out all the foreigners. So Britain, France, and Russia all became involved, now not in opposing the Manchu Dynasty, but in propping up the Manchu Dynasty against the Taiping rebels. They eventually succeeded, and the upshot of the Taiping Rebellion, which went on from 1850 to 64, was that even more Chinese ports were opened up to the Western world than in the past, and the rebellion was ultimately put down. The success of the West in in bringing in more ordinary forms of Christianity was fairly limited in China, although it would have more success in other places. Also, the Western world didn't really colonize China. It was too big, too well-established for that to happen. Rather, what occurred in the latter part of the 19th century and the early 20th century is that the Western states, including eventually by the end of the century, the United States, established spheres of influence in China, areas of China where Britain was the predominant local trader, or France was the predominant local trader, or Russia was the predominant local trader. And in 1900, the Western powers would once again become involved in putting down a rebellion there against the government, the so-called Boxer Rebellion, uh, which occurred in 1900, and which again was put down with Western aid.
Now, another, uh, Far Eastern state that was opened up by the West was Japan, and interestingly enough, in this case, it was opened up by the United States in one of the early, uh, pieces of American involvement in in encroachment into Asia. There, Japan had been closed to Western trade, to Western missionaries, to Western involvement in general since the 17th century. But in 1853, an American fleet commanded by Commodore Matthew Perry forced its way into a Japanese port and persuaded the Japanese, more or less at the point of a gun, to begin trading with the United States and the other Western powers. Now, this was a success in the sense that Japan did exactly that, but it also backfired in the sense that Japan, unlike China, did not become a victim, so to speak. Japan certainly did not become a colony. In fact, Japan began to play the game in much the same way that Western European states, and increasingly the United States, did. Japan, in other words, began to behave in many ways like a European great power, not in Europe, of course, but it too became a colonizer, it too became a great trader, and by the end of the 19th century, it would be a competitor with the Western colonial powers rather than a target.
Now, there were of course other areas that the the West moved into in Asia. For example, in 1884, France moved into what at the time was known as Indochina, establishing a legacy there that would eventually lead in the 20th century to the Vietnam War. Britain moved into Burma in the 1880s as well, what is nowadays, uh, uh, a state that is in a considerable upheaval. The Japanese, not only began to get involved in the affairs of the world as colonizers, but they also fought a couple of major wars in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which really served notice that Japan had arrived as a power. In 1894-95, they fought a war with China, the Sino-Japanese War, in which Japan seized control of Korea from China, thereby alarming the Western world considerably. And they alarmed the Western world even more when in 1904 and 1905, they fought the Russo-Japanese War against Russia and won. The first time in modern times that an Asian state had defeated a European state in a war.
Now, another area towards which European attention turned was Africa. I mentioned earlier that about 1870, there was what is known as the Scramble for Africa, and indeed, Africa became the sword, the site of the most spectacular colonial expansion in the second wave of European imperialism. Indeed, by the turn of the century, there was hardly a square inch of the entire African continent that had not been colonized by one European state or another.
Now, of course, Northern Africa had been well known to Europeans for not just hundreds, but thousands of years. Egypt is one of the seed beds of Western Civilization, going back five or six thousand years. Northern Africa, stretching all the way over to Morocco, had been in close contact with Europe through Mediterranean trade for a long time. The western coast of Africa had been explored by the Portuguese and others, and so also had the eastern coast of Africa as early as the 14th, or I'm sorry, the 15th and 16th centuries. But the vast majority of the Europe of the African continent had remained unknown. Africa used to be very frequently referred to as the Dark Continent, and many people make the mistake of assuming that that is a reference to the skin color of its inhabitants, but it's not. In fact, except for coastal Africa, north, south, east, and west, central Africa remained largely unknown to Europeans prior to 1870. Much of it is covered with dense jungle. Central Africa is separated from the north by the Sahara Desert, and therefore penetrating that region proved to be extremely difficult.
And therefore, there's a whole series of events in the late 19th century that lead up to that penetration. One is that there was competition for land in Northern Africa, where we see particularly the French expanding their influence into areas like Algeria and Morocco, and where we see the British solidifying their influence in Egypt. But that solidification led to extending power further south. In the case of the British, for example, south into the Sudan. Uh, Italy also became involved in North Africa, attempting, not successfully, to conquer Abyssinia, or what we now call Ethiopia, in the late 19th century, and having somewhat more success in conquering what is now days the state of Libya. Of course, Libya was not nearly as profitable then as it is now because nobody knew at the time that there was oil there. But the point is that there is competition in Northern Africa that is eventually going to lead to competition further south.
There also had been competition over Southern Africa. Southern Africa had originally been colonized by the Portuguese. The Dutch had taken over from the Portuguese, and in the 19th century, the British had begun taking over from the Dutch, and as we'll see shortly, there would be some pretty serious conflict there. In the late 19th century, central Africa is opened up thanks to the realization that there are products there that it is difficult to find elsewhere. For one thing, it was discovered that there was gold in central Africa to some extent, and by this time, many of the gold reserves of the rest of the world had been mined out. But even more important was the discovery in central Africa of diamonds. Beyond diamonds, yet another precious, uh, item that was discovered in central Africa was ivory. Ivory, of course, was used for jewelry, but it also had more practical purposes. In the late 19th century, it became very common in Western middle-class households to have a piano, and one reason we still refer to playing the piano as tickling the ivories is that piano keys were quite literally made from ivory, the tusks of elephants in the 19th century.
But oddly enough, perhaps the most appealing product was the one with the least obvious intrinsic value, and that is rubber. Rubber plants grow all over Central Africa. Rubber, of course, has a great number of practical uses, and what really spurred this early on was the invention of the pneumatic tire, not so much for automobiles and airplanes, which would only come around the turn of the century, but the pneumatic tire on bicycles. The bicycle became a major mode of transportation in the late 19th century, and the original bicycles had solid tires, sometimes tires even made out of wood. This gave you, as you can probably imagine, a fairly rough and unpleasant ride. The invention of the pneumatic tire made, uh, you know, the whole experience a much different one, and it created an insatiable demand for rubber, which at the time could only be had out of the jungles of central Africa or to a lesser extent, South America.
So there is enormous competition to get into central Africa and to exploit these resources. There was also a desire to try to Christianize the people there, and this too becomes competitive among different denominations associated with different states. And there is simple human curiosity. A whole group of explorers began pushing their way into central Africa, seeking more knowledge about the Dark Continent in the 19th century. Two of the most famous examples of these are David Livingstone, a a British missionary and explorer who explored extensively in central Africa in the 1860s and 70s, and the American Henry Morton Stanley, who went in looking for him and eventually found him and perhaps even greeted him with the famous line, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" There were others like Richard Burton, not the Richard Burton who was the husband of Elizabeth Taylor, but Richard Francis Burton, the great linguist and explorer, who explored extensively in Africa as well as other places. And as people began to discover how to penetrate Africa by going down the Congo River, for example, or down the Nile, or in other ways, behind them came colonists, behind them came traders, and soon all of Africa wound up being colonized.
Now, Britain played a huge role in this. Britain already had colonies in Egypt and in South Africa, and one of the great dreams of the British was to link the two with a railroad, something that never actually happened, but it led them to acquire more and more territory, particularly in the southern part of Africa, where much of the drive came from a British imperialist by the name of Cecil Rhodes. Uh, Rhodes is nowadays remembered primarily as the man responsible for the Rhodes Scholarships, but he was also responsible for expanding British influence beyond the southern tip of Africa into much more of South Central Africa. Belgium created a very wealthy colony around the mouth of the Congo River, the so-called Belgian Congo, under the Belgian King Leopold II. France greatly expanded its influence, especially in Northwestern Africa, and Germany too established a number of colonies in central Africa, particularly in East Central Africa. So again, you know, virtually all of Africa winds up being colonized.
Now, this created some problems at the time. The colonies created did not necessarily correspond through the tribal divisions that already existed in Africa. So Europeans often found themselves trying to govern two or more tribal peoples who were mutually hostile. This, of course, becomes a much greater problem after World War II when many of these colonies become independent and are still populated by hostile people, but that's another story for another day. In the meantime, as competition for territory in Africa heated up, it often led to warfare, and one of the most famous examples of that is the warfare that broke out in South Africa between the British and the descendants of earlier Dutch settlers there, known as the Boers. That's Boers, as in Boer, not like boring people or pigs. The Boers had moved out of Southern Africa, with or the the Cape region of Southern Africa, with the British encroachment onto their territory, into two regions known as the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.
But late in the 19th century, it was discovered that there was gold and diamonds in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, and the British began pushing into that territory as well. It's a long and very complicated story. Uh, the best text on the Boer War is close to a thousand pages long, but the short version is this: the Boers resisted, and they resisted much more effectively than the British had expected. There were actually two Boer Wars, but the second one, the Great Boer War of 1899 to 1902, is one that marks a real turning point in British imperialism in a lot of ways. The British were used to winning, and they were used to winning fairly easily. That turned out not to be the case in the Boer War of 1899 to 1902. The Boers put up fierce resistance. They fought much more effectively than the British had anticipated, and although the British did eventually win, it cost them a great deal more in money and manpower than they had expected.
Furthermore, the Boer War had consequences that went beyond just the fighting. The war was so bloody and so ugly in many respects that it led many people at home in Britain to question the whole imperial enterprise. In short, it became a political issue between the two major political parties. Moreover, it cost Britain prestige in the world. One of the things that the British did to ultimately win is that they rounded up the wives and children of many of the Boers, as well as all the prisoners of war they captured, and put them into concentration camps. This is the first widespread use of concentration camps in the 20th century. Now, I want to make it clear, these were not extermination camps like those later created by the Nazis in World War II and by the Soviet Union in World War II and afterwards, but they were not particularly nice places for the wives and children and prisoners of war of the Boers to be, and Britain was widely condemned for this.
Furthermore, it began to make the British aware that they were not invincible. Following the Crimean War, the British had ceased to really be involved very much in European affairs. They had embraced this notion of splendid isolationism and had really done very little to pursue allies on the continent. Finding themselves condemned by the Germans, by the French, and by others, it began to dawn on the British that perhaps they needed to cultivate a closer relationship with some of the continental European states, and as you will see in a subsequent lecture, this led in an important way into diplomatic developments that lead up to World War I.
Now, there was also imperialism in the Pacific. The Pacific Ocean, of course, is a vast body of water compared to any other body of water in the world. It's much, much bigger than the Atlantic Ocean. It takes far longer to cross, and for that reason, it is very useful to have stopping off stations along the way. And there are, of course, quite a number of islands in the Pacific that European states began to compete for in the 19th century, initially as way stations, as places to stop off, take on water, take on food, have a little R and R, and so on. But it was also discovered that many of these islands had very valuable resources: breadfruit, for example, in Tahiti, or pineapples in Hawaii, and so on, goods that could not be had anywhere else.
And in one of the oddest developments of the late 19th century, one of the products for which there was the most fierce competition was something called guano. Guano is essentially the droppings of bats and other birds, which it accumulated for hundreds, if not thousands, of years on many of the Pacific Islands. Why would people fight over this? Well, because it's an extremely valuable fertilizer. In the late 19th century, farming and scientific farming had become much more widespread, and the recognition that fertilizer has a tremendous impact on productivity had become very prominent in the minds of agriculturalists. We've moved really beyond simply using, uh, the dung produced by cattle and sheep and goats in a crop rotation system. Guano is very, very rich at exactly the nutrients you want if you're growing crops, and so people begin to apply this to fields in a large way. But we're really before the era of chemical fertilizers like we use now. So the competition for this as a way of increasing agricultural productivity actually led to outbreaks of guano wars, as people fought over islands for this product, if you will.
Now, another thing is that as competition in the Pacific increased, the great powers, and especially Britain and Germany, to a lesser extent the United States and Spain, came to see the possession of Pacific Islands as strategically important, and as World War I, and even more World War II would certainly prove, they were right to see it that way.
Yet another area into which expansion began in the late 19th century, although this would accelerate a great deal after World War I, was the Middle East. Of course, we think of the Middle East now primarily in terms of oil. It's only, uh, around the time of World War I that people start to really see the significance of that. But there was already competition for territory in the Middle East for reasons having very little to do with oil, but with a desire of nations to protect their own security and the security of their colonies. Britain, as I have mentioned several times, had a very valuable colony in India, a colony that it had no intention of turning loose. Between India and Russia is the territory that we now know as Afghanistan. Afghanistan did not have a lot to offer in the way of products of its own at the time, but the Russians were eager to extend their influence into Afghanistan as a way of securing their border. The British, on the other hand, wanted to keep control over Afghanistan themselves because they wished to keep the Russians as far away from India as possible. And so there began there a diplomatic competition that often became military in nature, called the Great Game. In fact, you may have heard in discussions of the war in Afghanistan recently references to the Great Game. Well, this is a struggle, uh, maneuvering, uh, diplomatic efforts, and warfare between Britain and Russia to control Afghanistan, with, of course, a third very important and unpredictable variable being the local tribes in Afghanistan, who were perfectly happy to play the British and the French against each other. The competition over Afghanistan also led competition for territory elsewhere in Persia, or what we now know as Iran, and in the various territories that after World War I would come to make up the states of Iraq and Lebanon. So that too is beginning to become an issue.
There was even some competition in Latin America. By and large, the United States had discouraged Western European involvement in Latin America since the 1820s with the Monroe Doctrine. But of course, Spain was already there. Spain might have lost many of its territories, uh, in the French Revolution, but it still had some, notably it still had territory in Cuba and Puerto Rico. And in the late 19th century, this led to an outbreak of war between the United States and Spain, the so-called Spanish-American War, in which the United States acquired control of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean Sea and also the Pacific territories of the Philippines and Guam. Also, United States interest in Latin America itself began to bring the U.S. into the Western imperial competition, notably with the desire to build a canal through Panama connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This was not the first attempt to do this. The French had attempted it, the British had contemplated it, but it was the United States who eventually succeeded in building the canal that for much of the 20th century would be one of the principal ways of getting from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
So by the time we reached the beginning of the 20th century, Africa has been almost completely colonized, China has been subjected to spheres of influence, Japan has become a competitor itself, and the competition continues in the Middle East, in parts of Africa, and in the Pacific. And indeed, that imperialistic competition for territory would prove to be one of the major causes for World War I.
All right, so now that we've learned more about what's happening in Europe and, of course, in, uh, in the rest of the world, because now we're starting to to include more territories and not just kind of focused on the European continent, when we come back for our next lecture, the title is the Second Industrial Revolution, which I've briefly mentioned in the past, but we also have a Second Industrial Revolution. It's a little bit different, of course. I'd mentioned that it kind of spread into Japan and Russia, and it allows for opportunities for women, and also there was a scientific revolution that will take place as well. And then, of course, we'll start to focus on the World Wars, of course, World War I being very, very important here, and that will, of course, encompass quite a few future lectures. Until next time.