Transcription
Okay, so it turns out the second wave of imperialism we've been talking about had massive effects on the growing global economy, and I reckon we ought to talk about it. So, if you're ready to get them BR cows milked, let's get to it.
One of the main themes of this unit has been the effort of industrialized imperial powers to take over and colonize the whole dang world. One of the main motivations for doing so is to get their grubby hands on more and more raw materials that they needed for their factories to turn out manufactured goods. As imperial powers gained more and more colonies, many of them transformed those colonial economies into export economies, which are primarily focused on the export of raw materials or goods for distant markets.
Oh, if you want to follow along with this video and all my videos, check the link in the description. Now, that may not seem like a big deal to you, but it was a massive development. You see, before a lot of these places were colonized, most of the people in Africa, Southeast Asia, or the Americas were subsistence farmers. That just means the farmers grew a variety of foods that they and their families consumed in order to survive. But once these imperial powers showed up, they got busy quick, fast, and in a hurry reorganizing colonial economies around the export of one or maybe two cash crops or natural resources.
For example, here's a piece of land in which many subsistence farmers grow a diversity of food for their survival. But then here comes Big Daddy Imperial State, which colonizes the territory and then notices that all that soil is good for growing cotton, for example. Oh, what a coincidence! They need raw cotton by the metric buttload for their textile factory, so get all those yams, potatoes, and wheat out of here. Y'all grow only cotton from here on out. Or if it was raw materials, then the only thing those people were doing was digging for copper or diamonds or whatever.
So, the big development here is that imperial powers fundamentally transformed colonial economies to serve their own interests, namely the extraction of natural resources or the production of industrial crops. I know what you're thinking: why would they do such a thing? And that is a very perceptive question, my own pupil. So let me explain it up real nice.
The first cause of this massive economic development was that imperial powers needed raw materials for industrial factories. Remember, industrial production is the means by which states gained and maintained power during this period. And since those machines needed raw materials, then exploiting their colonies to get them was just fine by them.
For example, the economies of Egypt and India were highly dependent on exporting cotton to Britain. Prior to this, Britain got a lot of its cotton from the United States, but then they were rude enough to get themselves into a Civil War, and so the cotton supply dried up. Britain cranked up their Egyptian and Indian holdings to produce cotton like mad, and by the end of the 19th century, almost the entire Egyptian economy, for example, was dedicated to exporting cotton to Britain. The same thing goes for the extraction of palm oil in West Africa. You see, palm oil was used to manufacture goods like soap and was a critical lubricant for factory machines. Therefore, using enslaved labor, palm oil plantations were established throughout West Africa, and their colonial economies were dominated by its export.
Then there was the mad dash for guano extraction in the Pacific and Atlantic Islands. As it turns out, these giant mountains of bird poop made real good fertilizer for industrial crop operations.
Okay, and then the second cause of this economic development was the need to supply food to growing urban centers. Now remember that a major effect of industrialization was urbanization, or the migration to and growth of cities. As these cities grew more populous, there were more and more mouth holes to feed, and therefore they had to import food from elsewhere. Therefore, some colonial economies were reorganized to meet that need by shifting to cash crop cultivation of popular foods like sugar and coffee, and the growing demand for meat among the middle class in industrial nations, which was satisfied by industrial ranching operations set up in Argentina and Brazil.
Finally, let's talk about the effects of all these global economic developments, and I'm going to mention two. First of all, profits from exports were used to purchase finished manufactured goods. For example, Britain's colonial holdings more than doubled over the course of the 19th century, but in most cases, they were less concerned about adding territory than they were about integrating those colonies into a growing network of trade. In other words, colonies provided a closed market for manufactured goods.
What that means is that because industrial states manufactured far more goods than their own populations could buy, they needed other markets for their output. So, as colonial economies shifted to cash cropping, most of what they needed to survive had to be purchased on the world market. Therefore, whatever profits they gained from the export of natural resources or mineral extraction went to purchasing the finished manufactured goods exported by imperial states.
That reality is related to the second effect, namely a growing economic dependence of colonial people on their imperial parents. This is the thing to remember, so don't miss it: the reorganization of colonial economies served only the interests of the colonizing overlords, not the indigenous peoples. So when imperial states organized colonial economies for their own benefit, that meant that the colonial peoples became more dependent upon them for their own well-being.
Okay, click here to keep reviewing for unit 6, and click here to grab my video note guides, which are going to help you get all the contents of this massive course firmly gripped into your brain fold. I'm glad we got to hang out, and I'll catch you on the flip-flop. I'm out!