Unit 8.2

Russo-Japanese War

(1904-1905) War between Russia and Japan over imperial possessions. Japan emerges victorious.

The Russo-Japanese War

(1904-1905) War between Russia and Japan over imperial possessions. Japan emerges victorious. The Russo-Japanese War ended through negotiations mediated by American President Teddy Roosevelt.

Boxer Rebellion

1899 rebellion in Beijing, China started by a secret society of Chinese who opposed the "foreign devils". The rebellion was ended by British troops. With the empress dowager's encouragement, the Boxers went on a rampage in northern China, killing foreigners and Chinese who had ties to foreigners. Confident that foreign weapons could not harm them, some 140,000 Boxers besieged foreign embassies in Beijing in the summer of 1900. They were crushed, however, by a heavily armed force of British, French, Russian, U.S., German, and Japanese troops. After the rebellion, the Chinese government was forced to allow foreign powers to station troops at their embassies in Beijing and along the route to the sea. When Cixi died in 1908, anti-Qing revolutionary movements that sought alternative methods to deal with foreign and domestic crises were rife through-out China.

British India Video

A century of Portuguese domination of Indian trading posts gave way to another century of intense competition between Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and Britain. All along the way, the Mogul Empire surrendered more and more of its territory and sovereignty to the foreigners. A violent reaction to the British presence, the 1857 Sepoy Rebellion, was brutally suppressed by the British army. The following year, the British dissolved East India Company rule in India and assumed direct control, making Queen Victoria, the empress of India, or at least that's how many textbooks describe it. In much of India, the British exercised indirect rule, allowing local rulers of socalled princely states to continue to enjoy a great deal of domestic autonomy as long as they remained loyal to the British.

East India Company

An English company formed in 1600 to develop trade with the new British colonies in India and southeastern Asia. The British empire in south Asia and southeast Asia grew out of the mercantile activities of the English East India Company, which enjoyed a monopoly on English trade with India. The East India Company obtained permission from the Mughal emperors of India to build fortified posts on the coastlines. In the seventeenth century, company merchants traded mostly for Indian pepper and cotton, Chinese silk and porcelain, and spices from southeast Asia. During the eighteenth century, tea and coffee became the most prominent trade items, and European consumers acquired a permanent taste for both beverages.

Treaty port system

An interstate system that developed through treaties in the mid-nineteenth century between China and Japan on the one hand, and European and American powers on the other, to regulate trade and legal privileges of European and American powers in selected ports in China and Japan.

Scramble for Africa

Between 1875 and 1900, however, the relationship between Africa and Europe dramatically changed. Within a quarter century European imperial powers partitioned and colonized almost the entire African continent. Prospects of exploiting African resources and nationalist rivalries between European powers help to explain this frenzied quest for empire, often referred to as the "scramble for Africa." Even as European powers sponsored informal imperial-ism in the Ottoman and Qing empires in the last half of the nineteenth century, they also embarked on a striking outburst of formal imperialism in Africa.

Flaws of both direct and indirect rule

Both methods of government were flawed: under direct rule, imperial powers struggled with a constant shortage of European personnel, which under-mined the effectiveness of rule, and indirect rule imposed erroneous and rigid European ideas about what constituted tribal categories and boundaries onto African societies.

The United States colony in the Philippines

But ruling over its new colony in the Philippines would prove to be difficult and violent. A fourteen-year insurrection against their new American colonial overlords left four thousand American soldiers dead, twenty thousand Filipino military casualties, and anywhere between a quarter-million to a full million Filipino civilians dead. American colonial officials and soldiers in the Philippines first developed and used the technique of waterboarding as a method of interrogation, a practice that remains controversial to this day. Filipino civilians often suffered the most in the conflict, as American troops either could not or would not distinguish between partisan gorilla and local civilian.

Direct Rule

By the early twentieth century, after some experimentation, most European governments sought to establish their own rule, which took the form of either direct rule, typical of French colonies, or indirect rule, characteristic of British colonies. Under direct rule, colonies were headed by European personnel who assumed responsibility for tax collection, labor and military recruitment, and the maintenance of law and order. Administrative boundaries intentionally cut across existing African political and ethnic boundaries to divide and weaken potentially powerful indigenous groups.

Qing Empire

Empire established in China by Manchus who overthrew the Ming Empire in 1644. At various times they also controlled Manchuria, Mongolia, Turkestan, and Tibet. The last emperor of this dynasty was overthrown in 1911 by nationalists.

Spanish-American War

In 1898, a conflict between the United States and Spain, in which the U.S. supported the Cubans' fight for independence

European Imperialism in the Pacific

In Australia and New Zealand, European powers established settler colonies and dominant political institutions. In most of the Pacific islands, however, they sought commercial opportunities and reliable bases for their operations but did not wish to go to the trouble or expense of outright colonization. Only in the late nineteenth century did they begin to impose direct colonial rule on the islands. Settlers began to arrive in Australia in 1788, nearly two decades after Captain James Cook reported that the region would be suitable for settlement. In that year, a British fleet with about one thousand settlers, most of them convicted criminals, arrived at Sydney harbor and established the colony of New South Wales. By the 1830s voluntary migrants outnumbered convicts, and the discovery of gold in 1851 brought a surge in migration to Australia European settlers established communities also in New Zealand, where the islands' fertile soils and abundant stands of timber drew large numbers of migrants.

Indirect Rule

In contrast, indirect rule sought to exercise control over subject populations through indigenous institutions such as "tribal" authorities and "customary laws."

Imperialism in Southeast Asia

In the interests of increasing trade between India, southeast Asia, and China, British imperialists moved in the nineteenth century to establish a presence in southeast Asia. By the 1880s they had established colonial authority in Burma, which became a source of teak, ivory, rubies, and jade. By century's end, all of southeast Asia had come under European imperial rule except for the kingdom of Siam (modern Thailand), which preserved its independence largely because colonial officials regarded it as a convenient buffer state between British-dominated Burma and French Indochina.

Informal Imperialism in the Ottoman Empire

In the last half of the nineteenth century, two formerly powerful societies—the Ottoman and the Qing empires—increasingly came under such informal imperialism as each struggled with military weakness and internal problems in contrast to the industrialized and competitive nation-states of Europe. Although reform movements emerged in both lands, the results were inadequate, and by the early twentieth century both empires were still firmly in the grip of foreign domination. In 1882 the Ottoman state was unable to pay interest on its loans and had no choice but to accept European administration of its debts.

Two of the important sites of Western Imperialism

India & Africa

U.S. Imperialism in Latin America and the Pacific

Instability and disorder also prompted the United States to intervene in the affairs of Caribbean and Central American lands, even those that were not U.S. possessions, to prevent rebellion and protect American business interests. In the early twentieth century, U.S. military forces occupied Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Haiti. However, Colombia was un-willing to cede land for the project. Under President Theodore Roosevelt (in office 1901-1909), an enthusiastic champion of imperial expansion, the United States supported a rebellion against Colombia in 1903 and helped rebels establish the breakaway state of Panama. In exchange for that support, the United States won the right to build a canal across Panama and to control the adjacent territory, known as the Panama Canal Zone. Roosevelt then added a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine in 1904, which stated that the United States has the right to intervene in the domestic affairs of nations within the hemisphere if they demonstrate an inability to maintain the security deemed necessary to protect U.S. investments. The Roosevelt Corollary, along with the Panama Canal when it opened in 1914, strengthened U.S. military and economic claims

The Emergence of New Imperial Powers

Nineteenth-century imperialism was mostly a European affair until the end of the century. At that point, two new imperial powers appeared on the world stage: the United States and Japan. Both lands experienced rapid industrialization in the late nineteenth century, and both built powerful armed forces.

Capitulations

Nothing symbolized foreign influence more than the capitulations, agreements that exempted European visitors from Ottoman law and provided European powers with extraterritoriality—the right to exercise jurisdiction over their own citizens according to their own laws. Capitulations also served as instruments of economic penetration by European businesspeople who established tax-exempt banks and commercial enterprises in the Ottoman empire, and they permitted foreign governments to levy duties on goods sold in Ottoman ports.

Opium Wars (First and Second)

Outraged (after the Chinese had destroyed some twenty thousand chests of opium), British commercial agents pressed their government into a military retaliation designed to reopen the opium trade. The ensuing conflict, known as the Opium War (1839-1842), made plain the military power differential between Europe and China. The Chinese navy and infantry were no match for their British counterparts, who relied on steam power and modern fire-arms, and in 1842 the Chinese government sued for peace. Second opium war: A second series of conflicts sometimes called the Second Opium War, took place in 1856 to 1860. Unlike the previous opium war, this one involved more conflict on land. The war ended when an Anglo-French force marches on Beijing and forced the Qing to make even more humiliating concessions to the foreigners. While in Beijing, the foreign soldiers destroyed and looted the Qing summer palace. Among the loot, they brought back with them where the gifts that Lord McCartney had bestowed on the Qing Empire some seventy years previously. But the continued conflicts between China and the outside world ultimately created a system, called the Treaty Port system, in which not just one port city but rather dozens of cities were opened for business.

Informal Imperialism in the Qing Empire

Qing problems became serious in the early nineteenth century when officials of the British East India Company began to trade in opium—rather than silver—in exchange for the Chinese silks, porcelains, and teas so coveted by Europeans. Trade in opium was illegal in China, but it expanded rapidly for decades because Chinese authorities made little effort to enforce the law. By the late 1830s, however, government officials had become aware that China had a trade problem and a drug problem as well. In 1839 the government took active steps to halt the trade, which included the destruction of some twenty thousand chests of opium.

The Berlin Conference

The British occupation of Egypt intensified tensions between those European powers who were seeking African colonies. To avoid war, dele-gates from fourteen European states and the United States—not a single African was present—met at the Berlin West Africa Conference (1884-1885) to devise ground rules for the colonization of Africa. According to those rules, any European state could establish African colonies after notifying the others of its intentions and occupying previously unclaimed territory. Hosted by Otto von Bismarck

Imperial Japan, 549- 550

The Japanese drive to empire began in the east Asian islands. During the 1870s Japanese leaders consolidated their hold on Hokkaido and the Kurile Islands to the north, and they encouraged Japanese migrants to populate the islands to forestall Russian expansion there. By 1879 they had also established their hegemony over Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands to the south. In 1876 Japan purchased modern warships from Britain, and the newly strengthened Japanese navy immediately began to flex its muscles in Korea. In 1894 conflict erupted between Japan and China over the status of Korea.

The Treaty of Nanjing

The Treaty of Nanjing (1842), which ended the British war against the Chinese, ceded Hong Kong Island in perpetuity to Britain, opened five Chinese ports to commerce and residence, compelled the Qing government to extend most-favored-nation status to Britain, and granted extraterritoriality to British subjects.

The United States as an Imperialist Power

The increasing presence of the United States in Asia was greatly enhanced by the Spanish-American War of 1898. This pitted an older and declining Spanish maritime empire against a rising American one. The United States eyed many of the remaining overseas possessions of Spain, both in the Caribbean and in the Philippines. The American victory in the war signified in the eyes of many, the arrival of the United States as a full-fledged imperialist power.

How did Britain transform India?

They proceeded to survey land holdings and standardize taxes, build railroads and telegraph networks, encouraged the cultivation of cash crops, and established a school system, albeit one aimed at only a tiny sliver of the Indian elite. Graduates of these schools often found that even though they were fluent in English and familiar with British history and culture, they were seldom allowed to ascend to the higher positions in officialdom in India, let alone in the British Empire more generally. The economic impact of this imperialism was staggering. Some economic historians estimate that in 1750, India had a nearly twenty-five percent share of the world's manufacturing output while Britain had barely two percent. Perhaps even more troubling was the fact that during British rule, India experienced some of the worst famines ever recorded, most prominently in 1876 to 1878, and again in 1899 to 1900. Some scholars argue that British rule made the famine conditions worse than they might otherwise have been.

The British Empire in India

Under both company rule and direct colonial administration, British rule transformed India. To profit from India's enormous size and wealth, British officials cleared forests and encouraged the cultivation of crops, such as tea, coffee, and opium, that were especially valuable trade items. They restructured landholdings and ensured that land taxes financed the costs of British rule. They built extensive rail-road and telegraph networks that tightened links between India and the larger global economy. They also constructed new canals, harbors, and irrigation systems to support commerce and agriculture.

Great Game

Used to describe the rivalry and strategic conflict between the British Empire and the Russian Empire before WWI.

Japanese Empire

Weak/powerless emperor controlled by a Shogun. Adopted a policy of isolationism to limit foreign influence.

The Open Door

Worried about the potential results at the carving of the Chinese melon, the United States, which did not seek a special sphere of influence of its own in China, sought to defend what it called the Open Door. This meant equal access for all foreigners everywhere in China. The Open Door sounded equal and fair, at least for all foreigners, but most of the other powers ignored the American pleas for the Open Door and established their own spheres of influence. The increasing presence of the United States in Asia was greatly enhanced by the Spanish-American War of 1898.

(First) Sino-Japanese War

conflict between China and Japan in 1894-1895 over control of Korea