In 1830, France faced large debt and unemployment. Combined with the need to find raw materials to fuel the industrial revolution, France decided to invade and conquer Algeria. Algerians resisted the French military. France ended up sending 1/3 of its military to win the fight. By 1847 France defeated the Algerian resistance fighters. They took control of the region and began building a colonial empire. By 1850, the now French colony of Algeria had attracted several thousand settlers from France. They came as traders, government officials, and farmers. Native Algerians violently resisted French expansion. To protect its colonists, France had to maintain a large army in Algeria.
Egypt fell deeply into debt in the 1870s, in part because of the expense of building the Suez Canal. The canal, which ran through Egypt, was completed in 1869. It linked the Mediterranean and Red seas. For the British, the canal brought their most valuable colony, India, much closer. Compared with a voyage around Africa, sailing by way of the Suez Canal chopped some 4,500 miles off the trip. By 1880, the British had taken financial control of the country. Their intervention in Egypt set off protests by Egyptian nationalists who did not want foreign control and in 1882, led an uprising. In part to protect their access to the canal, the British put down the rebellion and took full control of Egypt.
The Dutch establish a colony in Cape Town, South Africa in the 1600s. Britain seized control of the colony in 1795. To escape British rule, thousands of Dutch settlers (known as Boers) migrated north into the interior of what is now South Africa. By the late 1800s, the lure of gold and diamonds brought British settlers and businesses into Boer lands. The diamond fields attracted thousands of prospectors, including immigrants from Europe and the United States. Railway construction, trade, and employment all boomed. Once gold was discovered, large enterprises formed to acquire land, using money raised in New York and London. Commercial mining companies went to work, using steam-powered machinery to do the digging. They bought South African coal to fuel their machines and to run the steam locomotives that serviced the goldfields. They hired tens of thousands of workers. South Africa’s economy surged. In 1899 war erupted in the region. The war lasted until 1902 when the Boers surrendered to British rule. Click here to view some British film footage from South Africa in 1899.
The French East India Company established the colony of French Indochina in the 1600s. Overtime French control expanded until they controlled what is now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The colony provided France with valuable cash crops like rice, rubber, coffee, and tea. The French also encouraged the production and trade of opium. The French officials exploited the local population, forcing them to grow crops and mine minerals for export.
The Dutch rulers imposed the Cultivation System on the people of the Dutch East Indies. Each village was expected to reserve 1/5 of their lands for growing crops for the Dutch to export. The Dutch authorities took these crops as rent for living on the land- forcing the native people to pay rent to live on their own land! This system brought the Netherlands great wealth in resources and trade.
In March 1857 a sepoy (Indian soldier in the British East India Company's army) attacked his officers. This attack was due to the rumors that the rifle cartridges were greased with pig or cow fat. Eating cow or pig is against the Hindu and Muslim religions, and the sepoys had to bite the end off the cartridges when loading their weapons. The British responded by arresting and executing the sepoy AND by imprisoning other sepoys who refused to use the rifle cartridges. This sparked a wave of anger- and in the following months hatred of the British rule and the social and economic inequalities between the British and the Indian people bubbled over. Sepoys across India revolted. The Sepoy Rebellion spread quickly- but so did the British response. The British squelched the rebellion, but it caused them to alter their Indian foreign policy. The colony came under the direct control of Parliament, a period known as the British Raj. British rule grew more authoritarian. England began to view India as the "jewel of the crown" and considered it the most profitable colony. Britain continued to manage much of the Indian economy, introducing some industrial technology into a society based on farming. India’s population rose, but so did the incidence of famine.
Europe's imperialist powers competed among themselves in East Asia. For them, the biggest prize was China. With the world’s largest population, China offered the Europeans an enormous market for their products. China’s weak military could not resist European advances. Britain, France, Germany, and Russia all demanded and received concessions from the weak Chinese government. They carved out spheres of influence over key ports and large chunks of Chinese territory. Britain held sway over the fertile Yangtze River valley. France gained hegemony over a large region in the south. Germany forced China to yield control of a smaller region on the northern coast. Russia’s sphere of influence lay to the north of the Korean peninsula.
In the 1890s, Japan joined in the land grab. Japan had once been one of the West’s commercial targets (forced to trade by the Americans). But the country had grown much stronger since 1868. At that time the Meiji Restoration had restored Japan’s emperor to power. It had also started a period of modernization based on Western ways. A popular slogan, “A rich country, strong army,” reflected the country’s newfound imperialist ambitions. Japan, a small, mountainous island nation, envied China’s expansive farmlands. It also saw China as a possible source of coal and iron ore, which Japan needed in order to compete in an industrializing world. China had plentiful reserves of those minerals. So did China’s neighbor Korea, a country that China had traditionally ruled. In 1894, Japan went to war with China over control of Korea. Despite being seen as the underdog, Japan won the nine month long Sino-Japanese War. (Sino stands for “Chinese.”) As a result Japan won control of Korea. China also had to pay Japan’s war costs and give Japan the island of Formosa (present-day Taiwan) and the Liaodong Peninsula in Manchuria.
