Eu rope in the Nineteenth Century 31glory; merchants seeking raw materials and trade relations; and clerics seeking to con-
vert “savages” to Chris tian ity. But the staggering wealth they discovered, and the relative
ease with which it could be acquired, led to increasing competition among Eu ro pean
powers for territories in far- distant lands. Most of the Eu ro pean powers became empires
and, once established, claimed as sovereign territory the lands indigenous peoples
occupied. These empires are the origin of the term imperialism, the annexation of
distant territory (most often by force) and its inhabitants to an empire. Colonialism,
which often followed or accompanied imperialism, refers to the settling of people
from a home country like Spain among indigenous peoples of a distant territory like
Mexico. The two terms are thus subtly dif er ent; most but not all imperial powers settled
their own citizens among the peoples whose territories they annexed, and some states
established colonies but did not identify themselves as empires. Still, most scholars use
the two terms interchangeably.
This pro cess of annexation by conquest or treaty continued for 400 years. As the
technology of travel and communications improved, and as Eu ro pe ans developed vac-
cines and cures for tropical diseases, the costs to Eu ro pean powers of imposing their
will on indigenous people continued to drop. Eu ro pe ans were welcomed in some places
but were resisted in most. In most cases, Eu ro pe ans overcame that re sis tance with very
little cost or risk. They met spears with machine guns and horses with heavy artillery.
In the dawning machine age, it became more common to target indigenous civilians
deliberately, often with near genocidal results. By the close of the nineteenth century,
almost the whole of the globe was “ruled” by Eu ro pean states. Great Britain was the
largest and most successful of the imperial powers, but even small states, such as Portugal
and the Netherlands, maintained impor tant colonies abroad.
The pro cess also led to the establishment of a “Eu ro pean” identity. Eu ro pean states
enjoyed a solidarity among themselves, based on their being Eu ro pean, Christian, “civ-
ilized,” and white. These traits diferentiated an “us”— white Christian Europeans—
from an “other”— the rest of the world. With the rise of mass literacy and increasing
contact with the colonial world due to industrialization, Eu ro pe ans more than ever saw
their commonalities, the uniqueness of being “Eu ro pean.” This identity was, in part,
a return to the same kind of unity felt under the Roman Empire and Roman law, a
secular form of medieval Christendom, and a larger Eu rope as Kant and Rousseau had
envisioned (see Chapter 1). The Congress of Vienna and the Concert of Eu rope gave
more concrete form to these beliefs. The flip side of these beliefs was the ongoing
exploration, conquest, and exploitation of peoples in the non- European world and the
subsequent establishment of colonies there.
The Industrial Revolution provided the Eu ro pean states with the military and eco-
nomic capacity to engage in territorial expansion. Some imperial states were motivated
by economic gains, seeking new external markets for manufactured goods and obtain-
ing, in turn, raw materials to fuel their industrial growth. For others, the motivation wasESSIR7_CH02_020_069_11P.indd 31 6/14/16 10:01 AM