530 Chapter 27but Pan-Slavs saw Bosnia lost to Austria; the Bulgarians
won independence but lost much territory promised to
them in a preliminary treaty, the Treaty of San Stefano.
The Balkan crisis of 1875–78 drove Bismarck to ne-
gotiate a close military alliance with Austria-Hungary
known as the Dual Alliance (1879), which became the
new cornerstone of his alliance system. The Habsburg
prime minister and foreign minister was a Hungarian,
Count Julius Andrássy, who held no grudge against
Germany for the war of 1866. Secret terms of the Dual
Alliance promised each country military assistance if
they were attacked by Russia and guaranteed neutrality
if either were attacked by any other country. Bismarck
labored simultaneously to retain Russian friendship by
preserving and strengthening the Three Emperors’
League; he understood that “[i]n a world of five powers,
one should strive to be a trois” (on the side with three).
Italy, motivated by a growing colonial rivalry with
France in north Africa, joined the Dual Alliance in
1882, converting the pact into the Triple Alliance. Ger-
many thus acquired explicit security against France, al-
though Bismarck publicly presented the treaty as
merely a bulwark of the monarchical order. To under-
score his desire for Russian friendship, Bismarck later
negotiated another Russo-German treaty known as the
Reinsurance Treaty (1887). This document gave a Ger-
man pledge not to support Austrian aggression against
Russia, and it was accompanied by significant German
investment in Russian industrial development. Both
governments reiterated their devotion to the status quo.
Finally, Bismarck orchestrated a series of secondary
treaties, such as the Mediterranean Agreements (1887),
which involved other governments (including Britain
and Spain) in the defense of the status quo. The net-
work of his treaties became so complex that Bismarck
enjoyed the self-bestowed image of being a juggler
who could keep five balls in the air at once.
The New Imperialism, 1881–1914
The great powers exploited the European peace to an-
nex large empires around the world. In 1871 only 10
percent of Africa had fallen under European control.
Britain held the Cape Colony in South Africa and a few
strips of West Africa. France had seized Algeria in 1830
and had long controlled part of West Africa including
Senegal, while Portugal retained southern colonies dat-
ing back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but
most of the continent remained self-governing. By
1914 Europeans claimed virtually the entire continent,leaving independent only Liberia (under American in-
fluence) and Ethiopia (claimed by Italy but uncon-
quered) (see map 27.2). The new imperialism had also
ended self-government in the Pacific by 1914. There,
the Japanese, who took the Ryuku Islands in 1874 and
Formosa in 1895, and Americans, who took Hawaii in
1898 and part of Samoa in 1899, joined Europeans in
building oceanic empires. Simultaneously, Britain and
Russia expanded in southern Asia, Britain and France
occupied most of Southeast Asia, and all of the indus-
trial powers (including Japan and the United States)
menaced China. Empires were growing so fast that a
leader of British imperialism, Colonial Secretary Joseph
Chamberlain, gloated, “The day of small nations has
long passed away. The day of empires has come.”
Europeans had been claiming empires around the
world for centuries. Britain, France, Spain, Portugal,
Denmark, and the Netherlands all held colonies taken
before the nineteenth century. According to an
estimate made in 1900, the frontiers of Russia had been
advancing into Asia (much as the United States pushed
westward) at the rate of fifty-five square miles per year
since the sixteenth century. In the century between the
1770s and the 1870s, Russia fought six wars against the
Ottoman Empire and four wars against Persia, in the
course of which the czars annexed the Crimea, Geor-
gia, and Armenia, then advanced into south Asia and
prepared to take Afghanistan. Newly unified Italy and
Germany were eager—against Bismarck’s better judg-
ment—to join this club. As Kaiser Wilhelm II said in a
speech of 1901, echoing Bülow’s Weltpolitik,Germans
also expected “our place in the sun.”
Europeans had previously built colonial empires,
sending colonists to live in distant colonies. The new
imperialism of 1881–1914 included little colonialism.
Europeans sent soldiers to explore and conquer, offi-
cials to organize and administer, missionaries to teach
and convert, and merchants to develop and trade, but
few families of colonists. When Germany annexed
African colonies in the 1880s, more Germans chose to
emigrate to Paris (the capital of their national enemy)
than to colonize Africa.
Earlier empires had also been based on mercantilist
commerce. Colonies might provide such diverse goods
as pepper, tulip bulbs, opium, or slaves, but they were
expected to strengthen or to enrich the imperial state.
Economic interests still drove imperialism, but the mo-
tor had changed. Imperialists now sought markets for
exported manufactures, especially textiles. They
dreamt, in the imagery of one British prime minister, of
the fortunes to be made if every Oriental bought a
woolen nightcap. The rise of trade unions inspired in-