534 Chapter 27
teenth century appears to be an age of peace for Britain
when viewed in a European context, it was an epoch of
constant warfare when viewed in a global context.
In addition to economic and political explanations
of imperialism, Western cultural attitudes are also im-
portant. These range from religion and humanitarian-
ism to social Darwinism and racism. Christian
missionaries formed the vanguard of imperialist inter-
vention in Africa and Asia. They were successful in
some regions: Nigeria and Madagascar, for example, are
both more than 40 percent Christian today. In other re-
gions, people resisted Christianity as an imperialist in-
tervention; as one Indian put it, “Buddha came into our
world on an elephant; Christ came into our world on a
cannonball.” Missionaries also taught Western attitudes
and behavior, such as denouncing the depravity of
seminudity in tropical climates. Textile manufacturers
were not alone in concluding that “[b]usiness follows
the Bible.” Europeans also justified imperialism by
speaking of humanitarianism. Some used crude stereo-
types about abolishing cannibalism or moralistic argu-
ments about ending polygamy; others took pride in the
campaign to end the slave trade, which Europeans had
done so much to develop. More educated arguments
cited the abolition of practices such as Sutteein India
(the tradition by which a widow threw herself on her
husband’s funeral pyre) or the benefits of Western
medicine.
Humanitarian justifications for imperialism were of-
ten cloaked in terms such as the French doctrine of la
mission civilatriceor the title of Rudyard Kipling’s poem
“The White Man’s Burden” (1899). Such terms sug-
gested the social Darwinian argument that Western civ-
ilization was demonstrably superior to others, and this
led to the simple corollaries that (1) in Jules Ferry’s
words, “superior races have rights with regard to infe-
rior races” and (2) they had a duty to help “backwards”
peoples. Kipling, for example, urged advanced states:
“Fill full the mouth of Famine/And bid the sickness
cease.” Even humanitarianism thus contained an ele-
ment of the racism common in imperialism. Europeans
had often viewed colonial peoples as heathens or sav-
ages. Late nineteenth-century social Darwinism wors-
ened such stereotypes with the pseudoscientific notion
that all races were locked in a struggle for survival, a
struggle to be won by the fittest. Imperialists cheerfully
concluded that their own nation would win this strug-
gle. A president of the United States spoke of his desire
to help his “little brown brothers” (the people of the
Philippines). A czar of Russia joked about going to
war with “little yellow monkeys” (the Japanese, who
promptly defeated the Russians). By the early twentieth
century, Western racism was so unchallenged that a
major zoo exhibited an African in a cage alongside
apes.The Scramble for Africa
Historians often cite the French occupation of Tunis in
1881 as the beginning of the new imperialism. French
pride had been hurt by the events of 1870–71, and it
had received another blow in 1875 when the British
purchased control of the Suez Canal (built by the
French in the 1860s) from the khedive of Egypt. Bis-
marck used the distrust generated by the Suez issue to
reawaken Anglo-French rivalry. At the Congress of
Berlin in 1878, he encouraged the French to claim Tu-
nis, and the congress approved. Jules Ferry, who be-
came premier of France in 1880, used the excuse of
raids by Tunisian tribes into Algeria to proclaim a
French protectorate over Tunis—an act that promptly
benefited Bismarck by driving the Italians into the
Triple Alliance. The British responded by using nation-
alist riots as an excuse to extend their control of Egypt
in 1882. They bombarded Alexandria, occupied Cairo,
and placed Egypt under the thumb of a British consul.
Nationalist rebellion moved south to the Sudan in- It acquired a religious fervor from an Islamic
leader known as the Mahdi (messiah); the mahdists de-
feated several British garrisons, notably the forces of
General Gordon at Khartoum (1885), and sustained an
autonomous government until Kitchener’s victory at
Omdurman a decade later.
Anglo-French imperialism in North Africa pro-
voked a race among European governments, known as
“the scramble for Africa,” to claim colonies in sub-
Saharan Africa. In the five years between 1882 and
1887, Europeans claimed more than two million square
miles of Africa. (The United States today totals less
than 3.7 million square miles.) In 1884 alone, Germany
took more than 500,000 square miles as German South-
west Africa (today Namibia), Cameroon, and Togo;
two years later, they added nearly 400,000 square miles
as German East Africa (today Tanzania). The largest
single claim, nearly a million square miles of central
Africa known as the Congo, was taken by King
Leopold II of Belgium in 1885. Leopold then founded a
company that brutally exploited the Congo as a gigan-
tic rubber plantation, under the ironic name of the
Congo Free State. But even land grabs that huge could
not compete with the British and French empires; by
1914 Great Britain and France each controlled approxi-
mately five million square miles of Africa.