Democracy and nationalism. Industrialization. Reforms that led to women’s suffrage, labor laws, and schooling for children. So far, every major topic we have explored in the Long Nineteenth Century is something that still exists today. In this unit, we turn to empire, a big story in the Long Nineteenth Century. One can argue that this topic is a bit different than the others because there are no actual empires left today. Empire seems to have been a dead-end in a world that ended up choosing a different political model, the nation-state.

But–as historians often ask after statements like that–is this true? Was empire really just a dead end, or does a version of it persist today? Can we use the study of the empire to understand the present? To find an answer, we will need to start by studying what an empire is. So, in this unit, we ask: How were modern empires created, administered, and contested in the Long Nineteenth Century, and how did they help to create the world we live in today?

The system of imperialism

To understand the impact of different empires that existed during the Long Nineteenth Century, we must seek to understand three topics. The first is the how and why of “imperialism.” We know that industrialized countries like Britain, France, and the United States built and ruled empires in this period. But why then? What motivated the governments and their people? What made it possible for them, at that particular point in history, to expand their authority so far around the globe?

Of course, you can probably answer a lot of those questions right now, thanks to previous units. You’ll remember how nationalism drove some countries to compete with each other, and one way to compete was by seizing overseas territory. Ironically, reformers–who in theory are the ones trying to make things better– sometimes actually drove imperialism. They argued that taking territories was OK, or even desirable, if the goal was to (in their words) “civilize and improve” their populations. Unfortunately, their idea of improvement was often less “how can we help?” and more “how can we change you to fit our needs?” Imperialist claims of racial superiority were also becoming powerful in this era, so colonial subjects were often treated as racially inferior.

Possibly the most important factor in the construction of new and larger empires in this period was industrialization. In the first place, industrialized countries were now able to conquer and rule other societies, especially those that were not industrialized. Machine guns and artillery obviously played a role, but it wasn’t just about weapons. When only one side has steamships, railroads, telegraphs, and new medicines, they have a great advantage occupying and ruling whoever doesn’t have those tools.

Industrialization also provided one of the motives for empire-building. Industry needed raw material to turn into goods, and it needed markets in which to sell them. Colonies promised to provide both. The minerals of a colony’s land could be mined, its forests cut, its fish caught–all to feed the factories of the empire. Then, those factories could produce goods that could be sold to people in the colonies, who would have little choice except to buy them.

All of these motives came together in what we call imperialism. Imperialism was the set of ideas and actions that people in some societies supported in the conquest and rule of people in other societies, who were treated unevenly. It was a set of ideas and actions that were especially relevant in a few industrialized societies that built empires, but that also came to be shared quite widely during this era.

Colonialism and response

The second topic we need to examine looks at it from another perspective: how did people in the colonies experience this imperial rule? As we will see in the second half of this unit, the inhabitants of the colonies were not citizens. They were subjects, and as such had few or no political rights. Their experiences varied from place to place and from person to person. We will see that colonial lives in Ghana, in India, and in China, for example, were slightly different. But colonial subjects everywhere had enough in common that their shared set of experiences can be called colonialism.

Colonialism was based, first, on a sense of difference. This difference was often expressed in the language of racism, but it didn’t end there. Imperialism told the people who ruled colonies that they were better than the people they ruled, so they did not need to treat colonial subjects as equals. They could withhold the rights they enjoyed from others. This sense of ruling over “inferior” people also meant that colonialism was often quite violent.

Colonial subjects did not just accept this treatment, of course. For most people, however, constant resistance was too difficult. Some people found ways to negotiate for slightly better treatment. Others believed they could “catch up” by imitating some parts of European society. Most people just tried to survive in an oppressive system, as people do.

Many colonial subjects did actively resist colonial rule, with strategies including military organization and campaigns. But active resistance is pretty difficult when you’re fighting an industrialized, highly armed occupier who prevents its subjects from coming together in solidarity. Thus, many people in the colonies tried other, more hidden forms of resistance. Some of these, conducted in secret, included working slowly or telling lies or stealing from the colonial government. Other people thought up philosophies of resistance that would help them to organize in the future.

The third topic we need to examine while studying imperialism isn’t really covered here but will come up later in the course. It is the question of how people in the colonies eventually organized to overthrow this system and their degree of success. We already know, of course, that formal empire did not last into the twenty-first century. There are a few small colonies still around, but almost everyone in the world lives in a nation-state. So somehow, people in the colonies managed to overthrow those empires. How and when they did it can help us to think through strategies that different people around the world might use today when they are seeking political rights and liberties.

Does that mean that all legacies of empire are really gone from the world? A look at international economics shows that the parts of the world that were formerly colonized are more likely to still be impoverished today. Ideas that dominated imperial thought, like racism, or the claim of superiority by industrialized societies, are still around and often quite powerful. In many places, though formal empires have ended, the economic structures of colonialism to some degree remain. So we have to continue to think of those legacies of imperialism and colonialism as we try to understand our own world.