New Imperialism - The New Imperialism and The Newly Industrialized Countries

The New Imperialism and The Newly Industrialized Countries

Just as the U.S. emerged as one of the world's leading industrial, military and political powers after the Civil War, so would Germany, following its own unification in 1871. Both countries undertook ambitious naval expansion in the 1890s. And just as Germany reacted to economic depression with the adoption of tariff protection in 1879 and colonial expansion in 1884-85, so would the U.S., the landslide election in 1896 of William McKinley, would soon be associated with the high McKinley Tariff of 1890.

United States colonial expansionism had its roots in domestic concerns and economic conditions, much like other newly industrializing nations whose governments sought to accelerate internal development. Advocates of the imperial system also drew upon a tradition of westward expansion over the course of the previous century. Economic depression led some U.S. businessmen and politicians from the mid-1880s to come to the same conclusion as their European counterparts—that industry and capital had exceeded the capacity of existing markets and needed new outlets. The "closing of the Frontier" identified by the 1890 Census report and publicized by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in his 1893 paper The Significance of the Frontier in American History, contributed to fears of constrained natural resource.

Like the Long Depression in Europe, the main features of the U.S. depression included deflation, rural decline, and unemployment, which aggravated the bitter social protests of the "Gilded Age"—the Populist movement, the free-silver crusade, and violent labor disputes such as the Pullman and Homestead strikes.

The Panic of 1893 contributed to the growing mood for expansionism. Influential politicians such as Henry Cabot Lodge, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt advocated a more aggressive foreign policy to pull the United States out of the depression. However, opposition to expansionism was strong and vocal in the United States. Whatever the causes, the result of the 1898 Spanish-American War was that the U.S. came into the possession of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Puerto Rico remains a territory of the United States.

Although U.S. capital investments within the Philippines and Puerto Rico were relatively small (figures that would seemingly detract from the broader economic implications on first glance), "imperialism" for the United States, formalized in 1904 by the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, would also spur its displacement of Britain as the predominant investor in Latin America — a process largely completed by the end of the Great War.

In Germany, Imperial Chancellor Otto von Bismarck revised his initial dislike of colonies (which he had seen as burdensome and useless), partly because he was under pressure for colonial expansion matching that of the other European states, but also under the mistaken notion that Germany's entry into the colonial scramble could press Britain into conceding to broader German strategic ambitions.

Japan's development after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 followed the Western lead in industrialization and militarism, enabling her to gain control of Taiwan in 1895, Korea in 1910 and then a sphere of influence in Manchuria (1905), following the defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. Japan's colonial boom was in part a response to the actions of more established powers, and her expansionism drew on the harnessing of traditional Japanese values to more modern aspirations for great-power status; not until the 1930s was Japan to become a net exporter of capital.