Rise of The New Imperialism - New Imperialism and The Emerging Empires

New Imperialism and The Emerging Empires

Just as the United States emerged as a great industrial, military and political power after the American Civil War, so would Germany following its own unification in 1871. Both countries undertook ambitious naval expansion in the 1890s. Just as Germany reacted to depression with the adoption of tariff protection in 1879, so would the United States with the landslide election victory of William McKinley, who had risen to national prominence six years earlier with the passage of the McKinley Tariff of 1890. Germany, a leading military power after unification, abandoned free trade and embraced expansionism with its adoption of a tariff in 1879, its acquisition of a colonial empire in 1884-1885, and its building of a powerful navy after 1898-1900.

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

United States expansionism had its roots in domestic concerns and economic conditions, as in other newly industrializing nations where government sought to accelerate internal development. The rapid turn to imperialism in the late nineteenth century can be correlated with the cyclical economic crises that adversely affected many groups.

The Panic of 1893 contributed to the growing mood for expansionism. Like the post-1873 period in Europe (the Long Depression), 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 labour disputes such as the Pullman and Homestead strikes.

The Panic of 1893 contributed to fierce competition over markets, as the long Depression two decades earlier across the Atlantic. 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.

Advocates of empire also drew upon to a tradition of westward expansion over the course of the previous century. The ‘closing of the Frontier’ identified by the 1890 Census report and publicised by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in his 1893 paper The Significance of the Frontier in American History, contributed to fears of constrained natural resource.

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. The U.S. became involved in the War with Spain only after Cubans convinced the U.S. government that Spain was brutalizing them. Whatever the causes, the result of the war was that the U.S. came into the possession of Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. It was, however, only the Philippines that remained, for three decades, as a colonial possession.

While Germany, the United States, Italy, and other more recently industrialised empires were under relatively less pressure to offload surplus capital than the United Kingdom, the emerging empires resorted to protectionism and formal empire in response to the United Kingdom's advantage on international markets.

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), these colonies were strategic outposts for expanding trade with Asia, particularly China and Latin America, enabling the United States to reap the benefit of the ‘Open Door’ in China and ‘Dollar Diplomacy’ in Latin America. The U.S. gradually surpassed the United Kingdom as the leading investor of capital in Latin America and East Asia—a process largely completed by the end of the Great War.

Japan's development after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 followed the Western lead in industrialisation and militarism, enabling the empire to gain control of Korea in 1894 and a sphere of influence in Manchuria (1905) following its defeat of Russia. Japan was responding in part to the actions of more established powers, and her expansionism drew on the harnessing of traditional values to more modern aspirations for great power-status: not until the 1930s was Japan to become a net exporter of capital.