The long 19th century.

Imperialists justified their conquests with a stack of ideologies. Social Darwinism (a misapplication of evolutionary theory) claimed that “fitter” peoples should rule “weaker” ones. The civilizing mission (mission civilisatrice) framed colonialism as moral uplift. Kipling’s “White Man’s Burden” (1899) made it poetic. Christian missionaries believed they were saving souls. Economic theories called colonies necessary outlets for industrial overproduction. None of these were honest. All of them were widely believed.

The Berlin Conference (1884–85) carved Africa into European spheres without African input. By 1914, only Ethiopia and Liberia remained independent. France took most of West and Central Africa; Britain took the east-to-Egypt corridor; Belgium took Congo (with extreme brutality under Leopold II). In Asia: Britain ran India directly after 1858; France held Indochina; the Netherlands held Indonesia; multiple powers carved out treaty ports in China. Japan industrialized fast enough to become an imperialist itself, taking Taiwan (1895) and Korea (1910).

Colonized peoples resisted in multiple registers. Armed resistance: Maori Wars (NZ), the Sepoy Rebellion (India 1857), Mahdist War (Sudan), Zulu wars, Boxer Rebellion (China 1899–1901), Herero genocide (German Southwest Africa). Reform from above: Tanzimat reforms in the Ottoman Empire; Self-Strengthening Movement in late Qing China; Meiji Japan’s wholesale modernization. Cultural-political mobilization: Indian National Congress (1885), African National Congress (1912). Each response taught lessons that fed into 20th-century independence movements.

The global economy by 1900 was structurally lopsided. Industrial powers (Britain, France, Germany, U.S., Japan) made manufactures from raw materials extracted from colonies and semi-colonies (rubber from Congo, cotton from Egypt and India, sugar from the Caribbean, tin from Bolivia, oil from Persia). Free-trade ideology served the industrialized; tariffs and infant-industry protection helped late-comers. Periphery nations were locked into producing one or two commodities, vulnerable to price swings—a structural problem we still call “underdevelopment.”

Some imperialism didn’t require formal colonies—just economic dominance. China after the Opium Wars: foreign-controlled treaty ports, foreign-managed customs, but no single colonial master. Latin America after independence: U.S. and British capital ran railroads, mines, banana plantations (Honduras, Guatemala). Egypt after the Suez Canal: indebted to British financiers and eventually occupied. Argentina, Brazil, Mexico were independent but financially dependent. Economic imperialism was harder for nationalists to fight than formal colonialism—you can’t expel a bondholder.

About 50 million Europeans emigrated between 1840 and 1914—Irish during the famine, Italians and Eastern Europeans for work, Jews fleeing pogroms. Roughly 30 million Indians and Chinese crossed oceans as indentured laborers. Causes: industrialization’s push (peasants displaced from land), capitalism’s pull (factory and plantation jobs), state policy (favorable U.S. immigration before the 1880s), and persecution (pogroms, famine). Steam transportation made it cheap and survivable for the first time in history.

Migration built diasporic communities: Chinatowns in San Francisco and Vancouver, Little Italies in New York and Buenos Aires, Indian merchants in East Africa and the Caribbean. It built remittance economies—home-country families lived on money sent back. It also provoked racist backlash: the Chinese Exclusion Act (U.S. 1882), Australian White Australia policy, Canadian head taxes. Migrants often took the lowest-paying, most dangerous jobs (railway construction, mining, plantation labor). Their labor built modern infrastructure while their citizenship rights remained provisional.

On causation FRQs, the chain matters. Industrialization → demand for raw materials and markets → imperialism. Industrialization → urban poverty and dislocation → mass migration. Industrialization → military technology gap → Western dominance. Industrialization → labor concentration → unions, socialism, Marx. Industrialization → wealth → museum culture, mass literacy, public health. The exam rewards CONNECTING specific industrial developments to specific consequences with specific evidence.