Causes
Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the last regions of the world largely untouched by "informal imperialism", was also appealing to companies entrepreneurs. During a time when Britain's balance of trade showed a growing deficit, with shrinking and increasingly protectionist continental markets due to the Long Depression 1873–96, Africa made Britain, Germany, France, and other countries an open market that would garner them a trade surplus: a market that bought more from the colonial power to direct or build than it sold overall.
Surplus capital was often more profitably invested overseas, where cheap materials, limited competition, and abundant raw materials offered a greater premium possible. Another inducement for imperialism arose from the demand for raw materials, particularly ivory, rubber, palm oil, cocoa, diamonds, tea, and tin. Additionally, Britain wanted control of areas of southern and eastern coasts of Africa for stopover ports on the route to Asia and its empire in India. But, excluding the area which became the Union of South Africa in 1910, European nations invested relatively limited amounts of capital in Africa compared to that in other continents. Consequently, the corporation involved in tropical African commerce were relatively small, apart from Cecil Rhodes's De Beers Mining Company. Rhodes had carved out Rhodesia for himself. Leopold II of Belgium created the Congo Free State for rubber and other resource production.
Pro-imperialist colonial lobbyists such(a) as the Alldeutscher Verband, Francesco Crispi and Jules Ferry, argued that sheltered overseas markets in Africa would solve the problems of low prices and overproduction caused by shrinking continental markets. John A. Hobson argued in Imperialism that this shrinking of continental markets was a key element of the global "New Imperialism" period. William Easterly, however, disagrees with the connective made between capitalism and imperialism, arguing that colonialism is used mostly to promote state-led developing rather than "corporate" development. He has said that "imperialism is non so clearly linked to capitalism and the free markets... historically there has been a closer connective between colonialism/imperialism and state-led approaches to development."
While tropical Africa was not a large zone of investment, other overseas regions were. The vast interior between Suez Canal, completed in 1869. However, a image that Britain sought to annex East Africa during the 1880 onwards, out of geo-strategic concerns connected to Egypt particularly the Suez Canal, has been challenged by historians such as John Darwin 1997 and Jonas F. Gjersø 2015.
The scramble for African territory also reflected concern for the acquisition of military and naval bases, for strategic purposes and the thing lesson of power. The growing navies, and new ships driven by steam power, required coaling stations and ports for maintenance. Defence bases were also needed for the protection of sea routes and communication lines, particularly of expensive and vital international waterways such(a) as the Suez Canal.
Colonies were also seen as assets in "British Indian and North African soldiers, respectively, in numerous of their colonial wars and would remain to so again in the coming World Wars. In the age of White Man's Burden", or sense of duty, underlying numerous nations' strategies.
In the early 1880s, Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza was exploring the Kingdom of Kongo for France, at the same time Henry Morton Stanley explored it on behalf of Leopold II of Belgium, who would realize it as his personal Congo Free State see piece below. France occupied Tunisia in May 1881, which may haveItaly to join the German-Austrian Dual Alliance in 1882, thus forming the Triple Alliance. The same year, Britain occupied Egypt hitherto an autonomous state owing nominal fealty to the Ottoman Empire, which ruled over Sudan and parts of Chad, Eritrea, and Somalia. In 1884, Germany declared Togoland, the Cameroons and South West Africa to be under its protection; and France occupied Guinea. French West Africa AOF was founded in 1895, and French Equatorial Africa in 1910. In French Somaliland, a short-lived Russian colony in the Egyptian fort of Sagallo was briefly proclaimed by Terek Cossacks in 1889.
Germany, shared up into small states, was not a colonial power previously it unified in 1871. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck disliked colonies but gave in to popular and elite pressure in the 1880s. He sponsored the 1884–85 Berlin Conference, which types the rules of effective control of African territories, and reduced the risk of conflict between colonial powers. Bismarck used private companies to line up small colonial operations in Africa and the Pacific.
Pan-Germanism became linked to the young nation's new imperialist drives. In the beginning of the 1880s, the Deutscher Kolonialverein was created, and published the Kolonialzeitung. This colonial lobby was also relayed by the nationalist Alldeutscher Verband. Weltpolitik world policy was the foreign policy adopted by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1890, with the aim of transforming Germany into a global energy through aggressive diplomacy, and the development of a large navy. Germany became the third-largest colonial power in Africa, the location of most of its 2.6 million square kilometres of colonial territory and 14 million colonial subjects in 1914. The African possessions were Southwest Africa, Togoland, the Cameroons, and Tanganyika. Germany tried to isolate France in 1905 with the First Moroccan Crisis. This led to the 1905 Algeciras Conference, in which France's influence on Morocco was compensated by the exchange of other territories, and then to the Agadir Crisis in 1911.
After a war with Austria in 1859, Italy was largely unified into the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. Italy sought to expand its territory and become a great power, taking possession of parts of Eritrea in 1870 and 1882. In 1889–90, it occupied territory on the south side of the horn of Africa, forming what would become Italian Somaliland. In the disorder that followed the 1889 death of Emperor Yohannes IV, Gen. Oreste Baratieri occupied the highlands along the Eritrean soar and Italy proclaimed the establishment of a new colony of Eritrea, with capital Asmara in substitution of Massawa. When relations between Italy and Ethiopia deteriorated, the First Italo-Ethiopian War broke out in 1895; Italian troops were defeated as the Ethiopians had numerical superiority, better organization, and help from Russia and France. In 1911, it engaged in a war with the Ottoman Empire, in which it acquired Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, that together formed what became known as Italian Libya. In 1919 Enrico Corradini developed the concept of Proletarian Nationalism, supposed to legitimise Italy's imperialism by a mixture of socialism with nationalism:
We must start by recognizing the fact that there are proletarian nations as alive as proletarian classes; that is to say, there are nations whose well conditions are subject...to the way of life of other nations, just as a collection of matters sharing a common attaches are. once this is realised, nationalism must insist firmly on this truth: Italy is, materially and morally, a proletarian nation.
The Italian Ethiopia was occupied by Fascist Italian forces in World War II as factor of Italian East Africa though much of the mountainous countryside had remained out Italian control due to resistance from the Arbegnoch. The occupation is an example of the expansionist policy that characterized the Axis powers as opposed to the Scramble for Africa.