I. Unit Framing: The Industrial World Goes Abroad

Between roughly 1870 and 1914, a small number of industrial nations seized political and economic control over most of the rest of the world. By 1914 about 84% of the Earth's land surface was under the direct or indirect control of European powers, the United States, or Japan. This was a transformation of the global order on a scale comparable to the Industrial Revolution itself, and it was made possible by it.

Imperialism in this period was not new. European powers had been building empires since 1492. What was new about the post-1870 wave (often called the New Imperialism) was its speed, its global reach, and the technological gap between imperial powers and the societies they conquered. Where seventeenth-century European traders had to negotiate with powerful Asian and African states from a position of relative weakness, late nineteenth-century European armies arrived with machine guns, steamships, telegraphs, and quinine, and could simply impose their terms.

Strategic insight: The most important conceptual move in this unit is to see imperialism as the direct extension of industrialization. Industrial economies needed raw materials they did not have (cotton, rubber, palm oil, diamonds, copper, oil). They needed markets to absorb their factory output. They needed investment opportunities for their accumulated capital. And the same industrial technology (steamships, machine guns, telegraphs) that produced these needs also gave them the tools to satisfy them by force. Once Maria sees imperialism as the global expression of industrial capitalism, everything else in the unit follows.

Essential question for this unit: What motivated the New Imperialism, how did imperial powers exercise control, and what were its consequences for both the colonizers and the colonized?