Franco-Prussian War

Crimean War

Bernhard von Bülow’

n “sphere of influence” on

“a national home for the Jewish people.

Take up the White Man’s burden —

such as Henry Labouchère’s poem “The Brown Man’s Burden” (1899) and E. D. Morel’s “The Black Man’s Burden” (1903)

The first phase of European imperialism occurred in the wake of Christopher Columbus’s accidental discovery of the Americas in the late fifteenth century.

Others seem to have been genuinely motivated by racial imperatives or the humanitarian concerns encapsulated in Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “The White Man’s Burden.” Obviously, the desire to take civilization to the benighted corners of the world could dovetail with the work of Christian missionaries.

In 1800, Europeans controlled about 35 percent of the world’s total landmass. On the eve of World War I, Europeans controlled around 85 percent of the earth.

(In every Colonial legislature the Society should attempt to have its members prepared at all times to vote or speak and advocate the closer union of England and the colonies, to crush all disloyalty and every movement for the severance of our Empire.

Added to this the absorption of the greater portion of the world under our rule simply means the end of all wars, at this moment had we not lost America I believe we could have stopped the Russian-Turkish war by merely refusing money and supplies.

Encouraged by the emerging discourse of Social Darwinism, many advocates of imperialism came to see expansion and conquest as both evidence of their racial superiority and a justification for further exploitation.

The first was the period of Catholic exploration and conquest carried out by the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the second was the age of mercantilism, best represented by the Dutch and English commercial colonialism of the seventeenth and eighteenth century.