Questions to Ask About Imperialism

Why ask it

Imperialism is one state extending its power over other peoples and lands, by conquest, treaty or economic pressure. Colonialism is the narrower practice of settling or directly governing a territory, so a country could be under an empire's thumb without being anyone's colony, as China was after the Opium Wars. Get the group to agree on both words before the discussion starts, or people will argue past each other.

Why ask it

The usual list is raw materials and markets for industrial economies, rivalry between states, ports and coaling stations for navies, missionary zeal and national pride. A list is where a weak answer stops. Rank the motives for one particular case, such as Britain in Egypt or Germany in East Africa, and say what would have happened with the top one taken away.

Why ask it

Factories wanted cotton, rubber, palm oil, tin and copper, and buyers for what they made. The same industry supplied steamships, railways, the telegraph, quinine against malaria and the machine gun, which is why the African interior was taken within a few decades after centuries of Europeans keeping to the coast. Which came first is the argument to have: the appetite, or the tools that made feeding it cheap.

Why ask it

In roughly thirty years after 1880, European powers claimed almost the whole continent, leaving only Ethiopia and Liberia independent. At Berlin in 1884 and 1885, fourteen powers invited by Bismarck agreed on how they would recognize one another's claims, including free trade on the Congo and a rule that a claim needed 'effective occupation', and no African ruler was invited. A common error is to say the conference drew the map, when most borders came from later treaties between the powers, so ask what the meeting did and did not settle.

Why ask it

Rome, the Mongols, the Ottomans, the Mughals, the Qing and the Aztecs all ruled over conquered peoples, so empire itself was old. Textbooks still call the decades after 1870 the 'new imperialism', and what students can argue about is how new it was: industrial weapons, government from an ocean away, and a theory of race for ranking the conquered. Put it early, since it keeps the unit from becoming a story about Europe alone.

Why ask it

The East India Company was chartered in 1600 to trade, and after its victory at Plassey in 1757 it collected taxes in Bengal, kept an army of its own and came to govern much of the subcontinent until 1858. Chartered companies did the early work of empire elsewhere too, from the Dutch in Indonesia to Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company. The question underneath is who answers for a conquest carried out by shareholders, and at what point a government steps in to take it over.

Why ask it

Britain went to war in 1839 after Chinese officials seized and destroyed opium that British merchants were smuggling in, and the treaty of 1842 handed over Hong Kong, opened ports to trade and set the pattern of 'unequal treaties' that other powers copied. This is the case for discussing empire by gunboat and trade agreement. The Boxer Uprising of 1900 makes a natural second half of the lesson.

Why ask it

Commodore Perry's warships forced Japan to open its ports in the 1850s, and the Meiji government answered by industrializing and building a modern army and navy. Japan then took Taiwan in 1895 and annexed Korea in 1910. Raise it when someone says imperialism was a European habit, and follow up by asking whether Japan was copying the West or acting on reasons of its own.

Why ask it

After the war with Spain the United States held the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam, and it annexed Hawaii the same year. Supporters spoke of naval bases, the China trade and a duty to 'uplift', while the Anti-Imperialist League, with Mark Twain among its members, said a republic born in revolt against an empire had no business ruling colonies. Read one speech from each side and see which arguments are still in circulation.

Why ask it

Ethiopia beat an Italian army at Adwa in 1896, Siam (now Thailand) gave up territory at its edges and sat usefully between British Burma and French Indochina, and Liberia had ties to the United States. Each case shows what conquest depended on: weapons, diplomacy and the rivalries of the powers themselves. The harder follow-up is what 'independent' was worth when the loans and treaties were still written elsewhere.

Why ask it

Imperialism is the I in the MAIN acronym many classes learn, beside militarism, alliances and nationalism. The Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911 and the naval race count for the claim. Against it, the powers had settled most of their colonial quarrels by 1914 and the war began in the Balkans, so have each student argue the side they find less convincing.

Why ask it

Expect four arguments: a civilizing mission, the spread of Christianity, the supposed blessings of trade, and a claim of racial superiority dressed up as science. Write them on the board in the words of the time, then ask who each was aimed at: voters at home, rival powers or the colonized. Reading an argument closely is not the same as accepting it, and it helps to say so aloud.

Why ask it

Kipling published the poem in 1899, addressed to the United States as it took the Philippines, and it presents empire as a thankless duty. Parodies and replies appeared within weeks, 'The Black Man's Burden' among them. Set the poem beside one reply and students see that the case against empire is as old as the case for it.

Why ask it

It borrowed Darwin's idea of natural selection and applied it to nations and races, so that conquest could be described as nature taking its course. The biology said nothing about who ought to rule whom. What to draw out is the convenience, because a theory that tells the powerful their power is deserved will never be short of readers.

Why ask it

Missions often arrived ahead of the flag and then called for protection that brought the flag after them, and mission schools taught in the colonizer's language. Missionaries also reported abuses, as several did from the Congo, and their schools educated many later nationalist leaders. Accept 'both' only from a student who can give an example on each side.

Why ask it

Look at what an ordinary person would have seen: wall maps with the empire colored in, adventure stories, advertisements for tea and soap, and world's fairs that put colonized people on show in mock villages. Bring one image and have the group describe it before anyone interprets it. Then ask who at home was not persuaded, and how we would know.

Why ask it

Names to find: Dadabhai Naoroji, who argued in Parliament and in print that Britain was draining India's wealth; Georges Clemenceau, who attacked Jules Ferry's talk of 'superior races' in the French parliament in 1885; and the Aborigines' Rights Protection Society, formed in the Gold Coast in 1897 to stop a colonial land bill. The question takes away the excuse that nobody back then could have known better.

Why ask it

Leopold II spoke in public of ending the slave trade in central Africa while writing privately that he wanted 'a slice of this magnificent African cake', and yet plenty of district officers and missionaries plainly meant what they said. Where you can, compare a public speech with a private letter by the same person. Then ask whether sincerity changed anything for the people on the receiving end.

Why ask it

Strong answers get specific: a new tax that had to be paid in coin, a court that worked in a foreign language, land reclassified as belonging to the crown, a chief appointed over people who had never had one. Have each student pick one colony and one decade. 'They lost their freedom' is true and tells you nothing about how.

Why ask it

Direct rule put European officials in charge down to the district, which was the French tendency. Indirect rule worked through local rulers, as the British did in northern Nigeria and the Indian princely states. In settler colonies such as Algeria, Kenya, Australia and southern Africa, Europeans came to stay and took the land itself, so compare who lost land and who kept some authority under each.

Why ask it

A hut tax or head tax payable only in coin meant a farmer had to grow a crop for sale or leave home to earn wages at a mine or plantation. Some colonies also required unpaid labor on roads and railways. Here is how an empire found workers without using the word slavery, and the discussion should turn on how much choice was left.

Why ask it

From 1885 the Congo was the personal possession of Belgium's king, and villages were set rubber quotas that armed men enforced by taking hostages, mutilating and killing. Historians' estimates of the population loss run into the millions, though no census exists to fix the figure. Word got out through missionaries' photographs, the shipping clerk E. D. Morel and the British consul Roger Casement's report, and Belgium took the colony from the king in 1908.

Why ask it

Trading companies, mine owners, shipping lines, planters and bondholders did well, and so did officers and officials with careers to make. Whether the average taxpayer gained is an old dispute: J. A. Hobson argued in 1902 that empire served investors while the public paid for the armies and navies, and historians still disagree. A sharp answer separates who collected the profit from who paid the bill.

Why ask it

Land that had fed its farmers was turned over to a single export such as cotton, rubber, cocoa, sugar, tea or peanuts, and railways ran from the mine or plantation to the port, seldom between towns. Hand out a colonial railway map and ask what it was built to move. Keep the map, because it is evidence again when you reach the Legacy group.

Why ask it

Severe famines struck in the 1870s and 1890s, and again in Bengal in 1943. Drought or wartime disruption set them off, and the argument is over what officials did next: grain exports that continued, thin relief, and a conviction that the market should be left alone. The death tolls are estimates that differ by source, so require students to say where their number comes from.

Why ask it

Usually a small share of children, taught in the colonizer's language, with the empire's history in place of their own. Macaulay's minute on Indian education in 1835 said outright that the aim was a class of interpreters between the rulers and the ruled. The irony worth a few minutes is that those schools turned out many of the lawyers and teachers who later led independence movements.

Why ask it

People did ride the trains and use the clinics and courts, so the question cannot be waved away. Push on who each was built for, who paid through taxes and labor, and what the same society might have built unruled, given that Japan and Siam laid railways without being colonized.

Why ask it

Empires were thinly staffed and could not have run without them: most of the soldiers in British India were Indian. Motives ran from pay and promotion to settling a score with a rival neighbor, or a judgment that fighting would only get people killed. Hold off on the word 'traitor' until students have listed what the alternatives were.

Why ask it

It depends heavily on the place. In parts of West Africa women who had held political offices or run the markets lost standing because officials would deal only with men, and in 1929 Igbo women in southeastern Nigeria led a mass protest against taxation and the chiefs the British had appointed. Send students looking for women's own testimony, which is far scarcer than what officials wrote about them.

Why ask it

Tax strikes, boycotts, petitions, newspapers, moving out of the government's reach, churches that broke from the missions, and the quiet kind: working slowly and telling the census taker as little as possible. Armed risings get the chapter headings because they left the most paperwork. Set students to find one example in which nobody picked up a weapon.

Why ask it

Enslaved people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue rose in 1791, defeated French, Spanish and British forces, and declared the independent state of Haiti in 1804. It showed that a colony could be lost to the very people held in it, and in 1825 France made Haiti agree to pay an indemnity in return for recognition. Since it falls before the years most units cover, it is a good way to ask when the story of resistance ought to begin.

Why ask it

Indian soldiers of the East India Company's army mutinied at Meerut in May 1857, the revolt spread across northern India with civilian support, and after it was put down the British Crown took over from the Company in 1858. British writers long called it the Sepoy Mutiny, and many Indians call it the First War of Independence. Each name is an argument about who was fighting and for what, so check which one your textbook uses.

Why ask it

Filipino forces led by Emilio Aguinaldo had declared independence from Spain in June 1898, and when the United States kept the islands, war began in February 1899 and was declared over in 1902. The fighting, with the disease and hunger that came with it, killed far more Filipino civilians than soldiers, in numbers that differ widely by source. Pair it with the 1898 question, so the speeches for and against annexation are read beside what the war looked like on the ground.

Why ask it

Firepower is the short answer, as at Omdurman in 1898, along with the empires' skill at recruiting one people against another. Yet Samori Touré's long war in West Africa, the Zulu victory at Isandlwana in 1879 and the Maji Maji rising in German East Africa raised the price of rule and became founding stories for later nationalists. The discussion is about how a lost war can still count.

Why ask it

Boycotts of British cloth, the Salt March of 1930 and mass refusal to cooperate made India hard to govern and harder to defend in front of the world's press. A complete answer includes the limits: independence came in 1947, after a world war had drained Britain, and with a partition that Gandhi opposed. A useful challenge is whether nonviolence would have worked against a ruler less sensitive to opinion at home.

Why ask it

Nehru studied at Cambridge, Ho Chi Minh spent years in Paris, Nkrumah studied in the United States and London, and thousands of colonial soldiers came home from two world wars having seen Europeans afraid. They turned the empires' stated ideals of liberty and self-government on the people who had taught them. Follow up with which ideas these leaders took from their own traditions.

Why ask it

Most of the surviving records were written by the officials doing the suppressing, who called risings 'disturbances' and their leaders 'fanatics'. Oral histories, songs, court testimony and later memoirs give the other side, with gaps of their own. For an essay, make students name the author and the intended reader of every source they quote.

Why ask it

Colonies sent millions of soldiers and laborers and were promised reforms that mostly did not arrive, and after 1918 the German and Ottoman territories were shared out among the victors as League of Nations mandates. The second war left Britain and France deep in debt, saw Japan overrun European colonies across Southeast Asia, and produced an Atlantic Charter whose words about self-government colonized readers took literally. Put it to a vote: which did more damage, the cost or the lost air of invincibility?

Why ask it

Good answers combine pressure from below, in mass nationalist parties and strikes, with empty treasuries in Europe, two superpowers that each opposed the old empires for reasons of their own, and the example India set in 1947. Seventeen African countries became independent in 1960 alone. Try asking which factor a student would remove to delay the whole process by a generation.

Why ask it

Compare Ghana in 1957, reached through elections and talks, with Algeria, where the war of 1954 to 1962 killed hundreds of thousands of people. The pattern to look for is settlers: where many Europeans had made homes and owned the land, as in Algeria, Kenya and Rhodesia, the colonial power or the settlers themselves fought to stay. Then test the pattern against a case that does not fit it, such as Vietnam.

Why ask it

British India was divided into India and Pakistan along a line drawn in a matter of weeks by Cyril Radcliffe, a lawyer who had never been to India. More than ten million people were uprooted, and estimates of the dead range from a few hundred thousand to two million. Blame is argued between British haste, the Congress and Muslim League leaderships and violence on the ground, and students with family from the region may carry accounts of their own, so agree how to listen before you begin.

Why ask it

Egypt's President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Britain, France and Israel invaded, and pressure from the United States, including on Britain's currency, forced them out within weeks. Many historians treat it as the moment Britain's standing as a world power visibly ended. Set it beside 1882, when Britain occupied Egypt and no other power could make it leave, and ask what had changed in between.

Why ask it

New states were courted and leaned on by Washington and Moscow, and wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola and the Congo were fought partly as contests between the two. The Bandung Conference of 1955 was an attempt by Asian and African leaders to stay out of both camps. The question underneath is whether a country choosing between two patrons was free in the sense its founders had meant.

Why ask it

Kwame Nkrumah's word for it, in 1965, was neo-colonialism: a flag and an anthem, with the economy still steered from abroad through debt, trade terms, foreign companies and military bases. Critics reply that blaming outsiders lets governments since independence off too lightly. Hold this one until late in the unit, when the group has enough cases to argue from.

Why ask it

Lines drawn in European capitals put rival peoples inside one state and split others among several, and the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 and the ruler-straight borders of Africa are the usual examples. Beware the easy version: in 1964 African governments chose to keep the borders they had inherited, judging that redrawing them would be more dangerous. A strong answer traces one present-day dispute to a named treaty and then says what else fed it.

Why ask it

Arguments to weigh: economies built to export one or two raw materials, profits and skilled posts kept in foreign hands, institutions designed for extraction, and then the decisions made since independence, good and bad. Economists and historians disagree about the weights, and South Korea, Singapore and Botswana are cases a student should be ready to explain. No single cause should carry the whole essay.

Why ask it

English, French, Spanish and Portuguese are official languages across much of Africa, Asia and the Americas, and Christianity traveled with the missions. The racial rankings invented to justify rule have outlasted the empires that needed them. A question to bring it home: what language is your own schooling in, and how did that come about?

Why ask it

The Benin Bronzes, seized by a British military expedition in 1897 and now spread across museums in several countries, are the standard case, and some have been handed back in recent years. Arguments for keeping such objects cite lawful purchase, conservation and wider audiences, while arguments for return start from how they were acquired. It suits a structured debate because the facts of the taking are well documented.

Why ask it

Governments have answered differently: Germany acknowledged in 2021 that its forces committed genocide against the Herero and Nama in what is now Namibia, and Britain agreed in 2013 to compensate Kenyans tortured during the Mau Mau emergency. The discussion goes better once students separate three things, admitting what happened, apologizing and paying. Then ask who would pay, who would receive and who decides when it is enough.

Why ask it

Compare a textbook chapter, a statue or a national holiday from each side. The arguments over statues of Cecil Rhodes and Leopold II show that the memory is still being negotiated. Ask what each version leaves out, and who chose what went into it.

Why ask it

Students will bring up overseas military bases, foreign loans for ports and railways, and technology firms. Make them test each example against the definition agreed at the start: is there control over another people's government or economy, and can that people say no? The testing teaches more than whatever verdict the class reaches.

Why ask it

Street names, a regiment's memorial, tea, sugar, curry, the route a grandparent migrated by, the language spoken at home. It is a low-stakes way in for students who think the subject is far away. Set it as homework before the first lesson, or come back to it as a closing reflection.