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Locating the Age of Imperialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

Thomas August
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Extract

The publication of Africa and the Victorians in 1961 challenged the prevaling orthodoxy regarding the European scramble for territory during the last decades of the nineteenth century. In it, Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher argued that what had been traditionally viewed as qualitatively new was merely a difference ol degree and not kind. Subsequent studies, especially the work of David Fieldhouse, effectively laid to rest the assumption that new developments in Europe were the cause of the rush for colonies after 1880. And yet historians generally have been reluctant to abandon the ‘age of imperialism’ as an appropriate epithet for late-Victorian Europe. The sheer amount of territory conquered by Europeans in so short a span ol time seemingly compels teachers ol modern history survey courses to view the period 1880–1914 from a traditional perspective and with resort to established nomenclature. Does the historical rubric, ‘age of imperialism’, still have pedagogic value? The answer is a qualified affirmative, provided that its chronological moorings are anchored elsewhere.

Type
Modern imperialism and decolonisation
Information
Itinerario , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , July 1986 , pp. 85 - 98
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 1986

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References

Notes

1 Barratt-Brown, Michael, After Imperialism (London 1963) 111. Between 1870 and 1913 the proportionate share of the empire as placements for capital export hovered between 40% and 50% of the total volume.Google Scholar

2 Sauvy, Alfred, Histoire économique de la France entre les deux guerres, vol. 2 (Paris 1967) 453.cf. alsoGoogle ScholarThobie, Jacques, La France impériale, 1880–1914 (Paris 1982) 64Google Scholar.

3 Pollard, Sidney, The Development of the British Economy 1914–1950 (London 1962) 193.Google Scholar

4 Barratt-Brown, Michael, After Imperialism, 111.Google Scholar

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9 Sauvy, Alfred, Histoire économique de la France, 453.Google Scholar

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26 In addition to the active involvement of the state in colonial development programs, private investors in the United Kingdom were turning increasingly to the empire as placements for capital and at a time when total overseas investment was declining. By the late 1920s the empire attracted 59% of all British foreign investment, compared to the previous high of 47% before World War I. (Cf. Barratt-Brown, Michael, After Imperialism, 111.) The shift toward imperial investment is even more marked in the case of France. Thobie makes the interesting point that before World War I the French version of imperialism (in the Leninist sense of capital export) existed outside the colonial empire: Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Latin America, etc. (Google ScholarThobie, Jacques, La France impériale, 1880–1914, 99). In 1914 French foreign capital in the colonies amounted to a mere four billion gold francs: by 1940 the total had increased over fourfold to 17.5 billion gold francs. The colonial percentage of French foreign investment significantly rose during the same period, from 9% in 1914 to 45% in 1940. (Google ScholarMarseille, Jacques, ‘L'investissement français dans I'mpire colonial. L'enquête du gouvernement de Vichy (1943)’, Revue historique 1974 (no. 512)415–418Google Scholar.