In 1800 Europeans occupied or controlled 35 per cent of the world's land. By 1878 this had expanded to 67 per cent, largely due to the dominance of the British Empire, which in the middle decades of the nineteenth century marched steadily forward at the rate of several hundred thousand square miles a year. The pace and comprehensiveness of the colonization of the world increased after 1870, as France and the newly created nation-states – which included Germany, Italy, Belgium and arguably post-civil war United States – and, from the 1890s Japan, extended their political and economic power for colonial purposes. The result was that between 1876 and 1915 an additional ‘one-quarter of the globe's land surface was distributed or redistributed as colonies among a half dozen states’.

This quantitative expansion itself reflected a crucial qualitative change in the form taken by colonial exploitation in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Direct occupation and rule tended to replace the more informal modes that characterized earlier forms of colonialism, the precedents in the Caribbean sugar colonies of the eighteenth century and Australia in the early nineteenth century notwithstanding. The logic that drove this new form of colonialism lay in the rise of industrial capitalism in new nations, especially Germany and France. Unable to sustain itself from within national borders, industrialization automatically increased global competition for markets and resources.