Abstract
A conspicuous feature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the way in which several of the Western European countries such as France, Britain, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium took control of large parts of the world. Thus, at its peak, the British Empire alone consisted of more than a fifth of the world’s land surface. Some states such as France and Britain had had imperial ventures before, though Germany, as effectively a new state, was a newcomer. However, the burst in the nineteenth century was remarkable. There is little that remains today of formal empire in the sense of territory directly ruled by a foreign power. However, there are those who hold that empires exist in reality as much as before but that now the imperial control is more insidious and circumspect. Even if this is not so, recent imperial history has left such a mark on the present world that an awareness of it is necessary in order to understand present structures.
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Further Reading and Sources
Mentioned already in Chapter 4, Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Abacus, 1994), provides a lot of information and an always fascinating analysis of imperial issues both before and after independence from the perspective of an open-minded and scholarly Marxist.
Charles Reynolds gives a very interesting account of different ways of explaining imperialism in Modes of Imperialism (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1981). The classic statement of ‘structural imperialism’ is by Johan Galtung, ‘A Structural Theory of Imperialism’, Journal of Peace Research, vol. 8, no. 2 (1971) pp. 81–117.
The expansion of Europe is discussed in W. D. Smith, European Imperialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Nelson-Hall, 1982),
and in some essays edited by H. M. Wright, The ‘New Imperialism’: An Analysis of Late Nineteenth Century Expansion (London: Heath, 1964).
Jack Gallagher, Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), is interesting and controversial and the source of some figures about investment flows.
Dates of annexations and so on of colonies are taken from James Joll, The Origins of the First World War (London: Longman, 1992, 2nd edn).
Figures for the Indian population are taken from Robert M. Cassen, India: Population, Economy, Society (London: Macmillan, 1978).
Other information about India comes from E. Thompson and G. T. Garrett. The Fulfilment of British Rule in India (Allahabad: Central Book Depot, 1962),
and R. Gopal British Rule in India: An Assessment (London: Asia Publishing, 1963) (Printed in Delhi).
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© 1998 Michael Nicholson
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Nicholson, M. (1998). Imperialism, Post-Imperialism and Neo-Imperialism. In: International Relations. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26481-0_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26481-0_5
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