The era of European losses in the Americas was followed by a significant expansion of holdings in Asia, Africa, and Oceania, most visibly and highly publicized from the 1870s onward, when a scramble for still-unclaimed territories took place.
Between 1878 and 1913 European countries claimed 8.6 million square miles, roughly one- sixth of the earth’s land surface.1 But it would be a mistake to ignore developments during the first half century of phase 3.
Between 1824 and 1870 Europeans acquired roughly 5 million square miles, with notable advances in Africa’s southern, northern, and western extremities (South Africa, Algeria, Senegal), in India (Punjab, for example), Australia and New Zealand, and Cochinchina (southern Vietnam). Prior to 1870, moreover, Britain and France sent military expeditions to China that resulted in numerous foreign-controlled enclaves, the so-called treaty ports, within that vast independent empire. Phase 3 lasted for a full nine decades, not four.Though phases 1 and 3 are similar in their expansionist direction, they differ in the way Europe’s presence was felt abroad. During the earlier phase Europeans created formal empires in the New World while exerting influence informally and indirectly on Old World hinterlands through trading enclaves. During phase 3 the pattern was reversed. In the Old World Europeans used coastal enclaves as staging areas to penetrate continental interiors. Informal economic and cultural influence in the hinterland was no longer deemed sufficient; it had to be reinforced by political control. Meanwhile, in the New World Europeans seemed content to accept loss of control. France’s halfhearted, hapless effort to conquer Mexico in the early 1860s, with an army loyal to Austria’s Emperor Maximilian, is notable not only because it failed but also because the attempt was so unusual. The challenge in the Americas was not to resurrect colonialism but to devise new techniques of postcolonial influence. Europeans came to value influence in the New World at the very time they found it inadequate in the Old.
The event marking the start of phase 3 was the first Anglo-Burmese War, begun in 1824 and concluded two years later.
The war pitted British East India Company forces against the army of the Burmese king, Bagyidaw. In some respects it was simply the latest in a series of conflicts between the chartered company and indigenous rulers threatened by the company’s political and economic ambitions. But its location and the manner in which it was fought pointed toward a new era in relations between Europeans and peoples in other continents.The Treaty of Yandibaw that concluded the war ceded to the British victors Assam, Manipur, Arakan, and Tenasserim. By acquiring the first two Britain extended its hold from the coastal and Gangetic delta areas of Bengal deep into the mountainous interior of Asia. By acquiring the latter two Britain advanced into Southeast Asia.2 The war thus set the leading metropole on an expansionist path well outside its traditional South Asian domain. During the next nine decades other Old World areas previously thought of as being off-limits would likewise become takeover targets.
The Anglo-Burmese War was also the first in which a technology linked to the Industrial Revolution decisively influenced distant events. King Bagyidaw initiated hostilities, confident his army would overwhelm the company’s British officers and Indian troops. At first the British seemed to do their best to oblige the king. In one of the worst-managed wars in British history, fifteen thousand of the forty thousand troops were lost, mostly to diseases contracted while soldiers were quartered for months in Rangoon with nothing to do. What transformed an otherwise costly defeat into victory was the arrival of three steamships. One of these, the Diana, was initially assigned by the East India Company as a tugboat in Calcutta harbor but then pressed into service on Burma’s Irrawaddy River. There, as Daniel Headrick notes, it “towed sailing ships into position, transported troops, reconnoitered advance positions, and bombarded Burmese fortifications with her swivel guns and Congreve rockets.
The most important contribution of the Diana was to capture the Burmese praus, or war boats.... By February 1826 the Diana, which the Burmese called ‘fire devil,’ had pushed with the British fleet up to Amarapura, over 400 miles upriver. The King of Burma, seeing his capital [at Ava] threatened, sued for peace.”3The Diana was more than a tugboat. It was also a gunboat. The ship’s speed, its reliance on steam engines to advance steadily against unfavorable currents, and the destruction its guns wreaked on both sides of the river gave the East India Company a decisive advantage over Bagyidaw’s army. The Burmese were perhaps the first nonEuropeans—but certainly not the last—to experience the political implications of the Industrial Revolution’s technological advances.
An event marking the end of phase 3 was the Treaty of Fez (1912) between France and Abdul-Hafiz, sultan of Morocco, declaring a French protectorate over the territory. The Sherifian dynasty was retained, but France took control of Morocco’s domestic and foreign affairs. The treaty capped lengthy efforts by France to control the northwest African territory, thereby reinforcing its rule in neighboring Algeria and West Africa.4 Morocco was the last sizable European acquisition before World War I. Creation of the protectorate brings the story of overseas empires full circle. Phase 3 concluded where phase i began. Ceuta and Fez are separated by almost five hundred years—but only one hundred fifty miles.
The complex diplomatic maneuvers preceding Morocco’s takeover constituted the final round of Europe’s scramble for what remained of independent Africa. The scramble had its parallels with phase i, in particular the way intense competition among several metropoles stimulated each of them to claim more territory. But events leading up to the Treaty of Fez also showed how phase 3 differed from phase 1. Novel features included concentration on empire building in the Old World; entry of new powers with imperial ambitions (Germany and Italy); the prominence of diplomatic bargaining and the greatly reduced role of warfare as methods of resolving disputes among metropoles; and the considerable part that financial credit- extended by European banks in this case to the heavily indebted sultan—played in extending Europe’s reach.
To these and other features of phase 3 I now turn. The chapter’s structure parallels the discussion of phase 1 in order to highlight similarities and differences between the expansionist phases. As noted in chapter 2, one can use the similarities to construct a temporally comprehensive theory of European imperialism, while one can use differences to discard insufficiently comprehensive explanations.
Phase 3 was not an era of maritime exploration, if only because the discovery of the seas had already taken place. Europeans were less interested in finding new routes across oceans than in traveling more rapidly, safely, and predictably over familiar sea routes. The steam engine replaced the sail; iron and then steel replaced wood as the basic material in ship construction. Carrying capacity was enormously expanded, while refrigeration and canning increased the variety of transportable goods. Innovations in ocean transportation had the figurative if not literal effect of shrinking the globe.
Exploration in phase 3 was directed primarily at the poorly charted interiors of known continents. Heinrich Barth, Richard Burton, Rene Caillie, Mary Kingsley, David Livingstone, Jean-Baptiste Marchand, Gustav Nachtigal, Serpa Pinto, John Hanning Speke, Henry Morton Stanley, and Joseph Thomson in Africa, Francois Garnier and Francis Younghusband in Asia, Charles Sturt and Thomas Mitchell in Australia did for inland geography what Columbus, da Gama, Magellan, Drake, and Cook had done earlier in mapping the oceans and continental coastlines. Of special interest to many explorers were the origin and course of rivers that might facilitate inland penetration by European traders, missionaries, and soldiers. Among these were the White and Blue Nile, Congo, Zambezi, Niger, Salween, and Mekong.
Phase 3 was marked by a railway construction boom that spread rapidly from Europe to other continents. Railroads pushed inland from coastal ports, opening up areas hitherto unconnected to the world market and making it easier for outsiders to govern hinterlands back of phase i Old World enclaves. In Jan Morris’s evocative words, “The spectacle of the steam locomotive puffing brass-bound and aglow across steppe, prairie or scorched veld was to remain one of the perennial inspirations of the imperial mission.”5