The striking display of power in the ‘scramble for Africa’ and the ‘scramble for Asia’ remains one of the most unusual chapters in world history.

Nearly all of Africa and much of South and East Asia were divided up, at least on paper, between the expanding empires of the European states, Japan and Ethiopia. Even the United States, the classically anti­imperial republic, took over island colonies in the Pacific and Caribbean.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 created a much closer link between Europe, Africa, the Indian Ocean and Asia. Although the cutting of the canal, without locks, itself represented the rational triumph of science and international cooperation, it helped launch irrational conquests and burgeoning world conflicts. The king of Belgium began building up an empire in the Congo in 1876, and the Conference of Berlin in 1884-1885 officially sanctioned an open-ended European pursuit of empire in Africa. The unbridled rush for overseas colonies did not end with the diplomatic standoff between Britain and France over the Sudan in 1898, but reached a pinnacle with the Spanish-American War in 1899 (fought over Cuba, the Philippines and Puerto Rico), and the Russo-Japanese War (over Korea and Manchuria) in 1904-1905.

Surveying all the colonial players, and especially Italy, Germany and Japan, this chapter will highlight three aspects of imperialism during the period 1876 to 1905: the colonialism of ‘economic exploitation’, in the words of the theorist Paul Leroy-Beaulieu; settlement colonialism in the age of mass migration; and the social imperialism of using foreign policy and imperial glory to influence politics and reputation at home. Why did colonial expan­sion explode at this time? To what extent was this imperialism ‘new’? What did expansion reveal about the empires themselves? These extraordinary developments have indeed called forth so many different explanations and analyses that the theoretical debates cannot be extricated from the events themselves.