Why Europe Took the World in a Generation, and What It Cost

The idea

The question this unit answers is how a continent that held a third of the globe in eighteen hundred held four-fifths by nineteen fourteen, and the anchor's answer is an accident with three parts. Industry gave Europe a monopoly on steel, steam and the Maxim gun. Medicine, quinine and then germ theory, opened the interior that had killed every European who entered it. And an ideology, Social Darwinism dressed as a civilizing mission, made conquest look like duty. The motive underneath was the one unit eleven left: rivalry among powers with no Concert to restrain them, so that Berlin in eighteen eighty-four was a land grab to keep the peace among the grabbers. The costs fell first on the conquered. The Congo's population halved and its people's hands were cut off for rubber; the Herero and Nama were driven into the desert; India's Company became a Raj with a glass ceiling; China lost its ports and its silver; the Boers' families died in camps. The costs came home too: the anchor says the toll of imperialism exceeded the Thirty Years' War's, and that in nineteen fourteen the violence exported for a generation came home to roost. Two states escaped, and their escapes teach the rule. Ethiopia defended itself with the rifles Europe sold; Japan joined, building the fleet Perry's gunboats had suggested and beating Russia with it. The Ottomans and Qajars, never conquered, were hollowed instead: capitulations, debts, the Great Game. Unit fourteen begins where the export ended.