The Rise of the British Empire

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Leopoldo Antonucci
7 anni fa
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1 The Rise of the British Empire The Second British Empire Africa At the end of the 18th century Britain had lost its Thirteen Colonies in America. A hundred years later, however, a second wave of colonisation took place. The empire in Africa started as slave trading stores in Ghana (Gold Coast) and other parts of the West African coast. In the 1890s British troops pushed inland using the new technologies of steam, telegraphs and machine guns (and quinine to prevent Malaria) until they reached the borders of the French territories. The Berlin Conference in 1884 on Colonial matters divided up Africa and gave each of the European powers their own sections. Thus Britain ended with territories in East, West and Southern Africa.

2 The "Scramble for Africa Within twenty years, from 1880 to 1900, every corner of the Earth, from the highest mountains in the Himalayas to the most remote Pacific island and Antarctica, came to be claimed by one or other European power. Africa saw the most dramatic colonisation. During The Berlin Conference, it was divided up as if it had been a cake, split between greedy European leaders. This was called the "Scramble for Africa or Partition of Africa. Between 1885 and 1914 Britain took nearly 30% of Africa's population under her control, to 15% for France, 9% for Germany, 7% for Belgium and only 1% for Italy.

5 The New Imperialism At the time of the fierce debate on imperialism during the Second Boer War (1899), Hobson, a British liberal, observed the spectacle of what is popularly known as the "Scramble for Africa", and emphasized changes in European social structures as well as capital flow. His so-called accumulation theory suggested that capitalism suffered from under-consumption due to the end of mercantile capitalism, to the rise of monopoly capitalism and the resultant concentration of wealth in fewer hands. This apparently gave rise to a misdistribution of purchasing power: the huge impoverished industrial working class was often far too poor to consume the goods produced. His analysis of capital flight and the rise of colossal cartels later influenced Lenin in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) which has become a basis for the modern neo-marxist analysis of imperialism. Thus it was argued that the New Imperialism was caused essentially by a flight of foreign capital.

6 Regno Unito, Egitto, Sudan " Ai primi di luglio 1798 l'egitto fu invaso via mare da un corpo di spedizione francese forte di circa uomini guidato da Napoleone Bonaparte. Lo scopo principale dell'invasione fu quello minare il monopolio commerciale dell'inghilterra nella regione ma, tra gli scopi secondari, c'era anche quello di agevolare la conduzione di studi storici, archeologici, geografici, linguistici. L'occupazione francese durò fino all'estate del 1800 quando le ultime truppe comandate dal generale Menou si arresero agli anglo-turchi. " Dai primi del XIX secolo l'egitto fu tenuto dall'albanese Mehmet Ali Pascià che avviò una dinastia vicereale, formalmente vassalla di Istanbul ma sostanzialmente del tutto autonoma. " Nel 1881, sfruttando l'estrema debolezza del dominio e giustificando il tutto con la necessità di proteggere gli investimenti europei nella zona del Canale di Suez, il Regno Unito e la Francia obbligarono l'egitto a nominare due loro esperti alla guida dei dicasteri delle Finanze e dei Lavori Pubblici. Poco dopo Londra occupò l'egitto e il 18 dicembre 1882 e ne fece un suo "protettorato di fatto". " Nel 1899, il Regno Unito impose all'egitto il con-dominio sul Sudan, che fino ad allora faceva parte del territorio egiziano.

7 An Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan

8 British Lord Kitchener poster was used to recruit soldiers for World War I. J. M. Flagg's 1917 poster was based on the original British poster of three years earlier, and it was used for both World War I and World War II.

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