Review the features of the ‘New Imperialism’ in the context of the revival of colonialism in the nineteenth century.

The New Imperialism runs from about 1870 to 1914, and its novelty lies in scale, speed, motive and method.

Contrast with the old. Earlier colonialism was mercantile, run largely by chartered companies, concentrated in the Americas and aimed at trade and settlement. The new phase was directed by states themselves, aimed at Africa and Asia, and insisted on formal annexation rather than informal influence.

Defining features.

• Speed and completeness. Africa went from roughly a tenth under European control to almost the entire continent within three decades.
• Economic drivers. Industrial economies sought guaranteed raw materials — rubber, cotton, tin, oil — protected markets, and outlets for surplus capital, which Hobson analysed in Imperialism (1902) and Lenin restated in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) as the export of capital by finance capital.
• Strategic and competitive logic. Territory was taken to deny it to rivals, and colonies were valued for coaling stations and canal routes as much as for produce.
• Nationalism and prestige. Newly unified Germany and Italy entered the race for status, and public opinion at home was mobilised by a popular imperial press.
• Technology made it possible. Quinine against malaria, steamships, the telegraph, railways and the Maxim gun turned a costly and dangerous enterprise into a cheap one.
• Ideology. Social Darwinism, the civilising mission and racial hierarchy supplied the justification.
• Rules among the imperialists. The Berlin Conference of 1884-85 required effective occupation for a claim to be recognised, which converted paper claims into administration.

The debate. Hobson and Lenin made economics decisive; Fieldhouse and Robinson and Gallagher argued that many colonies never paid, and that the peripheral crisis and strategic rivalry mattered more. The safest reading is that economic motive supplied the pressure and strategic competition supplied the timing.