D. K. Fieldhouse’s work is a remarkable attempt at synthesizing the intriguing and complex history of European expansion since the eighteenth century. By dealing with the entire period and all European colonial powers, he enables the reader to make some fruitful comparisons on motivations for European empire building and on methods of colonial rule employed by Europeans overseas.
While European expansion from the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century was different from that of the “new imperialism” of the late nineteenth century, both phenomena, Fieldhouse argues, reflected a definite power relationship between European and non-European states. Colonization in the New World created for the first time the problem of administering “native populations” and settlers residing in the colonies. The study shows how the Latin powers created an overseas government reflecting the absolutist regime at home, while the Northern powers, such as Britain and Holland, established colonial governments patterned after the constitutional systems of the home country.
Dissatisfaction by the inhabitants of the colonies against imperial rule and European warfare from the middle of the eighteenth century until the Napoleonic era weakened the bonds of empire and led to successful struggles for independence in both Americas. The loss of empire in the New World created some of the impetus for a new wave of British and French expansion. The possibility for such expansion was made that much easier by the dramatic growth of European military power as a result of the industrial revolution.
Fieldhouse is persuasive in his thesis that the small enclaves of Africa and Asia were the base for an unplanned and often undesired expansion. In India the disintegration of the Mogul empire created a disorder which seemed to endanger the areas held by the British. To preserve what they had, British officials argued, they would need to pacify bordering territories. European advance unwittingly led only to further turbulence on the colonial frontiers and necessitated even further expansion. A similar process, Fieldhouse argues, caused much of the British and French expansion in Africa until 1882.
After 1882, a somewhat arbitrary date which Fieldhouse chooses, he argues that there developed a new kind of imperialism. Regardless of the date (which some would be inclined to place two or three years earlier or later), Fieldhouse is correct in seeing both a quantitative and qualitative change in the nature of European expansion. Quantitatively more territory was acquired in the generation after 1882 than during the entire preceding three-quarters of a century. The “new imperialism” was far less than the older form of expansion because of the local search for security in the colonies. Rather, the study argues, it was unleashed by the European rivalry for power.
The chancelleries of Europe sustained imperial expansion by seeing in it the safeguard of world-wide strategic interests, but Fieldhouse finds little evidence that the need for either raw materials, markets or an outlet for European capital triggered the so-called “new imperialism.” He is correct in showing that this need was not imperative; nevertheless imperialist statesmen like Ferry and Chamberlain clearly thought that imperial acquisitions were necessary to assure the economic welfare of their countries.
While European powers elaborated different sets of colonial doctrines and different administrative systems, Field-house shows how their rule created rather similar results. Traditional authority was undermined, but European culture was not implanted so deeply as to transform the colonies into replicas of Europe. In this way the old and new imperialism varied in a most significant manner. In the former ease the Europeans’ immigration or the very ferocity of their rule had destroyed many indigenous societies and created European substitutes. European military and political power grew dramatically in the late nineteenth century and was proportionately far superior to the power which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe had possessed in facing the New World. Yet in the end, ironically, it could not leave such a permanent mark on the territories it had conquered.
