The Second Industrial Revolution: New Imperialism

Writing in 1912, Karl Liebknacht warns, “All the international conflicts have been brought to their greatest point of intensity. Like a cyclone, imperialism spins across the globe,” and describes the alarming fact that is New Imperialism. Historians characterize this nineteenth-century phenomena by a flood of animated, industrialized European countries seeking to gain influence over a foreign group of distant and less-developed people. European countries were motivated by the need to protect their country’s own interests from other similarly economically advanced European countries and strove to strengthen their power, profit, and popularity through imperialism. This imperialism resulted from the stagnating Second Industrial Revolution, which

The Second Industrial Revolution, which emphasized the neoteric science of electricity, petroleum, and steel during the time period of 1870-1914, caused a fast-growing wave of imperialism to sweep over the Western European countries spreading a sea of riches. The Second Industrial Revolution indirectly caused a difference in goals for New Imperialism compared to Old Imperialism as it included: “power, profit, and popularity.” Western European countries had a surge in the creation of new technology by virtue of Second Industrial Revolution. Around the 1890s, Western European countries began to experience the momentum of the Second Industrial Revolution coming to a halt due to a lack of markets and limits on expansion within their well-defined borders. The deceleration of the Second Industrial Revolution incited powerful countries to pursue New Imperialism, expanding to uncharted areas to gain new markets, raw materials, and area for the placement of military bases to emphasize military dominance. New Imperialism flourished for Western European countries especially as they exploited distant

Initially the Long Depression’s profound negative effects on the European economy sparked nation’s interest in resuming imperialism. This harsh economic recession lasted for an astonishing twenty-six years (1873-1896), caused the prices of goods to decline, and put pressure on the government to protect their country’s economic strength. European nations relied on the Second Industrial Revolution to push them through this economically trying time. Unfortunately, the Second Industrial Revolution’s intensity lapsed during the 1890s because scarcity of materials to produce commodities rose and the amount of markets to sell in shrunk. This impediment did not interfere with countries such as Great Britain, France, and Germany from contending with one another. Each country sought an edge in expanding their economic prosperity against others. Europe did not have the abundance of raw materials, such as rubber, manganese, palm oil, and cotton that African intermediaries possessed. In order to overcome these arduous challenges, country’s strong-armed themselves into the African continent to obtain the necessary resources for the production of goods. Furthermore, European countries, in order to avoid intermediaries and the stagnation of their lucrative expansion, imposed an imperialism of free trade. Instead of directly controlling the