Age of Imperialism

Everything on this timeline starts from an idea that sounds harmless: let a company do it. Two hundred years later that company had an army of 67,000 men and collected taxes from more people than the government of William Pitt the Younger did.

This is the number that makes the rest of the timeline surprising. India was not a poor place that Britain developed. It was the richest place Britain had ever traded with, and the question is what happened to that wealth.

No European power took India from a strong Mughal Empire. They moved into a vacuum left by its decline, backing rival Indian rulers against each other. That is a different story from conquest and it is the accurate one.

A company won a province. From here the British East India Company collected taxes from tens of millions of people, which is not trade, and nobody in London had voted for it.

A private company with the third largest army in the world. Nothing in English law had been written with that possibility in mind, and Parliament spent the next eighty years trying to get control of it.

The two halves of this timeline meet here. Opium grown in British-controlled India paid for tea bought in China, and when China tried to stop it, Britain went to war to keep the trade open.

This is the engine under everything else. Colonies were not mainly about glory, and the ethnocentrism that justified them came later; they were places to get cotton and rubber cheaply and to sell cloth and machinery dearly.

A country with almost no navy told the empires of Europe to stay out of half the world. It was mostly bluff in 1823. By 1898 it was not, and the United States was using it to justify intervening itself.

Lin's letter asks a simple question: your country bans this drug at home, so why do you sell it to mine? He never got an answer. He got a war.

An industrial navy against a state that had not needed one. The iron steamer Nemesis could move against wind and current, up rivers, and destroy wooden war junks without being touched.

The phrase is theirs and it is exact: the obligations ran one way. A century of Chinese politics is shaped by the memory of these treaties, and the Communist Party still refers to the period they opened.

Britain wanted opium legalized and more of China opened. The Arrow was the occasion, not the reason, and telling those two apart is most of what historical thinking is.

The largest challenge to European rule anywhere in the nineteenth century, and it came from inside the Company's own army. It is called a mutiny in Britain and the First War of Independence in India, and both names are arguments.

Two hundred and fifty-eight years after a charter was signed in London, the company that had accidentally acquired a country was wound up and the government took over what it had built.

Three hundred million people governed by a few thousand British officials. That only works with the cooperation of Indian rulers, Indian soldiers and an Indian civil service, which is the fact the word Raj tends to hide.

It gave conquest a scientific-sounding excuse at precisely the moment Europe was acquiring the weapons to carry it out. The excuse was not Darwin's and he did not make it.

It is the single act from this period that Chinese schoolchildren are most likely to be taught, and objects taken from it are still in European museums and still being argued about.

India is the reason Britain cared about Egypt, and Egypt is the reason Britain ended up in Africa. This card is the hinge between the two halves of the whole timeline.

Forty-four years to divide a continent. It is the most famous part of the Age of Imperialism and it happened faster than almost anyone at the time expected.

The title was Disraeli's idea and it was aimed at a British audience as much as an Indian one. It made the empire something the public could feel patriotic about rather than a set of company accounts.

It happened in the same years as the Empress title and the imperial pageantry, and it is the hardest fact to set beside the argument that British rule developed India.

Seventy-four years of temporary. It is the clearest case on the timeline of an emergency measure becoming permanent by simply never ending.

The same year as the Berlin Conference. Europe agreed the rules for dividing Africa in the same twelve months that it acquired the weapon for enforcing them.

The rule they agreed turned a paper argument into an invasion, because now somebody had to be physically there. Most of Africa's borders today descend from the claims made in the fifteen years that followed.

An area seventy-six times the size of Belgium became one man's property, won by promising to end slavery there. It took twenty-three years and an international press campaign to stop him.

The men in that first session were lawyers and civil servants educated in English by the British system, asking for the rights that system said they had. It is the most important card in the second half of the timeline.

Japan is the exception that tests every explanation of this period. Faced with the same western pressure as China, it industrialized, built a modern navy, and within forty years was doing the colonizing.

A cause of war that may have been an accident. It is a good, clean case for asking a class how much of what starts a war is the event and how much is what people were already prepared to believe.

A short war that turned the United States into a colonial power almost by accident, and produced a future president in Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders.

They declared it, they had an army, and they had been fighting for two years. The United States did not recognize the republic, and that refusal is the whole cause of the war that follows.

A country founded in a war against an empire acquiring an overseas territory of its own. Mark Twain and others argued loudly that it contradicted everything the United States claimed to stand for.

A republic that already existed, with its own president and army, was transferred between two empires by a document neither of its representatives signed.

The United States spent three and a half years suppressing the independence movement it had said it was helping. It is the least-taught war in this period and the one that most tests the American story about itself.

An anti-foreign rising in China at the same moment as an anti-British war in South Africa and an anti-American war in the Philippines. Three continents pushing back in the same eighteen months.

Eight empires cooperating against one country. Foreign armies assembled inside the Forbidden City, and the looting that followed is still remembered in China as the low point of the whole period.

The indemnity was to be paid over thirty-nine years and came to more than the Qing government's annual revenue several times over. The dynasty did not survive the humiliation for long.

The doctrine of 1823 said Europe must not interfere. The corollary of 1904 said the United States would, and it was used to justify interventions across the Caribbean and Central America for thirty years.

Two empires swapped pieces of Africa to fix a European relationship, without consulting Morocco, Egypt or Germany. The resentment that produced runs straight into 1914.

A state visit lasting a few hours nearly caused a European war. By 1905 the empires had run out of unclaimed territory and were colliding with each other instead.

This is where Indian nationalism becomes a mass movement rather than a petition. Swadeshi gave ordinary people something to do, and Gandhi built his whole method on it twenty years later.

The one case in this period where journalism, photographs and public campaigning forced a European state to seize a colony from its own monarch. It shows what could be done, and how rarely it was.

The second near-war over Morocco in six years. Territory and the people on it were traded between two European governments to settle an argument neither had with Morocco.

Imperialism did not colonize China; it broke the state that governed it. What followed was decades of warlords, civil war and invasion, and a politics organized around never being in that position again.

Forty-four years of competing for other people's countries, ended by a war fought in Europe over a killing in Sarajevo. Troops and carriers from every colony served in it, on both sides.

The European empires were busy destroying each other, and the gap was filled immediately. The Age of Imperialism did not stop in 1914; the cast changed.

The single most important card in the last chapter. He arrived with a technique tested on a different empire in a different continent, and it turned a movement of lawyers into a movement of millions.

Non-cooperation is a strategy built on a fact about empire: a few thousand officials cannot govern three hundred million people who decline to help. He made that fact visible.

He picked the one British law that touched every single person in India, including the poorest, and broke it in a way anyone could copy. It is the best-designed act of protest in modern history.