Starting in the late-19th and early-20th century Europe's most powerful nation-states were taking control of most of Africa as well as large parts of South and East Asia. This process, which came to be known as New Imperialism, happened very rapidly and expressed the aggressive and irrational side of human nature.
Important political leaders in Europe saw imperialism as a way to maximize popular support at home. The need to secure ports, coaling stations for their navies, as well as the ability to raise colonial armies to help fight was a necessity for European states looking to establish themselves as world powers.
Some strong supporters of imperialism saw territorial expansion as a moral (just or right) enterprise that could bring the blessings of a superior civilization to those that were considered inferior. One French politician, Jules Ferry, said that superior races had a right to civilize those that were not. The famous poem, “White Man’s Burden” written by Rudyard Kipling, expressed Kipling’s views of racial and paternal (fatherly) disdain as he saw colonized peoples as “half-devil and half-child.” However, Kipling also had the idea that non-Western peoples could conform towards their western mentors and that at its base, imperialism was just an educational project as well as a way to spread European Enlightenment. The domination by superior powers over colonized peoples led to a hierarchical system and racism, leading to the view that the good and the just were reduced to the values the victor chose to impose.
Three methods were used by European powers to control the colonies. The first of which was using European administrators for direct colonial rule. This method was the most costly but ensured the most control for a nation-state. The second method was a protectorate arrangement where a local colonial ruler and the government carried on as usual, but the European nation-state controlled the country’s military, foreign affairs, and economy and intervened whenever necessary. The final method was known as the “sphere of influence.” In this agreement, a colony would grant a European state certain economic privileges within its territory. Europeans living or working within that territory were not expected to follow the legal system of that territory.
European nation-states were able to maintain their control of the colonies by providing a Western-style education for colonial leaders. Certain colonial elites were given a traditional university education and were then given important roles the colonial bureaucracy. Despite the high status jobs given to certain elites, they were still never considered equals to their European counterparts. Inequality mixed with the new western education led many elites to search for civil equality and national self-determination, a result the European nation-states did not foresee.
