25 Africa, the Ottoman Empire, And the New Imperialism 1800–1914

> How and why did Western nations strive for global dominance over the course of the nineteenth century? Chapter 25 examines nineteenth-century Western imperialism in Africa and the Middle East. As the process of industrialization advanced, European commercial interests went in search of new sources of raw materials and markets for their manufactured goods. At the same time, millions of Europeans and Asians picked up stakes and emigrated abroad. What began as a relatively peaceful exchange of products with Africa and Asia in the early nineteenth century had transformed by century’s end into a frenzy of imperialist occupation and domination that had a profound impact on both colonizer and colonized. The political annexation of territory in the 1880s — the “new imperialism,” as it is often called by historians — was the capstone of Western society’s underlying economic and technological transformation.