18.6: Effects

Almost without exception, neo-imperialism can be described as “plunder economies”, represented by three components.

• Colonial regimes expropriated the land from the people who lived there through force, backed by pseudo-legal means: unless a given person, or group, had a legal title in the western sense to the land they lived on. Likewise, traditional rights to hunt, gather material, and migrate with herds were lost.
• Colonial regimes expropriated raw materials like rubber, generally shipped back to Europe to be turned into finished products.
• Colonial regimes exploited native labor. Sometimes in the form of outright slavery like the Congo, the Portuguese African colonies, and forced labor in French and German colonies. In other cases, it consisted of "semi-slavery", as on the island of Java where the Dutch imposed quotas of coffee and spices on villages. Most of the territories controlled by Britain used a form of subsistence-level wages paid to workers.

In addition, European powers imposed “borders” where none had existed, randomly splitting up existing kingdoms, tribes, and cultures and lumping different ones together arbitrarily. Sometimes European powers favored certain local groups over others in order to better maintain control, such as the British policy of using the Tutsi tribe (“tribe” being something of a misnomer - “class” is more accurate) to govern what would later become Rwanda over the majority Hutus. Thus, the effects of imperialism lasted long after former colonies achieved their independence in the twentieth century.

In a somewhat ironic twist, only certain specific forms and areas of exploitation ever turned a profit for Europeans or the governments. Numerous private merchant companies founded to exploit colonial areas went bankrupt. In fact, the entire French colonial edifice never produced significant profits. Since governments generally stepped in to declare protectorates and colonies after merchant interests went under, the cost of maintaining an empire grew along with the territorial claims themselves. Thus, much of the imperial impetus boiled down to jockeying for position on the world stage between the increasingly hostile great powers of Europe.