Social Effects Of American Imperialism

The definition of imperialism is when one country has control over another country politically, economically, and or culturally. Modern European imperialism began in the late 1800’s and started to end in the early 1900’s. There are five main motives for imperialism; Economic, Exploratory, Ethnocentric, Political, and Religious. Some countries had economic motives for imperialism because some European countries wanted to sell products to other countries and wanted new trading routes. Other European countries had exploratory motives; people wanted to explore new territories for medical or scientific purposes. The main goal was to map new land before other countries would and pretty much have bragging rights. Ethnocentric motives for imperial …show more content…
European countries had religious motives because they wanted to spread their religion by conquering other countries and taught them their religion through education. There were many effects of imperialism politically, economically, and socially and they were both positive and negative. There were many countries that were imperialised, but the six countries focused on this unit were China, Congo, French West Africa/ Madagascar, India, Kenya, and Nigeria. The effects of European imperialism in Africa and Asia were positive economically because countries were now able to trade with more countries, but the effects were negative socially because the Europeans believed in racial superiority that led to many negative social effects. The effects of imperialism in African and Asian countries were positive economically because countries were able to trade goods with other countries. An important positive economic effect of imperialism can be found in Document #8. The document was written by Tafawa Balewa who was the Nigerian Prime Minister. It was written to the British government to thank them for what they have done to help them. It was a speech for the …show more content…
New methods of commerce were very important because this meant that they could sell or buy many goods on a large scale and this meant that their economy was getting more money from trading with other countries and they could get many goods from other countries. New industry also meant that more products could be made and used for trading with other countries, bringing more money into the economy. Another example from the presentations showing why the effects of imperialism were economically positive was Imperialism in China. The China Imperialism started in 1860 and ended around the late 1900’s. During this time, many countries had control over China. Some of those countries were Britain, France, Russia, Japan, and Germany. Although the Qing had control of the government, China was controlled by the other countries. The United States saw that countries like Britain and Japan carved-up parts of China, and were worried that this would jeopardize their chances of marketing with China. So the U.S. offered China what was called an “open door policy”. This pretty much meant that trading was opened between China