Economic causes for imperialism: Manufactured goods had to find a market after the IR. Meanwhile, raw materials needed to be sought. Nationalist explanations: imperialism enhances the size of country, a la feudal mode of thinking: the larger the territory, the higher the status of the country.

Nationalism, Social Darwinism, and Racism

How connections between nation and race were made.

19^th century nationalism emphasized homogeneity of ethnicity.

As nation-states came into being, sometimes the two were conflated.

An ordained deacon, Darwin as a young man was interested in science. His expedition to the Galapagos Islands in the South Pacific Ocean on board the Beagle in 1830 led to many findings about animal life.

In 1859 and 1871, he published respectively that the animal and human worlds evolved from lower to higher stages.

Darwinism and Social Darwinism

After Darwin, philosophers such as Herbert Spencer in England included society as part of the environment that humans adapted to, and social survival belonged to the "fittest"—those who adapted best. This was initially to address the issue of the urban poor and to block government welfare programs.

Abroad, Social Darwinism lent support to the superiority of the white race over the non-white natives. Racism was used as justification for imperialism, c.f. Kipling’s "The White Man’s Burden"

Historical discrimination and 19^th century racism

Discrimination of social/cultural/ethnic groups existed in European history, but systematic discrimination on the grounds of biology more than anything else was very much a 19^th century phenomenon associated with social Darwinism.

Idea of lineal progress

The Enlightenment idea of progress.

Christian idea of lineal progress vs. cyclical progress of most agrarian societies.

The Enlightenment secularization of progress: human ability to improve themselves.

The Darwinian idea of progress

Continuing with the idea of lineal progress, Darwin’s division of humans into stages of development paved the way for a universal common historical path for all societies. It paved the way for the 20^th century slogan of modernization.

Progress, nationalism and imperialism.

20^th century non-European nationalists almost all invariably bought into this unilineal definition of progress in their fight against imperialism for national independence (e.g. Ghandi and Nehru in India, Ho Chi-ming in Vietnam, Kamal in Turkey).