The 18 and 19 century Europe saw the adoption of civil rights, rule of law and constitutional guarantee. But when it came to colonial expansion these rights were the first to be taken away from the colonies around the world.
The British moved into India in the name of trade after losing monopoly rights aver trade in USA. The Spanish and the French were losing their importance in the west. Asia, Africa and the Pacific Islands became the focus of colonization to gain access to trade in the raw materials like the palm oil, cotton, tea etc. This trading advantage shifted to political control over the territories.
China attracted a lot of attention due to its tea and silk. The British were expert in industrialization but their products were of low quality as the raw material was of low quality. Even the colonial countries did not like those products. In China they need something to sell to them in exchange of tea and silk. So they started drug smuggling and it was the opium. The Chinese government started a crack down on opium smuggling so this powerful opium lobby of the British convinced the British government to start the opium war in 1839-42 and 1856-60. In fact some of the rich British families are the descendants of the opium smugglers. The British win in these wars forced China to give access to more ports of trade. Though China had banned opium trade in 1799 but the British used to freedom to trade to keep the opium channels open and increased more political and economic influence on the Chinese rulers.
The south East Asia and the Pacific Islands was also a lucrative target for forced takeovers. The French used Indochina for rubber plantations; the British used the timber of Burma, the Dutch used Indonesia for the palm oil. In these regions also the trading posts slowly became centers of political influence over local rulers. The French, Belgian and the British also set for the interiors of Africa as quinine was available now to treat malaria. Though no importance is given to quinine in the role of expansion of the European colonialists but without quinine it would have been very difficult to survive and flourish. All the regions that were exploited by these people were malaria prone starting from the Sough America to Africa to Asia. The Portuguese got a hold in South Western Africa. The French held much of north and West Africa. The British had areas of south and east Africa. Belgium forcefully seized Congo for rubber and the Germans had interests in the Ottoman Empire.
The largest and the most continuous and successful empire was that of India and Central Asia held by the British. These regions had abundant supply of raw material and the primary motive was plunder. The British population was very less but instead they coerced the Indian prince’s and their army to rule and police for them. The used a vast number of local civil servants to rule over their conquest. Steam ships and railways were primarily used for transfer of good from the interior to the ports and for movement of troops, rather than for facilitating transport of people.
The discovery of diamond mines in the 1860’s in Africa led to a round of scramble by the Europeans to get control over these regions. This also led to mass scale forced migration of Africans who had to leave their homeland to work in these diamond mines in pathetic unhygienic and often fatal living conditions. South African lands were literally stolen to drive people to work in the mines.
The rule of law was almost nonexistent in these colonies for the locals and all forms of torture and subjugation techniques were used to control any form of revolt or uprising. White supremacy was supreme and the locals, all either brown or black or yellow were considered inferior to the whites. The first uprising in India was in 1857 by some of the rulers and part of local army but was brutally controlled by force. This led to a series of slaughter of the locals in the pretext that the locals have raped the white women, but later it was found that all these propaganda was false but by then many people had already been killed in the name of conspirators. The people of Congo and Caribbean were abused by the colonial rulers and it went to such an extent that the fertility rates went down. The pregnant women used a variety of things like peacock flower, rue, willow and other plants to induce abortion as they did not want to bring the next generation into a life of slavery.
All forms of domination were justified in the name of racial supremacy. They thought that it was their right to turn the so called ‘savages’ into Christianity for their salvation. Priests were sent to all corners to spread Christianity. Social Darwinists, those who believed in the Darwin theory that white people are the pinnacle of human evolution, justified the acts of conquest to preserve their superiority. So the stealing of palm oil or diamond or tea or cotton was justified as a way to keep the white people superior. While the European colonial countries were the richest at that time the colonial territories were among the poorest in the world. Crop failure, famine and starvation were common and the locals faced the brunt of it.
Though the people who benefited from the colonialism, the people of Europe may say that these things are of the past but strains of it are still prevalent. The growing colonialism in those centuries also put colonial armies at war with each other in order to wrest more territories. This was also one of the reasons for the beginning of the First World War.
Thank you Telesfor sir