The Age of New Imperialism

The Age of New Imperialism refers to the period of intensified colonial expansion by European powers, along with the United States and Japan, roughly from 1881 to 1914, during which the great powers rapidly partitioned most of Africa and large parts of Asia and the Pacific into formal colonial territories. The period's defining episode was the so-called Scramble for Africa, formalized at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, at which European powers negotiated colonial boundaries across the African continent with little regard for existing African political or ethnic divisions, leading to the colonization of nearly the entire continent within about two decades. Driven by industrial competition for raw materials and markets, nationalist prestige, and new military and medical technology that made sustained European presence in tropical regions newly viable, the period produced colonial administrative and economic structures with lasting effects long after independence. It is generally considered to have ended with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.