Historical Interpretations: Expansion into Africa
History: AQA A Level The British Empire, topic 2.1.3
Historical Interpretations of Expansion into Africa
Different historians emphasise different motivations for the British expansion into Africa from 1890.
Turning point
- British expansion after 1890 moved away from an earlier ad hoc approach.
- British contemporary John Seeley (b.1834) said of imperial expansion before 1890, ‘we seem, as it were, to have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind’.
John Darwin, Unfinished Empire (2013)
- Historian John Darwin (2013) argues that the period 1890-1914 is characterised by a ‘pseudo-empire’, a determination to protect the Suez Canal that expanded to the oil regions.
Lizzie Collingham
- In The Taste of Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World (2017), historian Lizzie Collingham (2017) argues that the expansion in the turn of the 20th century was rooted in a search for food supplies.
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What did historian John Darwin (2013) say the period 1890-1914 was characterised by?