1. What is Imperialism?
Concept Formation

2. What is Imperialism?
Goal: Through looking at several images, political cartoons, and primary source documents you will develop a working definition of imperialism.
Directions: You will view each new image, political cartoon, or primary source excerpt and answer the following two questions in your notes
(1) What do you see?
(2) What do you think is the intended message?

3. Image #1
What do you see?
What is the image suggesting? What is the message?
American cartoon of John Bull (England) as an Imperial Octopus with its arms (with hands) in - or contemplating being in - various regions.
"a heroic archetype of the freeborn Englishman.” – John Bull
Suez Canal – financed, those who control it control trade
Boersland – cape colony, descendants of dutch farmers

4. Image #2
What do you see?
What is the image suggesting? What is the message?
Cecil Rhodes: Cape-Cairo railway project. Founded the De Beers Mining Company and owned the British South Africa Company, which established Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) for itself. He liked to "paint the map British red," and declared: "all of these stars ... these vast worlds that remain out of reach. If I could, I would annex other planets.”

5. Image #3
What do you see?
What is the image suggesting? What is the message?
"French political cartoon from the late 1890s. A pie representing China is being divided between UK, Germany, Russia, France and Japan." - Notice the absence of the US. US did not want a part in carving up China because they wanted to keep trade open. Japan wanted a part of the action because they desired to join Western Imperialists after they began to modernize after 1868.

6. Image #4
What do you see?
What is the image suggesting? What is the message?

7. Primary Source Excerpt: Wilfred Scawen Blunt: Britain's Imperial Destiny, 1896-1899
“The old century is very nearly out, and leaves the world in a pretty pass, and the British Empire is playing the devil in it as never an empire before on so large a scale. We may live to see its fall. All the nations of Europe are making the same hell upon earth in China, massacring and pillaging and raping in the captured cities as outrageously as in the Middle Ages. The Emperor of Germany gives the word for slaughter and the Pope looks on and approves. In South Africa our troops are burning farms under Kitchener's command, and the Queen and the two houses of Parliament, and the bench of bishops thank God publicly and vote money for the work. The Americans are spending fifty millions a year on slaughtering the Filipinos; the King of the Belgians has invested his whole fortune on the Congo, where he is brutalizing the Negroes to fill his pockets. The French and Italians for the moment are playing a less prominent part in the slaughter, but their inactivity grieves them. The whole white race is reveling openly in violence, as though it had never pretended to be Christian. God's equal curse be on them all! So ends the famous nineteenth century into which we were so proud to have been born....”
Poet, writer, womanizer. Did not support the philosophy of Imperialism. Was sent to notify a British agent about the Egyptian public opinion about new changes in government.

8. Final Definition
Now use those notes to write a working definition of imperialism in your notebook “IMPERIALISM IS…”
…the political, economic, and/or cultural domination of one country or region by another country