Empire and Imperialism

The overall economic profit and loss from empire is complex. While European economies no doubt benefited from cheaper access to raw materials and markets, that has to be weighed against the increased taxation to pay for defense. In the British case, to take one example, the positive economic impact of empire on the British economy in the period 1870 to 1914 has been calculated as marginal at best, while historians have suggested that reliance on imperial markets diverted Britain from the more difficult but more productive road of modernizing her economy.

Perhaps the most significant impact of empire on Europe was cultural. By the 1920s and 1930s there could have been few Europeans, in the cities of Europe at least, whose lives would not have been influenced in some way by empire. This was of course a process that went back several centuries, but in the nineteenth century this influence took on more profound forms. One can see this most obviously in language, as in the way Hindi words such as bungalow, pajamas, and thug, to name but a few, entered English, or in the way cheap tropical foodstuffs enriched the European diet. Empire also had an important impact in art and design, with the various colonial exhibitions set up by European governments, such as in London (1924) and Paris (1931), prompting new interest in colonial and African and Asian motifs. Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Henri Matisse (1869–1954), famously, were deeply influenced by their encounter with collections of African art in the 1900s, while colonial topics became the subject of interest to novelists, poets, filmmakers, and artists such as Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), Alphonse Daudet (1840–1897), and Julien Viaud (1850–1923).

Much of this interest in empires and colonial peoples lay within traditional structures of European fascination with an exotic "orient." Indeed, the most significant impact empire had was the impetus it gave to racial stereotyping in European society in these years. This process was reinforced by the influence of pseudoscientific racism in the late nineteenth century that propagated the idea that races had immutable identities and were ordered in a hierarchy of civilization; central to the whole imperial project was the notion of racial distinction between supposedly superior Europeans and supposedly inferior Africans, Asians, and Pacific islanders. Equally important, it should be noted, was the role of imperial expansion in reinforcing existing European constructions of femininity and masculinity.