Quick questions on Imperialism and colonialism (QCE Modern History Unit 1)

Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Americas after 1492. Dutch, English and French colonisation of the Americas and trading posts in Asia and Africa. The Atlantic slave trade.

British India consolidated after the Battle of Plassey (1757) and formalised after the 1857 Indian Rebellion. The British conquest of Australia after 1788. French Algeria from 1830.

The Scramble for Africa (1881-1914) and consolidation of European control over Southeast Asia and the Pacific. By 1914 Europe controlled $85$% of the world's land surface. Africa partitioned at the Berlin Conference (1884-1885) without African representation.

Europeans presented colonisation as a project of education, infrastructure and moral uplift. The French version (mission civilisatrice) was explicit; the British version (Macaulay's 1835 Minute on Indian Education) advocated creating a class of Indians "English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect".

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and others applied "survival of the fittest" to human societies, casting European dominance as a natural law. Used to justify rule over "lower" races.

19th-century craniology, race theories, and pseudoscientific hierarchies of human "types" gave a veneer of scientific respectability to imperial racism.

Free-trade imperialism: bringing markets and capitalism to "backward" regions was presented as economic uplift.

Missionary societies (London Missionary Society, Society for the Propagation of the Gospel) framed empire as evangelical opportunity. Often clashed with colonial administrators over labour conditions.

Indigenous populations collapsed by an estimated $80$% to $90$% in the century after 1492 due to disease, warfare and forced labour.

Approximately $12.5$ million Africans transported to the Americas between 1500 and 1866; about $1.8$ million died on the Middle Passage.

Indigenous peoples in Australia, the Americas, New Zealand and southern Africa lost land, sovereignty and often their lives. Australian frontier violence is now well-documented in scholarship (Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier, 1981; Lyndall Ryan's massacre mapping project).

Colonial economies were structured to supply raw materials to the metropole, not to develop industrial bases. Many post-colonial states inherited extractive economies they spent decades trying to diversify.

Leopold II's personal regime in the Belgian Congo killed approximately $10$ million people through forced labour and violence. Documented by E.D. Morel and Roger Casement; produced the first modern human-rights campaign.

Late Victorian famines in India (1876-1878, 1896-1902): estimated $10$ to $30$ million deaths. Mike Davis (Late Victorian Holocausts, 2001) argues colonial economic policy turned droughts into famines.