ABSTRACT
We can see the Crusades in the Middle Ages and the creation of overseas trading networks in the Early Modern Period as precursors to the more modern phenomenon that we call imperialism.* During the second half of the nineteenth century, powerful Western nation-states embarked upon an energetic program of seizing and formalizing possession over much of the world, in what has often been called the Age of Empire.1 One critical difference from the earlier era of colonization was that the Industrial Revolution had given Europeans the technological and military advantages that allowed them to conquer and colonize non-Western lands quickly, easily, and brutally. This made the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century process both qualitatively and quantitatively different from anything that had come before.
