ABSTRACT
The competition for markets and for sources of raw materials as well as the search for new fields for capital investment were much talked of in the heyday of imperialism and underlay the argumentation of a host of writers on economic imperialism. The major European investments were in the United States, Russia, the Ottoman Empire and Latin America, where there could hardly be any question of true imperial domination. At the height of the colonial age, in the early twentieth century, less than a third of Britain’s exports went to the dominions and colonies, and less than one-half of British foreign investment was in the Empire. If in fact the European governments in the 1880s and 1890s plunged headlong into the scramble for colonies, they were evidently acting in panic. In like manner an eminent French authority has estimated that even in the period prior to 1914 the Paris government spent two billion gold francs on the French colonial empire.
