ABSTRACT
If we take imperialism to mean the direct control or extension of control of one people, state, or nation over another, then it is as old as history itself. The tendency to dominate other people is not an African, Asian, Australian, European, Latin American, or North American phenomenon; it is a human one. At all points in the past, we find imperialistic relationships of one type or another. Students of world history, who focus their attention on connected patterns, are aware of this state of affairs. Scholars, too, have spent great time and effort researching and writing on the complicated political, economic, cultural, intellectual, environmental, and social connections and relationships of dependency between peoples, nations, and continents throughout human history. Making connections to the past is critically important to understanding it. Equally important, however, is learning to make proper distinctions. This reader is a compilation of primary and secondary sources, textual and visual documents about global relations primarily in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of its goals is to help students realize that although there are many similarities and continuities between this era and earlier phases of world history, there are also sharp differences. We have kept the thematic, geographical, and chronological focus of the readings relatively compact in order to provide students the opportunity to make connections between the selections and to comprehend some of the ways in which the period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries represents a new era in global relations.
