ABSTRACT
The great difference between the world at the beginning of this century and the world today is that European peoples then ruled most of it and controlled nearly all the rest with their military power. The partition of Africa into the spheres of influence or outright possessions of all these European powers had been settled sixteen years before Queen Victoria died, at the Conference of Berlin in 1885. The British Colonies on the Eastern seaboard of North America, having won their independence from England, had inherited, as the United States of America, the British ambition to conquer the whole North American continent. While this American imperial tide was flowing westward, the Russian Empire of the Czars had been steadily expanding eastward. The ‘Monroe doctrine’ announced by President Monroe in 1823 excluded any European colonial power from establishing itself in the Americas, North, Central and South.
