ABSTRACT
By focusing on the 1890s and 1900s, this chapter analyses how the tropics entered considerations of governance as European nation-states struggled to build national economies. States first co-opted colonial territory, solicited by private firms in search of trading opportunities and natural resources overseas. Subsequently, imperial statehood emerged as a means to support raw material and food supplies for nations and to order currency relations, employment, and national character formation. Cases differed, however. French Republicanism privileged the coordination of interest groups. In Italy, overseas relations fulfilled mainly a social and cultural function for the nation. In Germany, in the 1900s, state experts conceived of colonies as a part of a German national economy with a global reach. Britain, meanwhile, redefined cosmopolitanism within the confines of empire. The concluding synthesis recapitulates the historical processes that gave rise to imperial statehood as the model of modern European states.
