ABSTRACT
That great transmarine colonisation and activity took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is universally admitted. The nineteenth century saw a revival of colonising activity and the participants now included Italy, Germany and Russia as well as Britain and France, the traditional colonising countries. The great colonising career of France in Africa began in 1830, and colonisation, in the wider sense, was a policy actively pursued by all the European Powers, though it was not always pursued overseas. Colonisation for Russia meant the plantation of Siberia and penetration into Central Asia, and it was peculiarly active in the nineteenth century. For the German States, all active colonisers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it meant the plantation of waste areas in their own borders or in Europe herself] beyond which they did not look till the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Then united Germany, like united Italy, took colonies overseas and Russia extended her colonial interests to Tibet and the Pacific coast of China. At the beginning of the twentieth century there appeared the first of the many theories of imperialism with which that century was to abound. These were important in bringing the word as well as the fact into bad repute.
