416. Colonial policy.—Colonial policy, a topic which has had for some years a leading place in public discussion, can receive only brief consideration in this history. The colonial ventures of the recent period may in time bring forth the commercial results which their projectors promise; up to the present the results have been small. Until far into the century European governments showed little interest in the expansion of their people or the extension of their power in distant parts of the world. Their attention was absorbed by the problems of domestic and foreign policy in Europe. The colonial question, however, like every other political and economic question, assumed a new aspect under the changes wrought by steam and the telegraph. Distant continents were, by those changes, brought nearer to European capitals than parts of the home territory had been before. The immense increase of transmarine commerce which marked the latter part of the century was carried on largely by English-speaking people, and seemed to promise to states of the Continent similar results if they could spread broadcast their people and power as England had done. The best parts of the world had already been occupied, it is true, but great stretches of territory were still free from claimants of European descent. France began to raise her flag over new territory in Africa, Asia, and Oceanica; the Belgian king established his authority in the region of the Congo; the movement quickened to a scramble in the ‘80’s; and soon all parts of the habitable world except certain countries in Asia and Africa had been brought under the sovereignty of European powers. The colonial question—what to do with these possessions now that they have been secured, how to govern them—has not yet become a part of history; it is still a question of the day.
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS
1. Prepare a chronological table of the wars of the nineteenth century, from a manual of recent history.
2. The English navy during the Napoleonic wars. [Social England, vol. 5, pp. 391-401, 541-544; the sea stories of Captain Marryat.]
3. The Continental System and its effects. [Levi, Hist. Brit. commerce, part 2, chap. 4, reprinted in Rand, Ec. hist., chap. 5; Rose in Kirkpatrick, Lectures on hist. of nineteenth century, Cambridge, 1902, 59-78.]
4. Effect of Napoleon’s commercial measures on British finances. [Audrey Cunningham, British credit in the last Napoleonic war, Cambridge, 1910.]
5. The question of neutral rights. [Schuyler, Amer. diplomacy, chap. 7; Reeves, Two conceptions of the freedom of the seas, in Amer. Hist. Rev., April, 1917, 22: 535-543.]
6. The movement for independence in South America, and its commercial results. [Helmolt, Hist. of the world, vol. 1; History of South America, transl. by Adnah D. Jones, London (N. Y., Macmillan), 1899.]
7. Free navigation of European rivers. [Schuyler, Amer. diplomacy, chap. 6, p. 345 ff.]
8. The Sound Dues. [Same, p. 306 ff.].