Imperialism is a policy or ideology of extending rule over peoples and other countries,[2] for extending political and economic access, power and control, often through employing hard power, especially military force, but also soft power. While related to the concepts of colonialism and empire, imperialism is a distinct concept that can apply to other forms of expansion and many forms of government.
Looking at the empires, profitability was mixed. At first, planners expected that colonies would provide an excellent captive market for manufactured items. Apart from the Indian subcontinent, this was seldom true. By the 1890s, imperialists saw the economic benefit primarily in the production of inexpensive raw materials to feed the domestic manufacturing sector. Overall, Great Britain did very well in terms of profits from India, especially Mughal Bengal, but not from most of the rest of its empire. To understand the scale of the wealth transfer from India from 1765 to 1938 an estimated $45 Trillion was taken. [17] This is 15-times the $3 Trillion (2019) annual GNI of the UK. The Netherlands did very well in the East Indies. Germany and Italy got very little trade or raw materials from their empires. France did slightly better. The Belgian Congo was notoriously profitable when it was a capitalistic rubber plantation owned and operated by King Leopold II as a private enterprise. However, scandal after scandal regarding very badly mistreated labour led the international community to force the government of Belgium to take it over in 1908, and it became much less profitable.
Imperialism was a policy that changed the very nature of relations and politics between the different regions of the Earth. It interconnected many economies with each other, but it also resulted in the occupation and suppression of other nations, exploitation of labor and resources, and deadly mistakes. However, especially the British, spent a lot of money propping up the economies of her colonies and making sure that their was good infrastructure to move around the materials.
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