The Tea Act was meant to aide the failing East India Trading Company, which had massive overstocks of tea and other goods in London. Parliament therefore banned the sale of these goods from any other source. While this actually drove down the price of these goods in the colonies, the colonists resented the British attempting to regulate their economy in this way.

The Ottoman Empire fell at the end of WWI and became what is known today as Turkey. Using the powerful and historic port city of Istanbul as its capital, the Ottoman Empire extended over a vast area in the Middle East. This imperial power ruled lands as far off as in the horn of Africa and up into the Caucasus region. While the Ottoman Empire existed for several centuries, its power began to wain in the 19th century when it couldn’t compete with Western imperial powers and fell when it aligned itself with Germany in WWI.

European nations had the technology to dominate the nations of Africa and Asia for centuries by the time the Industrial Revolution happened. The Industrial Revolution simply made dominating them easier. What it did do was to make Europe need more raw materials to make their goods, and need people to sell those goods to.

European imperialism and colonization came at great detriment to the indigenous people of the land they conquered. The justification for this practice was that they were bringing "civilization" to these "backward," "savage" people. This led to the use of missionaries and religious conversion, the use of European legal systems, forced cultural integration, and new technologies. Unfortunately, the "civilization" brought by the Europeans had no reasonable place in it for the inhabitants of the land they conquered, indigenous groups were violently oppressed, and in many cases murdered on a large scale.

Europe had no interest in creating stable governments in Africa. Rather, they wanted to impose their own governments on the people of Africa. They did, however, say that it was the duty of white men to rule over people of color since they felt themselves superior to them. They also claimed they were doing good by attempting to stop the slave trade in Africa and the transatlantic slave trade.

The nineteenth century in the United States was a century of isolationism. America largely ignored the rest of the world, and the rest of the world largely ignored America. This all changed with American victory in the Spanish-American War in 1898. This led to the emergence of the United States as an imperial power as America took control of countries like the Philippines and Cuba.

The United States declared war against Spain in 1898 and the war ended in 1899. The United States easily defeated the Spanish fleets in Havana and Manila. The United States took control of these colonies from the Spanish despite the wish many local populations had to be independent. The Filipinos led a revolt against the U.S. starting in 1902. The justification for bringing these colonies under U.S. protection was to deter other powers such as the Japanese from extending their reach. This war marked the beginning of the United States’ imperial ambitions.

While there were many gold rushes in American history, there was never a truly large amount of gold in the United States. South Africa, however, is gifted with an abundance of it. This gold, along with the diamonds discovered 20 years earlier, made the British Empire incredibly wealthy, as South Africa was still part of the British Empire then.

Between 1865-1909 King Leopold II ruled Congo Free State as a megalomaniacal foreign ruler. During his control of this territory, he approved for the use of brutal tactics to force the local populations to extract rubber, ivory, and minerals from the land. There are estimates that between 2 and 10 million people died in Congo Free State during King Leopold II’s rule.

The Cape to Cairo Railway was the brainchild of British imperialist, Cecil Rhodes. The railway was worked on in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but was never completed. The British faced numerous challenges in completing the railway including climate, landscape, and indigenous resistance. While many segments of the railway were completed, the dream of a single railway that could extend from Egypt to South Africa was never achieved.