Episode 109: The Age of Imperialism, or “Allow me to ruin the Jungle Book for you”

(upbeat music) Welcome back to the Anti-Social Studies Podcast, a place for people who wish they had stayed awake in high school. Last time we explored the political revolutions set off by the enlightenment all across the West and another kind of revolution that was more industrial. Today, we're going back to the age of imperialism, or as I like to call it, allow me to ruin the jungle book for you. (upbeat music) To be clear, this is going on at the same time as the political revolutions and industrial revolution from last episode. But we'll look today at just how Europe was able to conquer the world, how they formed their new empires and what legacies they left behind. We'll also talk about the impact this had all over the world, specifically in Egypt, South Africa, India, Cuba, and Hawaii. Fair warning, if you're not a fan of white people being the bad guy in a story, then you might not want to listen to this episode. But actually, now to think about it, you might just want to stop listening to the rest of the season. This is the anti-social studies. I'm Emily Glinkler, settle in and let's go back in time. (upbeat music) Act one, imperialism from above. Europe was able to conquer the Americas first because at the risk of being insensitive and oversimplifying, the Americas were the easiest to conquer. They didn't have immunities to a lot of old world diseases since they didn't share the same domesticated animals and so they were already seriously weakened before most colonists even showed up. But African, Asia were different. They had highly centralized governments, like the Aztec and Inca, yeah, but they also had been interacting across Afro-Eurasia for thousands of years. It wasn't until Western Europe gained such superior technology that they were finally able to fully conquer these places. And the Industrial Revolution gave Europe that leg up. Take guns, for example. Before this time period, guns were loaded by putting three separate pieces down the barrel. You put the gunpowder, the wadding, and then the actual bullet. At this point, it was just a round ball of lead. These guns were really inaccurate and they took a long time to reload between each shot. But as the Industrial Revolution pressed on, people started making guns more efficient. They created the bullet cartridge that effectively had all three parts wrapped up in one. They reshaped the bullets to be pointed and a lot more accurate coming out of the barrel. And eventually, they created repeating rifles that could shoot more than once before they had to be reloaded. The first machine gun was invented in 1884, the same year that all of Europe sat down in Berlin and started carving up Africa on a map. The Industrial Revolution didn't just make imperialism easier. It was also the main reason for imperialism. Competing European countries needed access to more and more raw materials to fuel their industrial advancement. The American colonies were fine for sugar and tobacco, but Africa had mineral wealth, gold and tin, and they had other resources like timber and rubber, which is becoming necessary for machine parts and eventually tires for bicycles and then early cars. So by the mid-1800s, Europe had the motivation and the ability to fully take over the great continent of Africa. And on top of that, the fact that the continent had been seriously weakened for about 300 years due to the slave trade and the internal fighting it created. Most of its young men who would fight the Europeans off had already either been enslaved or died in war. But still, there wasn't a political organization left that most of the European powers decided they didn't need to necessarily completely colonize Africa the way Britain had done North America, for example. They just needed to send enough officials down to oversee the extraction of natural resources. And so they relied a lot on Africans to rule each other. This is important, but we'll come back to it in a second. So how did Europe decide who got what part of Africa? Remember the Congress of Vienna earlier this century? The main powers got together and decided to balance each other's power so that an Napoleon would never happen again. They did the same thing with Africa. They sat down at a conference table in Berlin, the Berlin conference, and negotiated for territory in Africa. Obviously, no African people were present. That would be insane. To be clear, Europe had already been scrambling for Africa for decades now, but in 1884, 1885, this formalized the process and helped avoid conflict between European nations over borders. This was a really big event for some of the newcomers in Europe, especially a young nation called Germany. It had been formed out of the remnants of pressure and parts of the late Holy Roman Empire and was turned into a military power by Otto von Bismarck in the mid 1800s. Side note, our dog's name is Otto von Klankler, 'cause you know, that's who I am. They relate to the conquering game, but don't you or a Germany will make up for last time. What ensued at the Berlin conference was basically a massive and way more consequential game of settlers of Ketan, where France got longest road, England won largest army, and Belgium was just sitting on a bunch of sixes and eights on rubber. But Germany was scrappy and buying up all those dev cards to work its way into the game. Anyway, Africa gets carved up as part of European empires, and here are a few names and people that you may have heard of, but totally forgotten who they are. First, King Leopold. He's the king of Belgium and he's a pretty bad dude. He's the one who kind of started the soul scramble for Africa thing, 'cause he ventured into the interior under the pretext of philanthropy and discovery. He starts establishing claims in the interior of the Congo, which is why everyone freaks out and says that the Berlin conference before chaos ensues. There's a fantastic slash terrible book about the Congo called King Leopold's Ghost. Basically, Belgium allowed for most of the land of the Congo to be controlled by private companies who were allowed to do whatever they wanted with no legal repercussions in the pursuit of natural rubber. These companies created military forces of native people to keep control over the workers, no sorry, not workers, enslaved people. And the white company men were basically allowed to do whatever they wanted with people there. It was like Westworld, but a million times worse because these were actual human beings, not dreamy James Marsden robots. Slaves who didn't meet their quotas would have their hands cut off and millions died of disease. So there's that. Another guy you've probably heard of is Cecil Rhodes. He was a mining magnate and prime minister of the Cape Colony, which is South Africa in the 1890s. His company also founded the country of Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe and Zambia, and they named it after him. Cecil Rhodes basically controlled all of Southern Africa and its diamond mines, out of which he formed the Debires Diamond Company, which still today controls 35% of the global diamond trade. Cecil Rhodes discovered so many diamonds in Southern Africa that there was concern that they would no longer be valuable. So his company did two things. First, he monopolized the market and convinced everyone that diamonds were rare. He took control of basically all the diamond mines and then sold them strategically to jack up the price. The other thing his company did was figure out a way to stabilize the market so that there would always be a demand for diamonds. Now, this part happens way after Rhodes died, but it's really interesting so I'm gonna talk about it anyway. They heard an American ad agency in 1938 to figure out how to get regular people, not just the super rich to buy diamonds. And the key was they needed to figure out a way to make people never wanna sell them. How could they connect diamonds with an emotion so that they would be kept forever and off the market not flooding the supply? And thus, the diamond engagement ring was born because you know, a diamond is forever. Back to imperialism, economic control like we saw across Sub-Saharan Africa was the most common type of imperialism. However, there were other situations where major powers would exert extreme influence over a country without actually officially controlling it. Let's look at two examples, Egypt and Cuba. Here comes Napoleon again, Stirrin the Pot and Kazim Chaos. As part of Napoleon's attempt to like be Julius Caesar, I guess, he invaded Egypt and France occupied the country for a few years. While he was there, Napoleon began a study of this ancient canal that had connected the Mediterranean to the Red Sea that had been around since like the BCE times. And eventually, a French company built the Suez Canal on its remains, the new finish in 1869. The canal was controlled by a private company with the majority of the shares owned by the French and a minority owned by the country of Egypt. How nice. But financial troubles caused Egypt have to sell its shares to the British. And now let's pause for a second to talk about how the US Civil War totally screwed over Egypt. So, Egypt had just asserted its full independence from Napoleonic France and the struggling Ottoman Empire and it had a new national leader named Muhammad Ali, not the boxer. He was trying to catch Egypt's economy up with the West and he was doing it through one of Egypt's best exports, cotton. His economy was doing really well, especially because most of the cotton from the American South was not able to get to the rest of the world in the 1860s, thanks to the embargo by the North during our civil war. This drove up cotton prices worldwide, helping places like Egypt and India. Muhammad Ali spent that cotton money like it was going out of style. He was trying to industrialize westernize, but then in 1865, when the Civil War ended, American cotton flooded the market and wrecked the Egyptian economy. Whoops. So now, the British and the French co-own and manage the Suez Canal in technically independent Egypt. This gets the access to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean trade and it's going to be super important. So much so that the British are going to fight a war over it when the Egyptians finally take control of it in the 1950s. But if you've seen season two of the crown, then you already know this. Another example of a western country having influence, but not technically complete control, is the United States in Cuba. So to back up a little bit, the United States in the first half of the 1800s was really just closing its doors and trying to catch up to Europe. But they wanted to make sure that Europe didn't get too close or too involved in our hemisphere. That's how we started to see it. So in the early 1800s, we issued a thing called the Monroe Doctrine. This basically said stay out of it. our backyard. If foreign powers intervene or try to take over parts of the Americas, which remember Hidalges become independent, Mexico, South America, Haiti, then the US would treat it like an attack on its own soil. We made it look like we were saying this to protect the new democracies of Latin America, but really we also wanted a lot of that land for ourselves eventually. So in this context, manifest destiny and the Mexican-American war should be seen through the lens of American imperialism. We were trying to compete with Europe by gaining more land and resources, but our first foray into full-scale imperialism where we attempt to gain colonies not just more land that's annexed as part of our country is the Spanish-American war in 1898. Okay, important point. We are the only ones really who call it the Spanish-American war. It's really the Cuban war for independence. The Cubans have been fighting the Spanish for years and we're doing pretty well, which freaked us out. You see, we had always assumed that Cuba, it's like 90 miles from the shores in Florida, right? We had always assumed that Cuba would eventually be part of the United States. We would eventually buy it from Spain like we did Florida. But now it looks like they were going to get full independence and that cannot happen. Using the accidental explosion of the USS Maine as our excuse, we get involved in the war on the side of the Cubans helping them gain independence from Spain. You're welcome. But by doing this, we insert ourselves into their political process and, quote-unquote, "help them write a new constitution that happens to give us a ton of privileges." How nice of us. We inserted a thing called the "plat amendment into the Cuban constitution" that said, "among other things, that US troops would only leave Cuba after they signed it." And this amendment basically said that the US could intervene in Cuban affairs whenever the US believed that Cuban independence was being threatened. But you might be asking, wouldn't the US intervening also threaten Cuban independence? Shut up. Stop asking questions. Just sign the document. A few years later, we also forced them to sign an agreement giving us an indefinite lease on Guantanamo Bay, where we set up a naval base in prison. Fun fact, the current Cuban government sees this as an illegal military occupation and they actually haven't cashed any of the rent checks we send them every year. Out of the Spanish-American war, the US also got a few former Spanish colonies as our own, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. So now, the US has officially entered the age of imperialism as well. But instead of just focusing on the conquerors, let's now look at the impact of imperialism on the conquered places. Act 2. The pros and cons of imperialism. Yeah, I'm just kidding. It's all cons. So every year, when we talk about imperialism in class, some kid will inevitably say something like, "Well, yeah, but imperialism was good for Africa. They transformed the economy and built a ton of infrastructure that they didn't have before, like roads." And as the teacher, what I say is, "Well, you're right. There were some physical improvements made to the land that can still be used after the Europeans left, but remember, it wasn't really in great condition and was only built to extract natural resources." But here's what I want to say to that kid. Seriously? Really? You're saying that Africa should be grateful because the Europeans left a few roads behind? And what you don't think that the successors of the great post-classical trading kingdoms of Mali, Great Zimbabwe or the Suhili states would have eventually gotten around to building roads and bridges? Remember Montse Mousa? Yeah, he's the richest guy in the history of the planet. I think he could have built a few roads if Europe would have just left them alone. Oh, and another thing. I mean, I would argue that the Africans would have built way better infrastructure that would have actually served their people. Unlike the Europeans, who were just building it to get out diamonds and rubber in a few human hands. Oh, calm down, Mali. It's okay. It's okay. They're just teenagers. They don't know any better. You have to teach them. All right. Imperialism leaves behind a few really important legacies around the world, but for today, I'm going to focus mostly on Africa. First, yeah, it does leave behind infrastructure like roads and bridges, but not really a lot that will serve the people of Africa. They only build hospitals, for example, in the cities where white Europeans are living, and schools are not a priority because they don't need an educated workforce to go work in the diamond mines. Sure, Christian missionaries do some of this, but not nearly to the extent that they would need to to serve the entire continent. And the way the Europeans structured their African colonies was basically to set up a shell government, bare bones infrastructure that was just enough to organize labor and get natural resources out. And it all got funneled through the colonial administration and eventually to the other country. And this can be important later because when African nations get their independence, this is still the way the government is set up. So whoever takes charge is basically stepping in and taking the place of the entire British empire, for example. All of the wealth of that country flows through them, and so they have an enormous amount of power. Some leaders will be George Washington's and not take advantage of their positions, but more of them unfortunately will be Napoleon's, who turn into strong men that suck their national economies dry, but more on that in the 20th century. The other big legacy of imperialism in Africa are the borders. When the European sat down at the Berlin conference and drew lines on a map, they were not taking into consideration the Africans at all. Daedard borders that separated one ethnic group into two or three new colonies, or even worse, that forced two historic enemies into the same colony. Africa is still reeling from the legacy of these boundaries. Just look at the genocidal Rwanda in the 1990s between the Hutus and the Tutsis. The Europeans made this problem worse by intentionally favoring one group over another, so the divide and conquer strategy. Often they would take a minority group and put them in charge. The minority group was grateful for the power, and so they served the Europeans, often with a lot of brutality against a majority group that might have oppressed them in the past. So again, when African nations get independence in the 20th century, they're often going to eliminate the Africans who served in the colonial government, seeing them as traitors. And this makes sense, but they're also getting rid of the only people who have actual governing experience. So, all of this begs the question, how could so many people think that this was a good idea for so long? And the easy answer is racism, and in a surprise turn of events, the easy answer is also the right answer, its racism. The Europeans in the 1800s truly believed that they were superior to most other places on earth, and from their perspective, why wouldn't they? They had the Renaissance, the scientific revolution, the enlightenment, exploration, conquest, the industrial revolution, they were controlling most the world. And people throughout history have always wanted to see themselves and their people as better than everyone else. Look at the middle kingdom in China, or xenophobia against non-greaks in the classical age, and Roman attitudes against the barbarians, or even the original exclusion of non-Arab's from Islam. It always happens and shouldn't surprise us, but what makes this time so much more extreme is that Europe has way superior technology, science, and communication to back them up. Okay, I want to make this point very clear. From here on out, basically every time I say the word science, just imagine I'm doing air quotes around it. Because what the Europeans are going to consider scientific in the 1800s is in no way actually based in fact, but they believe it is. The first part of this is scientific racism. Since the 1600s, there's existed this idea that the world can be divided into a few main races, each with their own distinct physical and mental attributes that keep them separate from each other. European scientists, again, air quotes, look around the world and they notice something that people of color tend to be doing most of the manual labor. And also look at that, a lot of them are less educated than say Europeans. They observe this fact as scientists and conclude that people of color are not as intelligent and are better suited to physical work than the other races. Now you might be thinking, but didn't the Europeans put the people of color into those manual labor jobs? Didn't they create this system that they are now using as scientific fact to justify? And if you're thinking that, then good job. You're paying attention. And also you would have been a terrible imperialist. So this idea of separate races with separate traits already exist. And in walks Charles Darwin. Now to be clear, I am not using air quotes when I say that Charles Darwin was a scientist. I have no idea whether or not Charles Darwin was a racist. I've never met the guy. He just wanted to study birds or turtles or whatever, but his ideas propel scientific racism into full-scale social Darwinism. Okay. Darwin proposed two big ideas, evolution and survival of the fittest. Basically, the more fit species will adapt, evolve and survive over time while the weaker species will die out. He was writing about animals, but scientific racists look at his work published in 1859, just 30 years before the Berlin Conference in Africa. And they look around at the world as it existed in that moment and they went, "aha, it's science." These people began to argue that industrialization and imperialism were just proof that white Europeans and Americans were just the more evolved species. Notice that we're now thinking of races as different species, not all just human beings. It was natural that they would evolve to dominate the other inferior races. And they also did a thing that is insanely racist and really requires a visual, please check out antisocialstudies.org after the episode. So as these ideas about evolution got established, Darwin also proposed that apes and human beings evolved from the same ancestors. Yeah, we're going here and I hate it. So imperialist propose that because black people's darker skin looks more like monkeys than a white person does, they must be further behind in the evolutionary process. Oh, it's bad. There's a diagram from an American textbook in the 1850s called the Types of Mankind that shows in succession the heads of a chimpanzee, an African, and a European. What this diagram is suggesting is that the Europeans are the most highly evolved, the furthest away from the apes, and thus they're the logical leaders of the world. Oh, and also, the European head in the diagram? It's just a drawing of a statue of Apollo. Yeah, the Greek god. Talk about a superior decomplers. So these ideas justify, to many Europeans, the terrible things that are done to non-white people across the world during the age of imperialism. And keep in mind that people were taught this as scientific fact for generations. Think about all the things that were taught today and how most of us just accepted it must be true. I mean, I could have made all this stuff up, but you trust me because I'm a teacher and I have a podcast. And I'll just give these to anyone. It's also important to note that there were Europeans who rebelled and rejected against this idea. We have works of satire making fun of the so-called white man's burden and recognizing that this is a really terrible way to look at the world, but they're in the minority right now. So an artifact that hits this point home for me is a British children's book that was published in 1899 called an ABC for Baby Patriots. I post a link on my website, but it has pages that say things like, "A is the army that dies for the queen. It's the very best army that ever was seen." B stands for Battles by which England's name has forever been covered in glory and fame. C is for colonies, rightly we boast, that of all the great nations Great Britain has most. Yeah. But it gets worse. On this next page, it shows two European kings pulling a line of African kings with chains around their necks. The last king in line just looks like a straight-up ape. And remember, this is a children's book. K is for kings once warlike and hottie. Great Britain subdued them because they'd been naughty. What? Did you just call grown African kings naughty? And you said that they were warlike and hottie? They're the ones who just conquered your entire continent with guns, shipped men off to be slaves on plantations, and made the ones who stayed working minds to get their hands chopped off. Oh, what? Europeans truly believed that they were civilizing an uncivilized continent. They were bringing them technology and Christianity and general goodness. And I'm sorry, but the US is not exempt from this. If you've ever seen the famous painting about Manifest Destiny, I'm sure your eighth-grade US history teacher showed this to you at some point. It's a white woman and a flowing Toga floating westward. Behind her in the east, where the US is, it's light and there are trains and ships and technology. In front of her, in the unconquered west, it's darker and there are natives and Mexican people. And she's caring with her two things, a telegraph cable and a Bible. Oh, and you'll know books like the Jungle Book in Tarzan were written to enhance this message, right? Like, Mogli is the only human surrounded by animals in the jungle. But he can dominate them because he has access to technology, fire. In the Disney movie, they even thought it was a good idea to add in a song where the orangutan sings, "I want to be like you, walk like you, talk like you." And Tarzan is a guy who gets saved when a white woman shows up with a book. It's that simple. Alright, let's move on before I lose my mind. But think about the impact that this message will have on generations of young Europeans. They grew up believing that they are inherently better than the rest of the world, physically, mentally, scientifically. Keep in mind, Adolf Hitler is growing up in Vienna and in Austria in the late 1800s during this time period. They obviously haven't learned their world history and realized that every region of the world has had a golden age and a high point where they easily could have argued that they were the best. Europe just happened to have theirs at a time when technology and information was advancing so quickly that they could force the rest of the world to acknowledge their golden age. [Music] Act 3. Resistance to Imperialism So why would colonized places let this happen to them? Or as Kanye might ask, "Why would people choose slavery?" Ugh, Kanye. They didn't just let this happen to them, obviously. They resisted every step of the way, but ultimately Europe was too advanced technologically and the colonized places were fragmented in various groups that were pitted against each other. In Africa, there was resistance all across the continent. For example, in southern Africa, the Zulu were a tribe that controlled a lot of land where diamonds had just been discovered. Dutch settlers had been in southern Africa for a few hundred years now. They were a bit called bowers. And they had competed with the Zulu for land, but now that there's diamonds, the British are stepping in. They started a war, and early in the Anglo-Zulu War, the Zulu won a major battle which terrified the British into investing the full force of their military into southern Africa. They eventually subdued the Zulu and will compete with the Dutch bowers for control of South Africa, ultimately combining forces to create the white supremacist, apartheid government, that lasted South Africa until 1991. Also, if you have a dad, he probably loves the Zulu. I know mine does. Hey dad. But the biggest success story in Africa as far as resistance was Ethiopia. Remember, Ethiopia was a unified Christian kingdom. When Italy was a late-comer to the game, they were trying to take up the scraps that no one else wanted to mess with. When Italy invaded, they were surprised that Ethiopian king Menelec II was actually supported by former rival tribes against the European incursion. And on top of this, they were backed by another Orthodox Christian power, Russia. Italy will eventually conquer Ethiopia for a few years before World War II, but the first Italian Ethiopian war is considered the most decisive defeat of Europeans by an indigenous army. Now, I've spent most of this episode in Africa, but let's move to Asia for a minute. In India, the British East India Company had been slowly creeping into the continent, although the Islamic Mughal Empire was still technically in charge. The company, in order to protect its officials and goods, built up its own personal army, made mostly of sea poise, or Indian soldiers who served the British. According to an oversimplified history textbook, the soldiers or sea poise eventually rebelled when the British introduced new cartridges for the Enfield rifles that were rumored to be greased with cow and pig fat. So soldiers had to tear open the cartridges with their teeth, so if this rumor was true, then it would be offensive to both Muslims who don't eat pork and Hindus who don't eat beef. Was this rumor true? I have no idea. If so, then it seems really stupid on the part of the British should not realize this, but then again, we've seen how ignorant and insensitive to other cultures they were at this time, so set outside their realm of possibility. But it doesn't really matter if it's true, because the rumors sparked a lot more serious concerns across India. Many people, especially nobles and former rulers, were frustrated at the growing power of the British East India Company in their country. They had taken over more land and forced the government to implement harsh taxes and other social reforms, so the sea poise supported by the Mughal princes rebelled. It's important to note that some Indians fought for the British, and there was a large majority that just stayed out of it, but the rebellion was eventually put down after a considerable amount of effort from the British and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Indians. The impact of this sea poise rebellion was big. The British became convinced that they couldn't just control India through its economy, they would need to assert full political and military control. This is similar what happened after the Zulu war, so after the sea poise rebellion in 1857, the British kick out the Mughal ruling family and create the British Raj, and for the next 100 years, India will be a direct colony of England. The other part of the sea poise rebellion that I find really interesting is its name, or what we've decided to call it. If you look it up online, you'll see that it's alternately called the sea poise rebellion, the sea poise mutiny, or the Indian rebellion of 1857, and whenever you're talking about a rebellion, revolution, revolt, what you choose to call it is really telling about your point of view. The British would call this event the sea poise mutiny, because that implies that it was an illegal overthrow of the person in charge, the captain of the ship, so to speak. So calling an mutiny puts the blame on the sea poise. But a sea poise might call it the sea poise rebellion, because a rebellion sounds much more politically legitimate, and it brings up the idea that they are rebelling against something bad, which puts the blame more on the British. But a true Indian nationalist would call it the Indian rebellion of 1857, explaining the scope beyond just the company's military. So now it affects the entire country, and people who wanted complete independence will think of this event as the beginning of the long independence movement that ends with Gandhi. Finally, let's talk about how the US got Hawaii. I'm sorry, I know I'm probably about to ruin someone's summer vacation, but it's my job, I can't help it. So we took a page from the British East India Company, and we first sent in some wealthy sugar planters to buy a land on the island. After they had gained considerable economic and political power, they forced the king of Hawaii to sign the bayonet constitution. That sounds consensual, right? This limited the power of the Hawaiian monarchy, and they also signed the rest of Procity Treaty, which gave commercial privileges to US businesses and granted the US control over Pearl Harbor. This is really similar to what we're going to do in Japan, but more on that next episode. So when the Hawaiian King dies, and his sister, Queen Liliwokalani, takes the throne, she takes steps to restore the power back to the monarchy. But that's not okay with the United States. So at the same time, the US Congress has proposed the McKinley tariff that would raise taxes on foreign imports by 50% including sugar, again with the taxes. American sugar planters in Hawaii realized that their businesses could be destroyed if they had to pay this extra tariff. Unless they could somehow make their land part of the United States and thus not subject to the tariff. You catch one on the throne down? You know, it's almost as if this is what the US Congress intended when they proposed this new tariff. So in 1893, a group of American businessmen backed by the US minister to Hawaii and a group of Marines staged a coup and overthrew the Hawaiian Queen. They created the Republic of Hawaii and elected Sanford Doll as the first president. His cousin, James Doll, then bought up a bunch of pineapple plantations and founded the Doll Food Company. And Lillio Kalani and her heir and niece traveled to Washington and these two women spent years fighting for the reinstatement of the Hawaiian monarchy but to no avail. Funny enough, William McKinley, the guy that had created the tariff that sort of started this mess, was elected president and he annexed to Hawaii in 1898. Side note, as a Texan, I have always been told that we are the only state that can fly our flag at the same height as the US flag because we were the only state that was once our own Republic or country but like what about Hawaii? I guess that's like a Texas thing that we just want to be better than ever now, but it still will be yes. And actually, that should really just be the tagline for this whole episode. Imperialism, it's total BS. So the West, the US and Europe, has firmly established itself as conquerors of huge parts of the world. We've talked about their interventions in Africa and parts of Asia, but what about the big guys? What about those massive land-based empires and new young countries that we've been talking about for a while? The Ottoman Empire, Russia, China, and Japan? Let's see how well they fare in this battle royale between the West and the rest of the world. To be continued. For notes, pictures about some of the things I mentioned and a transcript of the entire episode, check out my page at www.anti-socialstudies.org. Join me next time on the anti-social studies as we explore the modern era in the East or knock knock. It's the West. And don't forget that if you like what I'm doing, please subscribe to my podcast so you'll know in the next episodes or app. And if you really like what I'm doing, then go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts and give me your review. Thanks. [BLANK_AUDIO]