Imperial rivalry

Inter-imperialist rivalry

The extension of European control over Africa and Asia added a further dimension to the rivalry and mutual suspicion which characterised international diplomacy in the decades preceding World War I. France's seizure of Tunisia (1881) initiated fifteen years of tension with Italy, which had hoped to take the country and which retaliated by allying with Germany and waging a decade-long tariff war.

The most striking conflicts of the era were the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, each signalling the advent of a new imperial great power. But British policy towards the Boer republics and German actions in the Far East contributed to the dramatic policy shift which in the mid-1900s aligned hitherto isolationist Britain with first Japan in an alliance, and then with France and Russia in the looser Entente. German efforts to break the Entente resulted in a series of diplomatic crises which deepened animosities in the years preceding World War I. For details, see Tangier Crisis and Agadir Crisis.

It may be debated whether the New imperialism itself contributed in large measure to the subsequent global conflict, except to the extent that it broadened the geographical area of military operations. Both the European divisions of the 1870s onward and the accelerated colonial drive of the period can be said to derive from the same causes: strategic conditions, aggressive competing nationalisms and the economic and political imperatives of the new mass society.

The Anglo-French Entente

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