Nationalistic Empire
This last empire type was associated with the vigorous expansive
stages of 19th century industrialism, which required omnivorous supplies
of raw materials, high use of energy, and expanding markets. This empire
type emerged just before political independence.
Spatial Patterns: Nationalistic obsession with controlling maximum territory rather than merely peoples or wealth-producing powers.
Countries: All European colonial powers participated in this form of empire building.
Economics: Railroads were built to link the interior of these empires to the older European settlements for territorial control and commercial dominance.
Locations: By the 19th century, European colonial powers created this type of empire.
Indigenous populations were pushed to near extinction. Europeans created sharp social segregation with the native populations based on inherent cultural superiority based on biology and cultural habits of religion and social behavior (racism).
The result: complex political boundaries were drawn which bore virtually no relationship to indigenous cultural areas. For example, throughout Africa distinctive cultural groups were separated from each other as different colonies, and later, countries were created. Much of the political instability in the Third World today has roots in the arbitrary creation of nation-states, which existed neither in cultural composition nor location before European colonialism.
Strange geographies often resulted from European colonial rule --
one of the strangest occurred in Namibia.
Nigeria and Sudan are other examples of how European
colonialism contributes to current political instability. Very different
ethnic and religious groups -- commonly ancient rivals -- were forced to
live within European created nationalistic empires.
Africa's religious
fault-line, between a predominantly Muslim north and a more pluralist but
largely Christian south,
cuts across the Sahel, dividing several countries.
Sudan has suffered decades of religion-based civil war. In
Nigeria,
the massacre of thousands of Christian Igbos in Kano and other
northern cities in 1966 was one of the factors that
led to the Biafran civil war. Relations between
Nigeria's north and south remain unstable, because religious and ethnic divisions overlap within one country.