Empire-building, or colonizing peoples, lands, and their resources in order to fuel the development of European capitalist economies didn't really take off until the 1880's. Between 1880 and 1914, "most of the world outside of Europe and the Americas . . . came under the formal rule or informal political dominance of a handful of European states" (Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Empire).

Why this new form of dominance? There are economic as well as social/political explanations. The economic explanation goes like this: Imperialism developed when capitalist production hit its limits in Europe. The rise of states meant the rise of national economies. These economies were capitalist.

Let's back up. What is capitalism?

Capitalism is a way of organizing economic relations in a society (this is called a "mode of production"). Capitalism involves industrial production, market distribution, wage-labor (among most people), and private ownership of the means of production (machinery and financial resourcealled "capital") by a small class of people. It is historically specific, arising in Europe (first in England and Holland, then in France, the US, and beyond) in the 18th-century, and picking up steam and spreading globally thereafter.

Capitalism requires constant economic growth. So when these national economies hit their limits at home, and they couldn't expand into neighboring European states, they had to go abroad. This happened simultaneously for several European states. Thus began a competition for control of markets (i.e. and, resources, and people) around the globe.

What's crazy is that capitalism didn't spread because people needed money. It spread because people had too much money. Capitalist production produced a surplus in capital, too much to be invested into European national economies. Capitalists went looking for new places to invest (i.e. grow their money). But they were nervous about investing in places that weren't within their political control the way that the European states were. What if they put gobs of money into a mine and then someone else came along and took control of it or destroyed it? So they brought their states along to protect their money. How do states protect things? Through military means. So army and police were exported. And over and over again in a very short period of time, most of the world outside of Europe began specializing in producing one or two exports. The role of the colonies was very clear – supply raw materials for the European state, and don't compete with their economy.

Some people don't go for this economic explanation. They believe that while European markets definitely benefited from colonialist expansion, the price they paid in taxes to send their military overseas meant they didn't turn much of a profit overall. Critics also point out that state protection didn't follow capitalist investment nearly as clearly as the model would lead us to believe. So if the economic return on imperialism wasn't worth all the work – why did it come to take over most of the world?

Some say it was really power, or control of power, that was on the line. Nation-states had started developing, official "ethnic-linguistic" natinalism was rising, and at this time nationalism was still expansionist – taking over as much territory as possible. But remember – during this same time, democratization and electoralization were spreading all over Europe, not to mention socialism. State rulers desperately needed unity and loyalty from their citizens.

So while imperialist policies may not have brought riches to the European states, politicians told the people that expansion was going to grow the state economy, and thus improve their lives. The middle strata of society got behind this idea – it sounded like a solution to their problems. The Great Depression had led the middle classes to view national economies as competitors. Thus they came to associate their personal welfare with national expansion, and eventually, with international war.

The working class didn't buy it. They were suspicious of increased taxes to pay for military overseas and the price of wars that pitted working class people of different nations against each other. But their opposition to imperialism wasn't very loud, and the process continued.

Many Europeans were successfully swayed towards imperialism by the alleged moral good that they would be bringing to the "uncivilized" masses of Africa and Asia. Christian hegemony worked hand-in-hand with ethno-linguistic nationalism to bring most of the world under imperialist control. The relationship between imperialism and racism is a bit of a chicken-and-egg question: which came first? Really, they reinforced each other. European rulers needed unity, even more so once their citizens were spread all around the world in colonies. The colonists' only link back to their European states was "common descent." So the rulers played this card as much as they could. Common descent was intertwined with the civilizing mission, and racism as we know it was born. As Eric Hobsbawm says, "every full-fledged ideology has been created, continued, and improved as a political weapon and not as a theoretical doctrine." Racism became "the main ideological weapon of imperialistic politics."

And so the competition between states for control abroad and prestige at home developed at a rapid pace. And a lot of European toes got stepped on and the world wars began . . .