As you learned in the Windows On (Colonized Europeans: The Jews and the Irish) box on page 711, European colonization was not limited to peoples living outside of Europe. This was not unique to the nineteenth century. Majority populations throughout Europe had dominated and persecuted ethnic minorities for hundreds of years. However, the question of the place of minorities in politics and society took on a different flavor in the context of the larger project of nineteenth-century Western expansion. A renewed sense of the superiority of European civilization, combined with intensified national and racial consciousness, brought new urgency to the desire of many Europeans to assimilate or eliminate minority cultures. Assess the evidence relating to Western expansion in the nineteenth century described below and then respond to the essay question that follows. Take a close look at the maps of European expansion on pages 691, 694, and 704. What common factors contributed to the drive for expansion in the nineteenth century? What differences do you see between colonization in Asia and colonization in Africa? How would you explain these differences? The image on page 695 illustrates two of the most important motivations behind British imperialism: prestige and profit. In your opinion, which motive was most important in India? How about in Africa? What other motives would you identify? Read Lord Wellesley and Thomas B. Macaulay's arguments in favor of the British presence in India and the Bombay poet Dalpatram Kavi's work "The Attack of King Industry on page 697. What benefits did Wellesley and Macaulay believe the British brought to India? What deficiencies did they believe they were remedying? What response to the challenge of British domination did Kavi suggest? Who did Kavi blame for India's subjugation? Compare the description of a Chinese defeat in the First Opium War on page 700 with Ito Hirobumi's account of his efforts to understand and learn from the West on the same page. What lessons might Hirobumi have learned from the Chinese experience? Did his efforts to learn about the West constitute an admission of European superiority? Contrast Ernest Linant de Fellefonds' account of his conversation with Kabaka Mutesa on page 703 with Jamal al-Din al-Afghani's arguments in favor of science on the same page. Are the two men expressing the same opinion? If not, what distinctions would you make between their views? Read Heinrich von Treitschke's condemnation of German Jews on page 709. What made Treitschke's anti-Semitism different from the anti-Semitism that had been prevalent in Europe for centuries? How did German nationalism inform and inspire Treitschke's antipathy towards Jews? Examine a set of digitally altered color images of early twentieth-century subjects of the Russian Empire (The Emir of Bukhara, Nomadic Kazakhs, Jewish Children with their Teacher, Chinese Foreman of Tea Plantation, Dagestani Man). What light do these images shed on the diversity of the Russian Empire? What challenges did this diversity present to the Tsar's government? (Note these photographs were taken between 1907 and 1915. Click here to learn more about the digichromatography process that produced the color images linked above.) When you have finished reviewing the evidence, write a well-organized essay on Western expansion in the nineteenth century. What was the relationship between European nationalism and imperialism? How did internal developments affect Europe's approach to the rest of the world? How did imperialism, in turn, shape domestic politics and economics? Use the evidence you have just examined to support your claims and observations.