The Second Industrial Revolution and Imperialism were important episodes that started at the end of the 19th century and that generated consequences that shook the 20th century.
The Second Industrial Revolution was the industrial phenomena that happened from the middle of the 19th century. If we compare the First with the Second Revolution, we will see that that took place in the second half of the 18th century and had England as the major reference country, in the textile sector; while this, the Second, took place almost a hundred years later and the main country was Germany, but it counted on others like the United States and Japan, with emphasis on the automobile sector.
This period was marked by innovations, such as the emergence of cinema, the telephone and the main symbol of the Second Industrial Revolution, the automobile. This was only possible due to the strong investment in research and technology. Unlike the First Revolution, this one shows us a new reality. We see the emergence of a new capitalist phase, financial capitalism, marked by the merger of banking capital with industrial capital, enabling all these innovations. The huge investments marked the emergence of the so-called “mega companies” and the rise of monopoly capitalism. At this moment, alliances / agreements between companies are beginning to emerge in order to monopolize the market, as is the case of holdings, cartels and trusts.
With the growth of these companies and protectionist policies, the nations that entered this second industrial phase started a process of expanding their markets to regions such as Africa and Asia, aiming to seek raw materials, cheap labor, consumer market, but also invest in new industries. We call this process of expansion of capitalism imperialism, one of the main consequences of the Second Industrial Revolution.
With the growth of production and investments, at a certain point that this begins to surpass the domestic market and a process of expansion of production to other regions begins, aiming to keep profits high. In addition to the search for new areas for industrial development, imperialism had other motivations, such as the search for a consumer market, cheap labor and raw materials.
Imperialism presented various types of domination, such as cultural domination, of an ideological character aiming mainly to expand the consumer market, but there were also more incisive forms of domination, such as the establishment of areas of influence, protectorates and colonies, which can be framing or rooting.
Despite being very profitable for the European powers, the imperialist process generated conflicts with native populations in Africa and Asia, due to intense exploitation and disrespect for the territory and the ethnic groups that coexisted in the region. However, there were European justifications for this expansionism, the main one being known as “social Darwinism” or “white man's burden”, which, with a strong ethnocentric character, considered that Europeans, being more evolved, had a moral duty to civilize the African and Asian continents.
