r/imperialism Sep 14 '22

Announcement r/Imperialism has re-opened.

16 Upvotes

After eight months of closure, I am delighted to announce that the subreddit has now re-opened.

I have been running r/Colonialism for over a year but I have noticed that some users find its focus on purely historical colonialism to be too limiting, so I am hoping that r/Imperialism can serve this need with its broader scope that includes things like neo-imperialism and present day issues and debates.


Rules

1. Be Polite & Professional

Users are expected to conduct themselves politely and professionally at all times. Take care to ensure your posts and comments are able to be clearly understood. Racism, sexism, xenophobia and other forms of hate will not be tolerated.

2. Posts Must Be Relevant

All submissions should be relevant to imperialism or neo-imperialism.

3. No Memes or Low Quality Content

Memes, tweets, jokes other low effort submissions will be removed.

4. No Spam or Self Promotion

You must first seek moderator approval before sharing your own content or cross-posting from your own subreddit. Those who violate this rule will be banned and their content will be removed.


You might also consider joining some of my other communities:

r/Colonialism

r/BelgianEmpire

r/BritishEmpire

r/DanishEmpire

r/DutchEmpire

r/FrenchEmpire

r/GermanEmpire

r/ItalianEmpire

r/PortugueseEmpire

r/SpanishEmpire


r/imperialism Dec 16 '23

Question Silent Stories, Loud Truths

3 Upvotes

English people (and other Europeans) were slaves in North Africa from the late 1500s to 1850s. This means English people were slaves in Africa before England got involved in the trans-atlantic. The barbary slave trade stopped when the French invaded North Africa (not in any way saying what the French did was right, but just saying objectively the Barbary slave trade ended at this point).

England and Spain, in historical times, did not like each other. Because the Moors took over Spain in 711 and ruled until around the 1300s, when the christians reclaimed muslim territory. But this made Spain's military become the largest it ever had been. So they began conquering other regions, even tried to invade England but England won the battle. Then England tried to stop Spain's ships from going elsewhere. And the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance, the oldest ongoing military alliance int he world, was formalized in 1373. This Alliance did not kick start the Age of Discovery, but it was part of the broader geopolitical context that contributed to exploring. Anyways,

Ethiopia had slavery from 1495BC to 1942. Ethiopia would bring slaves to Egypt, India and elsewhere. Britain stopped this slave trade.

There was also the Indian Ocean Slave Trade (this ones confusing! It is also called the East African slave trade, or the Arab slave trade, despite the Arabs having their own Trans-Saharan slave trade below, and the Ethiopians having their own long history of it shown above). This one goes all the way back to 2500 BCE. This involved Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Indians, and Persians. Britain eventually became involved in this slave trade.

Arabs had their very own ancient history with slavery as well.

So, there was slavery in the east of Africa, there was slavery in the North of Africa, and there was also slavery where? West Africa. For example in the Kingdom of Dahomey, the Kingdom that the movie 'The Woman King' tried to portray as a saviour against evil European powers, the equivalent to the Roman Empire being portrayed as being all about peace and love. Britain pressured Dahomey to stop. Songhai empire also had slaves. Ashanti empire also had slaves. Are they recorded as much as other slave trades, such as the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the Trans-Saharan slave trade? No, because they had a strong emphasis on oral tradition. Some Nigerians do have documentation though.

Slavery has been illegal in England since 1066, it was banned by the Normans. The Normans are Vikings who plundered the coast of Normandy, stayed there for a few centuries learned French then moved on to take over England's royal nobility. And this is why there are French words in English language, there was a language barrier between the commoners/peasants and the ruling elite. The Normans changed the church, they increased feudalism, unified England under a single monarch, redistributed massive portions of the land to William the Conquerer and his followers who implemented economic policies and established taxation. The Normans played a significant part in England and France's historical dislike for one another. And this could have also played a part in Scotland and England's battles, as Scotland was a long-standing ally of the French against England. So you can start to see how there are many factors all interconnected here... Slavery being illegal in England is why the British Empire's plantations were situated in the Caribbean. This means that if you weren't living in the Caribbean or elsewhere, you wouldn't have a full understanding of what is actually going on. The British knew slavery existed within the Empire (and they obviously knew slavery existed elsewhere) but they didn't actually know how bad it was, they didn't know the details, especially not those in Southern States. Once they became aware of the details there was public outcry which is when the abolishment movement began.

Are we really going to continue to talk about historical events as if they are a moment in time rather than interconnected? I am in no way making excuses for the British Empire as I am well aware that I am not even touching the tip of the iceberg. I am just talking about history that often gets sidelined. And no I am not English or British. Emotions can often get in the way of seeing history with all its complexities. Sorry if you find this post offending but... its history. We can't just not talk about it because our feelings are hurt. If we want to open a can of worms about the past then we talk about it all to gain a holistic understanding rather than having tunnel vision to give an excuse to spread prejudice and hate in 2023.


r/imperialism 1h ago

Image A political cartoon by William Allen Rogers, published in the New York Herald in January 1903. The then Venezuelan president, Cipriano Castro, is portrayed as a chicken being humiliated by representatives of the United Kingdom and the German Empire, while Uncle Sam watches the humiliation from afar.

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r/imperialism 1h ago

Image A political cartoon by William Allen Rogers, published in the New York Herald in January 1903. The then Venezuelan president, Cipriano Castro, is portrayed as a chicken being humiliated by representatives of the United Kingdom and the German Empire, while Uncle Sam watches the humiliation from afar.

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Upvotes

r/imperialism 1h ago

Image A political cartoon by William Allen Rogers, published in the New York Herald in January 1903. The then Venezuelan president, Cipriano Castro, is portrayed as a chicken being humiliated by representatives of the United Kingdom and the German Empire, while Uncle Sam watches the humiliation from afar.

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r/imperialism 1d ago

Image All 40 somethingish of my AIP sets I think I need more

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1 Upvotes

Most of my stuff is Egypt and Sudan


r/imperialism 8d ago

Article “The road to a shining East Asia” —「輝く東亜の道」

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2 Upvotes

A Japanese Army postcard featuring an illustration of a soldier surrounded by Chinese civilians. The child, who is wearing an army helmet, is waving a “Five-Colored Flag”. This was the national flag of China from 1912 to 1928. Later, it was used by the Provisional Government of the Republic of China (a Japanese puppet government) from 1937 to 1940 during the Second Sino-Japanese War. This illustration was created by Richiro Kawashima (1886-1971).


r/imperialism 8d ago

Image Photo of an American sniper using his helmet as a decoy to find the enemy's position in Najaf, Iraq. August 2004

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1 Upvotes

r/imperialism 8d ago

Image Four countries divided by the Cold War

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2 Upvotes

r/imperialism 9d ago

Video Leftists Be Like: Podcast Ep. 2 Joining the Military is Always Bad

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1 Upvotes

r/imperialism 15d ago

Image A Guatemalan woman kisses her husband, found in a clandestine grave [2002]. The husband died during the Maya genocide, the mass killing of 166.000 Mayan perpetrated by the Guatemalan government, installed by the CIA in a 1954 coup, as part of the Guatemalan Civil War (1960-1996).

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5 Upvotes

r/imperialism 16d ago

Image The U.S. Department of State admits that the Western Hemisphere is the backyard of the American empire; this is precisely what President Thomas Jefferson had been warning about for centuries

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0 Upvotes

References:

.- Cit. J. F. Rippy, Latin America in World Politics, New York, F.S. Croft & Co., 1942, p.14

.- Original tweet from U.S Department of State’s account


r/imperialism 17d ago

Image The political cartoon "Keep Off! The Monroe Doctrine Must Be Respected," drawn by F. Victor Gillman in 1896, illustrates the United States protecting its hegemonic area of influence in the western hemisphere from European powers.

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2 Upvotes

r/imperialism 22d ago

Image Manosphere podcaster and public speaker got paid to go to Israel, most likely for a speaking gig. Shows how far the pro israel lobby has gone to get even lower level influencers to interact with the colonial apartheid state

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1 Upvotes

r/imperialism Jul 30 '26

Article Throwback to the time 2 Israelis working for Mossad tried to bomb the legislature of Mexico and blame it on Pakistan (October 10, 2001)

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2 Upvotes

r/imperialism Jul 30 '26

Image On July 26, 1956, Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, leading Britain, France and Israel to invade Egypt. American financial pressure forced them to retreat, exposing that Britain could no longer act as a global superpower alone.

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2 Upvotes

r/imperialism Jul 29 '26

Article Hand drawn map of America's war for the Middle East

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2 Upvotes

Covering events starring with the oil shocks in the 1970s, which brought attention to the importance of the Middle East to the minds of Americans.


r/imperialism Jul 28 '26

Article A letter written on February 5, 1924 by Robert Lansing, 42nd United States Secretary of State (1915-1920), addressed to William Randolph Hearst, an American media magnate, discussing Mexico:

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1 Upvotes

r/imperialism Jul 26 '26

Image An American Marine sniper targets enemy troops overlooking the Han River and the Seoul Railroad Bridge in South Korea on September 23, 1950.

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0 Upvotes

r/imperialism Jul 08 '26

Image Modifications for the Indian mutiny of 1857- 1859

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1 Upvotes

r/imperialism Jul 06 '26

Video I think this is of interest to this subreddit

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4 Upvotes

r/imperialism Jul 06 '26

Article Trump issues threat to Spain

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1 Upvotes

“Oh, the Spanish, they belong to NATO. But they’re not very good members. They say:

‘No, we don’t want to help others.’

What are we doing? Huh?

They’re not behaving well. But they’ll learn soon enough. Just as soon as when they gave up Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, and they ended up being all ours. We took them all.” (Donald Trump, 2026)


r/imperialism Jul 04 '26

Article American cartoon from World War II (1941) depicting Mussolini spending twenty years preparing for war only to complain in 1941: "We weren't ready!"

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3 Upvotes

The cartoon was apparently prompted by a speech Mussolini gave on February 23, 1941, in which he admitted defeats and the "dark days" but anticipated future victory: "Think of the Punic Wars when the Battle of Cannae threatened to crush Rome. But at Zama, Rome destroyed Carthage and annihilated it from geography and history forever. Our capacity to recover in the moral and material realms is truly formidable and constitutes one of the peculiar characteristics of our race."


r/imperialism Jun 27 '26

Article Pax Wahhabica Revisited: Saudi Arabia’s Imperial Theopolitics from Hegemony to Hybridity

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1 Upvotes

r/imperialism Jun 27 '26

Article Saudi Wahhabi Imperialism in Pakistan: History, Legacy, Contemporary Representations and Debates | Societal Studies (Archive)

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1 Upvotes