What factors encouraged Europeans to build empires around the world during the nineteenth century?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

A. Factors encouraging empire building
1. deployed industrially equipped armies and navies to control production of
key commodities
2. wanted to locate colonies in strategic positions along world trade routes
3. seize useful stations to control global communications by sea
a. imperial powers took advantage of unrest in other countries
4. scramble for territory, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century,
seven European powers seized 10 million square miles of Africa
5. parts of the world largely exempt from the rule of these empires, in most of
continental Latin America, and East and Southwest Asia, submitted to
economic domination—a form of exploitation that has come to be known as
business imperialism—and political interference
6. Britain took advantage of lack of Chinese, Japanese and France's interest to
consolidate and secure territories
a. long period of peace with other European countries that lasted for
almost 40 years
7. existing empires enlarged and new empires developed
a. Germany, Italy, and Belgium
8. demographic change
a. Europe's population soared generating enough surplus to populate
"New Europes"
9. increase in industrial technology
a. chronometer solved the problem of how to find longitude at sea
b. new steelmaking technology enhanced guns
c. techniques for making tropical-weight clothing
d. medicines good enough to keep European armies alive in the tropics
came into use
e. steam power, meanwhile, made European workers more productive
and improved the precision, adaptability, and reliability of
European armies in hostile environments
f. machine guns, especially the Maxim gun, patented in 1884, made a
huge difference because, unlike heavy artillery, they could be easily
transported to almost any destination