French soldiers at Tientsin (Tianjin) in the Boxer Rebellion After 1880 the frontiers of Greater Europe surged forward as if the final subjection of the non-Western world was only a matter of time. The most obvious sign of this was the rapid partition of those parts of the globe that had escaped the attention of European colonizers in earlier decades. The most famous case was Africa, shared out between Britain, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Germany and the Belgian king (who held his vast stake as a private fiefdom) in an astonishing series of bargains after 1884. But Africa was not unique. There were other partitions in South East Asia and the South Pacific. Nor was Greater Europe’s advance just territorial. It rode upon a huge expansion of international trade and a dramatic increase (from small beginnings) in the amount of capital sent to regions previously dismissed as too risky or unprofitable. It coincided with a colossal rise in the flow of migrants out of Europe, most of them heading for North or South America, but with enough left over to provide a settler spearhead in tropical Africa and Asia, and a much larger bridgehead in Russian North Asia.
