The history of the modem Imperialism began with the European Age of Discovery, at the end of the 15th century, when Columbus discovered the Red Indian’s America and Vasco da Gama went round the Cape, significantly christened as the Cape of Good Hope, and landed on the coast of India at Calicut. Soon after this, first arose the empires of Spain and Portugal in the Americas and in South and East Asia. These empires, however, were not fully modem in form and policy, for they retained many features and practices of the earlier imperialisms.
Only when the maritime countries of north-western Europe, Holland, France and England, entered in the global arena of empire-building that modern imperialism was really born. For the next two centuries, 17th and 18th centuries, these three countries not only attacked and destroyed the earlier Spanish and Portuguese Empires in Americas and in South and East Asia, but also furiously fought with each other to seize and snatch each other’s possessions. This was, for instance, the background story of the Wars of Clive and Duplex i.e. of the English and the French wars in the decadent Mughal India.
The final transformation of Modern Imperialism took place during the 9th century, and it then emerged into its present-day form. This change was brought about by the entry into the sordid game of empire-making by Germany, Italy and finally by Russia and the U.S.A. and even by an Asian country, Japan. The tragic consequences of this game of empire-building were the final subjugation of Indo-Pakistan by England and the division of almost the whole of Africa among the various Imperialist countries of Europe from Spain to England and Germany.
Each of these Empires of colonies, dependencies, protectorates, lease-holds and “spheres of interests” scattered over the globe. By the beginning of the consisted 20th century almost the whole Earl was parcelled out among the Empires of Great Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Russia, the U.S.A. and Japan, as well as the remnants of the earlier empires of Spain, Portugal, Austria and Ottoman Turkey, which do not really fall into the category of modern Imperialism. In this scramble for empire-building. Great Britain and France got the lion’s share, and the Britons hosted that the “sun never sets on the British Empire.”
The First World War (1914-19) was fought by these Imperialist Power to seize safeguard each other’s possessions. It, however, turned out to be different; for it opened a new phase of national liberation in the history of Modern Imperialism, and thus sounded its death-knell. Modem Imperialism has since then to struggle for their liberation from an era of constant crisis, for the subjugated nations of Asia and Africa colonial slavery, exploitation, poverty and backwardness. However, modern Imperialism did not vanish as easily as did the earlier Imperialisms. It has assumed a new form of Economic Imperialism, as distinguished from the Political Imperialism of the 19th century.