AP World History 6.5-6.6: Economic Imperialism and Migration

Economic imperialism

Foreign control over another country's assets and decision-making, even when that control is not legally recognized. It often involves a one-sided transfer of capital, labor, or natural resources.

How can economic imperialism exist without formal legal control?

A foreign state, corporation, or financial institution may control assets or important decisions in practice through investment, trade dependence, loans, or political pressure without directly governing the territory.

What are the five modes of economic imperialism identified by scholars?

Colonialism, internal colonialism, settler colonialism, investment imperialism, and unequal exchange.

How did economic imperialism differ from formal colonial rule?

Economic imperialism could dominate a country through trade, investment, loans, or control of resources while leaving its government legally independent. Formal colonialism involved direct foreign political control.

How did European powers use economic imperialism in Latin America?

After Latin American independence, European powers and later the United States used loans, trade, investment, and control of resources or infrastructure to influence the region without always establishing formal colonies.

What was a consequence of foreign investment in Latin America?

Foreign investment often expanded railroads, mining, plantations, and export economies, but it also made Latin American economies dependent on foreign capital and commodity markets.

How did European economic influence affect the Ottoman Empire?

European merchants and investors gained commercial privileges, invested in infrastructure, and provided loans. Ottoman debt increased, allowing European creditors to influence Ottoman finances and economic policy.

What institution illustrates European financial control over the Ottoman Empire?

The Ottoman Public Debt Administration, established after the empire defaulted on loans, allowed European creditors to collect certain Ottoman revenues and exercise influence over imperial finances.

How did economic imperialism affect China in the nineteenth century?

Foreign powers forced China to accept unequal treaties, opened treaty ports, gained commercial privileges and concessions, and established spheres of influence while the Qing government remained formally in control.

What were unequal treaties in China?

Treaties imposed by foreign powers after military defeats that granted foreigners trading privileges, treaty ports, extraterritorial rights, and other advantages that weakened Chinese sovereignty.

Colonialism

A system in which a foreign group controls another territory, its people, and its natural resources, commonly through conquest and settlement.

How did colonialism sometimes export unemployment from industrial societies to colonies?

Industrial societies could send displaced workers to colonies through settlement or impose free trade that flooded colonial markets with metropolitan manufactured goods. Local producers could then lose employment, as occurred during the deindustrialization of India under British rule.

How could colonial trade drain wealth from a colony?

Colonial authorities could extract resources and use colonial tax revenue to pay for the colony's exports. This prevented the colony from retaining an export surplus while supporting industrial development in the imperial center.

What broad historical consequences are associated with colonialism in the source?

Although colonialism could sometimes produce development dependent on the autonomy of the colonized population, it was overall associated with genocide, famine, war, and persistent global inequality.

Internal colonialism

A geographically uneven pattern of economic development caused by exploitation and subordination of a minority or peripheral region within a single state. It produces political and economic inequalities between regions.

How does an internal colony benefit the dominant region, or metropole?

It supplies the dominant region with relatively cheap, accessible, and disposable labor, land, and natural resources.

Settler colonialism

A form of domination in which outsiders permanently settle in a new territory, displace or eliminate Indigenous populations and sovereignties, and establish an autonomous political system.

What economic processes commonly accompany settler colonialism?

They include land confiscation, expulsion of Indigenous people, dispossession of property and wealth, and often dual labor markets that facilitate exploitation.

Accumulation by dispossession

A process in which wealth is accumulated through the seizure or forced transfer of land, property, resources, or political rights from an existing population.

Investment imperialism

The use of exported capital—including foreign direct investment, portfolio investment, and loans—as a means of exerting economic influence over other countries.

Why might overseas investments produce political or military intervention?

States or investors may pressure governments or intervene to protect foreign assets, secure access to resources, or preserve expected profits.

What is a limitation of the claim that foreign investment always benefits dependent countries?

Although investment may initially increase growth and transfer technology, unregulated investment can create monopolies and produce a net outflow of capital from the dependent country.

Unequal exchange

A pattern of international trade in which one country supplies more labor or ecological resources than it receives in equivalent value. It is often linked to differences in wages and production structures between countries.

Why can wage differences contribute to unequal exchange?

High-wage countries tend to use more capital-intensive production, while low-wage countries often provide labor-intensive goods. In monetary terms, the labor time embodied in exports from low-wage countries may be exchanged for less labor time from high-wage countries.

Human migration

The movement of people from one place to another with the intention of living temporarily or permanently in the new location. Internal migration within a country is more common globally than international migration.

What distinguishes migration from travel, tourism, commuting, or seasonal nomadism?

Migration involves an intention to settle or live in the new location. Temporary travel, commuting, and many seasonal movements generally lack that intention.

Internal migration versus external migration

Internal migration occurs within one country, whereas external migration crosses an international border. Internal migration is the dominant form worldwide.

Migrant

A person who changes their usual country or geographic location of residence, often for reasons such as employment, healthcare, or improved living conditions.

Refugee

A person forced to flee their country because of violence or persecution, commonly associated with war or oppression by governmental or nongovernmental actors.

Asylum seeker

A person who leaves their country and requests protection in another country, but whose application for refugee protection has not yet been approved.

Internally displaced person

A person forced to leave their home because of events such as natural disaster or civil disturbance but who remains within their own country.

Differential migration

Selective migration in which only part of a population group moves, rather than an entire ethnic or social group relocating together.

What is urbanization in the context of human migration?

Urbanization is the movement of population into cities, often from rural areas. It is a form of internal migration.

What major demographic pattern characterizes international migration?

Women make up nearly half of international migrants. Female migration may occur independently or with family members and can have economic, social, and political motivations.

How can industrialization encourage migration?

Industrialization creates jobs in factories, mines, cities, and infrastructure projects while disrupting traditional rural livelihoods. These conditions can push people from the countryside and pull them toward urban or industrial regions.

How did the abolition of slavery contribute to global migration?

After slavery was abolished in many regions, employers recruited indentured laborers from places such as India and China to work on plantations, in mines, and on infrastructure projects elsewhere.

What were common push factors for migration?

Push factors included poverty, unemployment, land shortages, famine, persecution, war, political instability, environmental disasters, and limited access to education or healthcare.

What were common pull factors for migration?

Pull factors included jobs, higher wages, available land, political or religious freedom, safety, education, healthcare, and the presence of family or community networks.

Voluntary migration

Migration undertaken substantially through a person's initiative or choice, often influenced by economic opportunity, political conditions, or social factors.

What factors can make the boundary between voluntary and forced migration unclear?

Economic, political, environmental, and social pressures often overlap. A person may formally choose to move while facing severe conditions that leave few realistic alternatives.

Push factors

Negative conditions in the place of origin—such as war, persecution, poor economic prospects, or insecurity—that encourage people to leave.

Pull factors

Attractive conditions in a destination—such as employment, safety, higher wages, healthcare, or social networks—that encourage people to move there.

How do push-pull factors explain a migration decision?

Push factors create pressure to leave the origin, while pull factors make a destination attractive. Migration commonly results from the interaction of both rather than from a single cause.

What were the major global migration patterns identified for 2013?

Migration was not simply from the Global South to the Global North: about 38% of migrants moved from one developing country to another, while about 23% moved between high-income OECD countries.

How can migration affect societies beyond income and GDP?

Migrants contribute to food, music, sports, art, culture, ideas, and beliefs. They may also participate in civic and political life within the destination society.

How can migration affect destination societies economically?

Migration can provide labor, fill shortages, expand markets, and contribute skills and entrepreneurship. It can also produce competition over jobs and resources, especially when migrants face exploitation or discrimination.

How can migration affect migrant-origin societies?

Migration can reduce local labor availability but may generate remittances, new skills, and transnational connections. Returning migrants can also bring capital, knowledge, and cultural practices.

Remittances

Funds that migrants send to people or institutions in their countries of origin. They can form a substantial share of national income in some countries.

Why are remittances economically important to migrant-origin countries?

They provide household income and foreign currency, support consumption and investment, and can represent a significant percentage of national GDP.

What is chain migration?

Migration facilitated by social networks formed by earlier migrants. Existing relatives, friends, or community members can provide information, financial help, housing, and employment connections.

What are migrant communities or ethnic enclaves?

They are communities in destination regions where migrants from a shared origin live, work, and maintain cultural institutions. They can provide support and employment while preserving language and traditions.

What social and political responses can migration produce?

Migration can encourage cultural exchange and pluralism, but it can also provoke nativism, discrimination, restrictive immigration laws, and conflict over jobs, land, political power, or national identity.