It was explosive, dangerous, all-consuming, attritional, and in 1914 no more than a few decades old.47 Far from belonging in the lexicon of a venerable but corrupt ‘ancien régime’, the term ‘imperialism’ was a neologism that entered widespread use only around 1900. It encapsulated a novel perspective on a novel phenomenon – the remaking of the political structure of the entire globe under conditions of uninhibited military, economic, political and cultural competition. Both the Dark Continent and the hegemonic failure models are therefore based on a faulty premise. Modern global imperialism
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