<P> In its earlier stages , imperialism was generally the act of individual explorers as well as some adventurous merchantmen . The colonial powers were a long way from approving without any dissent the expensive adventures carried out abroad . Various important political leaders , such as Gladstone , opposed colonisation in its first years . However , during his second premiership between 1880 and 1885 he could not resist the colonial lobby in his cabinet , and thus did not execute his electoral promise to disengage from Egypt . Although Gladstone was personally opposed to imperialism , the social tensions caused by the Long Depression pushed him to favor jingoism : the imperialists had become the `` parasites of patriotism '' ( John A. Hobson ) . In France , then Radical politician Georges Clemenceau also adamantly opposed himself to it : he thought colonisation was a diversion from the `` blue line of the Vosges '' mountains , that is revanchism and the patriotic urge to reclaim the Alsace - Lorraine region which had been annexed by the German Empire with the 1871 Treaty of Frankfurt . Clemenceau actually made Jules Ferry 's cabinet fall after the 1885 Tonkin disaster . According to Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism ( 1951 ) , this expansion of national sovereignty on overseas territories contradicted the unity of the nation state which provided citizenship to its population . Thus , a tension between the universalist will to respect human rights of the colonised people , as they may be considered as `` citizens '' of the nation state , and the imperialist drive to cynically exploit populations deemed inferior began to surface . Some , in colonising countries , opposed what they saw as unnecessary evils of the colonial administration when left to itself ; as described in Joseph Conrad 's Heart of Darkness ( 1899 ) -- published around the same time as Kipling 's The White Man 's Burden -- or in Louis - Ferdinand Céline 's Journey to the End of the Night ( 1932 ) . </P>
what three events allowed for the formal colonization of africa in the late 1800s
Treaty of Frankfurt Tonkin disaster The Origins of Totalitarianism