After the Industrial Revolution, industrialized countries had more people and more factories. Factory owners needed raw materials like oil, tin and rubber to continue making modern goods. But in Europe, these materials were not easy to come by. They needed to go elsewhere to find materials. Europeans decided to claim land in Africa, Asia and Latin America as their own. Like the conquistadors of the sixteenth century, the Europeans just took the land through force. This new era of conquest in the late 1800s was called imperialism.

The Europeans did not consider the indigenous, or native, peoples to be civilized, or in some cases fully human. European imperialists justified their conquests by calling them civilizing missions. Many believed that they were doing the natives a favor by teaching them about Western society and that it was their mission to civilize the “uncivilized.

After reading the above article cite evidence from the article to support the idea that the industrial Revolution played a major role in leading to Imperialism in Africa.