French Indochina
French Indochina known as the Indochinese Union after 1887 and the Indochinese Federation after 1947, was a grouping of French colonial territories in Southeast Asia. A grouping of the three Vietnamese regions of Tonkin and Cochinchina with Cambodia was formed in 1887. Laos was added in 1893 and the leased Chinese territory of Guangzhouwan in 1898; the capital was moved from Saigon to Hanoi in 1902 and again to Da Lat in 1939. In 1945 it was moved back to Hanoi. After the Fall of France during World War II, the colony was administered by the Vichy government and was under Japanese occupation until March 1945, when the Japanese overthrew the colonial regime. After the Japanese surrender, the Viet Minh, a communist organization led by Hồ Chí Minh, declared Vietnamese independence, but France subsequently took back control of French Indochina. An all-out independence war, known as the First Indochina War, broke out in late 1946 between French and Viet Minh forces. In order to create a political alternative to the Viet Minh, the State of Vietnam, led by former Emperor Bảo Đại, was proclaimed in 1949.
On 9 November 1953 the Kingdom of Cambodia proclaimed its independence. Following the Geneva Accord of 1954, the French evacuated Vietnam and French Indochina came to an end. French–Vietnamese relations started during the early 17th century with the arrival of the Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes. Around this time, Vietnam had only just begun its "Push to the South"—"Nam Tiến", the occupation of the Mekong Delta, a territory being part of the Khmer Empire and to a lesser extent, the kingdom of Champa which they had defeated in 1471. European involvement in Vietnam was confined to trade during the 18th century, as the remarkably successful work of the Jesuit missionaries continued. In 1787, Pierre Pigneau de Behaine, a French Catholic priest, petitioned the French government and organised French military volunteers to aid Nguyễn Ánh in retaking lands his family lost to the Tây Sơn. Pigneau died in Vietnam but his troops fought on until 1802 in the French assistance to Nguyễn Ánh; the French colonial empire was involved in Vietnam in the 19th century.
For its part, the Nguyễn dynasty saw Catholic missionaries as a political threat. In 1858, the brief period of unification under the Nguyễn dynasty ended with a successful attack on Da Nang by French Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly under the orders of Napoleon III. Diplomat Charles de Montigny's mission having failed, Genouilly's mission was to stop attempts to expel Catholic missionaries, his orders were to stop the persecution of missionaries and assure the unimpeded propagation of the faith. In September 1858, fourteen French gunships, 3,000 men and 300 Filipino troops provided by the Spanish attacked the port of Tourane, causing significant damage and occupying the city. After a few months, Rigault had to leave the city due to supply illnesses. Sailing south, de Genouilly captured the poorly defended city of Saigon on 18 February 1859. On 13 April 1862, the Vietnamese government was forced to cede the three provinces of Biên Hòa, Gia Định and Định Tường to France. De Genouilly was criticised for his actions and was replaced by Admiral Page in November 1859, with instructions to obtain a treaty protecting the Catholic faith in Vietnam, but refrain from territorial gains.
French policy four years saw a reversal, with the French continuing to accumulate territory. In 1862, France obtained concessions from Emperor Tự Đức, ceding three treaty ports in Annam and Tonkin, all of Cochinchina, the latter being formally declared a French territory in 1864. In 1867 the provinces of Châu Đốc, Hà Tiên and Vĩnh Long were added to French-controlled territory. In 1863, the Cambodian king Norodom had requested the establishment of a French protectorate over his country. In 1867, Siam renounced suzerainty over Cambodia and recognised the 1863 French protectorate on Cambodia, in exchange for the control of Battambang and Siem Reap provinces which became part of Thailand.. France obtained control over northern Vietnam following its victory over China in the Sino-French War. French Indochina was formed on 17 October 1887 from Annam, Tonkin and the Kingdom of Cambodia; the federation lasted until 21 July 1954. In the four protectorates, the French formally left the local rulers in power, who were the Emperors of Vietnam, Kings of Cambodia, Kings of Luang Prabang, but in fact gathered all powers in their hands, the local rulers acting only as figureheads.
French troops landed in Vietnam in 1858 and by the mid-1880s they had established a firm grip over the northern region. From 1885 to 1895, Phan Đình Phùng led a rebellion against France. Nationalist sentiments intensified in Vietnam during and after World War I, but all the uprisings and tentative efforts failed to obtain sufficient concessio
Russo-Japanese War
The Russo-Japanese War was fought during 1904-1905 between the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan over rival imperial ambitions in Manchuria and Korea. The major theatres of operations were the Liaodong Peninsula and Mukden in Southern Manchuria and the seas around Korea and the Yellow Sea. Russia sought a warm-water port on the Pacific Ocean for maritime trade. Vladivostok was operational only during the summer, whereas Port Arthur, a naval base in Liaodong Province leased to Russia by China, was operational all year. Since the end of the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, Japan feared Russian encroachment on its plans to create a sphere of influence in Korea and Manchuria. Russia had demonstrated an expansionist policy in the Siberian Far East from the reign of Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century. Seeing Russia as a rival, Japan offered to recognize Russian dominance in Manchuria in exchange for recognition of Korea as being within the Japanese sphere of influence. Russia refused and demanded Korea north of the 39th parallel to be a neutral buffer zone between Russia and Japan.
The Japanese government perceived a Russian threat to its plans for expansion into Asia and chose to go to war. After negotiations broke down in 1904, the Japanese Navy opened hostilities by attacking the Russian Eastern Fleet at Port Arthur, China, in a surprise attack. Russia suffered multiple defeats by Japan, but Tsar Nicholas II was convinced that Russia would win and chose to remain engaged in the war. Russia ignored Japan's willingness early on to agree to an armistice and rejected the idea to bring the dispute to the Arbitration Court at The Hague; the war concluded with the Treaty of Portsmouth, mediated by US President Theodore Roosevelt. The complete victory of the Japanese military surprised world observers; the consequences transformed the balance of power in East Asia, resulting in a reassessment of Japan's recent entry onto the world stage. It was the first major military victory in the modern era of an Asian power over a European one. Scholars continue to debate the historical significance of the war.
After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Meiji government endeavored to assimilate Western ideas, technological advances and ways of warfare. By the late 19th century, Japan had transformed itself into a modernized industrial state; the Japanese wanted to be recognized as equal with the Western powers. The Meiji Restoration had been intended to make Japan a modernized state, not a Westernized one, Japan was an imperialist power, looking towards overseas expansionism. In the years 1869–73, the Seikanron had bitterly divided the Japanese elite between one faction that wanted to conquer Korea vs. another that wanted to wait until Japan was more modernized before embarking on a war to conquer Korea. Worse, the Western Powers were conquering small pieces of China and China had dominated Korea with its military for centuries; the Japanese were doing what they could to emulate the West in every way possible, including conqering and occupying its neighbors. In much the same way that Europeans used the "backwardness" of African and Asian nations as a reason for why they had to conquer them, for the Japanese elite the "backwardness" of China and Korea was proof of the inferiority of those nations, thus giving the Japanese the "right" to conquer them.
Inouye Kaoru, the Foreign Minister, gave a speech in 1887 saying "What we must do is to transform our empire and our people, make the empire like the countries of Europe and our people like the peoples of Europe", going to say that the Chinese and Koreans had forfeited their right to be independent by not modernizing. Much of the pressure for an aggressive foreign policy in Japan came from below, with the advocates of "people's rights" movement calling for an elected parliament favoring an ultra-nationalist line that took it for granted the Japanese had the "right" to annex Korea, as the "people's right" movement was led by those who favored invading Korea in the years 1869–73; as part of the modernization process in Japan, Social Darwinian ideas about the "survival of the fittest" were common in Japan from the 1880s onward and many ordinary Japanese resented the heavy taxes imposed by the government to modernize Japan, demanding something tangible like an overseas colony as a reward for their sacrifices.
Furthermore, the educational system of Meiji Japan was meant to train the schoolboys to be soldiers when they grew up, as such, Japanese schools indoctrinated their students into Bushidō, the fierce code of the samurai. Having indoctrinated the younger generations into Bushidō, the Meiji elite found themselves faced with a people who clamored for war, regarded diplomacy as a weakness; the British Japanologist Richard Storry wrote the biggest misconception about Japan in the West was that the Japanese people were the "docile" instruments of the elite, when in fact much of the pressure for Japan's wars from 1894 to 1941 came from below, as ordinary people demanded a "tough" foreign policy, tended to engage in riots and assassination when foreign policy was perceived to be pusillanimous. Though the Meiji oligarchy refused to allow democracy, they did seek to appropriate some of the demands of the "people's rights" movement by allowing an elected Diet in 1890 (with limited powers and an equally
Anglo-German naval arms race
The arms race between the United Kingdom and the German Empire that occurred from the last decade of the nineteenth century until the advent of World War I in 1914 was one of the intertwined causes of that conflict. While based in a bilateral relationship that had worsened over many decades, the arms race began with a plan by German Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz in 1897 to create a fleet in being to force Britain to make diplomatic concessions. With the support of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tirpitz began passing a series of laws to construct an increasing number of a large surface warships; the construction of HMS Dreadnought in 1906 prompted Tirpitz to further increase the rate of naval construction. While some British observers were uneasy at German naval expansion, alarm was not general until Germany's naval bill of 1908; the British public and political opposition demanded that the Liberal government meet the German challenge, resulting in the funding of additional dreadnoughts in 1910 and escalating the arms race.
Maintaining Europe's largest army and second-largest navy took an enormous toll on Germany's finances. Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, German Chancellor from 1909, undertook a policy of détente with Britain to alleviate the fiscal strain and focus on the rivalry with France. Under Bethmann-Hollweg, from 1912 onwards, Germany abandoned the dreadnought arms race and focused on a commerce raiding naval strategy to be conducted with submarines. Britain had the largest navy in the world and its policy was to ensure the Royal Navy was at least the size of the next two largest navies, known as the two-power standard. Britain's economy was dependent on the ability to ship in raw materials and export out a finished product. By 1900, 58% of calories consumed by Britain's population came from overseas, meaning that an inability to guarantee free movement on the seas would result in food shortages. Before the German naval challenge, British political and military leaders mused about catastrophic economic and political consequences if the Royal Navy could not guarantee British freedom of action.
Worry about Britain's ability to defend itself became the focus of the invasion literature genre, which began in 1871, remained popular to World War I, was influential on public opinion. The first Chancellor of united Germany Otto von Bismarck had skillfully guided Germany's foreign relations so it was not attached to any other European power. After his departure in 1890, Germany's foreign policy drifted into deeper commitment with the Triple Alliance of Austria-Hungary and Italy. Friedrich von Holstein of the German Foreign Office convinced the new Chancellor, Leo von Caprivi, to not renew the Reinsurance Treaty with the Russian Empire in 1890. Bismarck had designed the Reinsurance Treaty to keep Russia from an alliance with France. Holstein had hoped that the lapsing of the Reinsurance Treaty would result in a closer relationship with Britain, competing with both Russia and France, which did not occur. From 1890 to 1897, Germany wavered between pro-British and pro-Russian policies, reflecting the incoherence of German leadership.
In 1890, American naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan published The Influence of Sea Power upon History, the single most important work in naval strategy. Mahan argued that sea power was the deciding factor that allowed strong nations to thrive and impose their will on weaker nations, that the proper way to achieve naval supremacy was large-scale battle between fleets. At the time, the Imperial German Navy subscribed to the commerce raiding theory of navy strategy, but Mahan's arguments had enormous influence over subsequent German and British thinking. Translated into German by Admiral Ludwig Borckenhagen who supported Mahan's ideas, a copy of the book was placed in every German naval vessel. Kaiser Wilhelm II subscribed to Mahan's ideas after reading his book in 1894 and sought Reichstag funding to implement them; the Reichstag funded four of the thirty-six cruisers that Wilhelm requested in 1895, none at all the following two years. Frustrated at being rebuffed, Wilhelm recalled Alfred von Tirpitz from his duties in the Far East to be the Secretary of State of the German Imperial Naval Office in 1897.
Tirpitz was a follower of anti-British nationalist Heinrich von Treitschke as well as Alfred Thayer Mahan's ideas on the primacy of battle fleets. In 1894, he wrote a famous memorandum section titled, "The Natural Purpose of a Fleet is the Strategic Offensive," dismissing commerce raiding and coastal defense, arguing that Germany must prepare for offensive sea battle to ensure its place in the world. In his first meeting with Wilhelm in June 1897, Tirpitz stated his case that Germany must confront Britain to ensure its place as a European power, he outlined a strategy that he would follow for many years: build a German navy strong enough that the effort to destroy it would open Britain to attack from Britain's French and Russian rivals, a form of Mahan's "fleet in being". Tirpitz calculated that since the British navy was scattered to protect its possessions around the globe, "it comes to a battleship war between Heligoland and the Thames." Both Tirpitz and Bernhard von Bülow, Secretary of State of Foreign Affairs from 1897 to 1900 and Chancellor until 1909, calculated that once Germany possessed a navy that Britain could not destroy without imperiling itself, Britain would be forced to negotiate with Germany as an equal and even give up its "splendid isolation" to join the Triple Alliance.
In accord with Wilhelm II's enthusiasm for an expanded German navy and th
Italo-Turkish War
The Italo-Turkish or Turco-Italian War was fought between the Kingdom of Italy and the Ottoman Empire from September 29, 1911, to October 18, 1912. As a result of this conflict, Italy captured the Ottoman Tripolitania Vilayet, of which the main sub-provinces were Fezzan and Tripoli itself; these territories together formed. During the conflict, Italian forces occupied the Dodecanese islands in the Aegean Sea. Italy had agreed to return the Dodecanese to the Ottoman Empire in the Treaty of Ouchy in 1912. However, the vagueness of the text allowed a provisional Italian administration of the islands, Turkey renounced all claims on these islands in Article 15 of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. Although minor, the war was a significant precursor of the First World War as it sparked nationalism in the Balkan states. Seeing how the Italians had defeated the weakened Ottomans, the members of the Balkan League attacked the Ottoman Empire starting the First Balkan War before the war with Italy had ended; the Italo-Turkish War saw numerous technological changes, notably the airplane.
On October 23, 1911, an Italian pilot, Captain Carlo Piazza, flew over Turkish lines on the world's first aerial reconnaissance mission, on November 1, the first aerial bomb was dropped by Sottotenente Giulio Gavotti, on Turkish troops in Libya, from an early model of Etrich Taube aircraft. The Turks, lacking anti-aircraft weapons, were the first to shoot down an aeroplane by rifle fire; the claims of Italy over Libya dated back to Turkey's defeat by Russia in the war of 1877–1878 and subsequent discussions after the Congress of Berlin in 1878, in which France and Great Britain had agreed to the occupation of Tunisia and Cyprus both parts of the declining Ottoman Empire. When Italian diplomats hinted about possible opposition by their government, the French replied that Tripoli would have been a counterpart for Italy. Italy made a secret agreement with Great Britain in February 1887 by an exchange of notes, it provided that Italy would support Great Britain and its role in Egypt while the Italians would receive British support in Libya.
In 1902, Italy and France had signed a secret treaty which accorded freedom of intervention in Tripolitania and Morocco. The agreement negotiated by Italian foreign minister Giulio Prinetti and French ambassador Camille Barrère was an endpoint in the historical rivalry between the two nations for control of northern Africa. In 1902, Great Britain promised that "any alteration in the status of Libya would be in conformity with Italian interests." These measures were intended to loosen Italian commitment to the Triple Alliance, thereby weaken Germany, which France and Britain viewed as their main rival on the continent. Following the Anglo-Russian Convention and the establishment of the Triple Entente, Tsar Nicholas II and King Victor Emmanuel III made the 1909 Racconigi Bargain in which Russia acknowledged Italy's interest in Tripoli and Cyrenaica in return for Italian support for Russian control of the Bosphorus. However, the Italian government did little to realize the opportunity and knowledge of Libyan territory and resources remained scarce in the following years.
The removal of diplomatic obstacles coincided with increasing colonial fervor. In 1908, the Italian Colonial Office was upgraded to a Central Directorate of Colonial Affairs. Nationalist Enrico Corradini led the public call for action in Libya, joined by the nationalist newspaper L'Idea Nazionale in 1911, demanded an invasion; the Italian press began a large-scale lobbying campaign in favour of an invasion of Libya at the end of March 1911. It was fancifully depicted as rich in minerals, well-watered, defended by only 4,000 Ottoman troops; the population was described as hostile to the Ottoman Empire and friendly to the Italians: the future invasion was going to be little more than a "military walk", according to them. Italy's government remained committed into 1911 to the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire, a close friend of their German ally. Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti rejected nationalist calls for conflict over Ottoman Albania, seen as a possible colonial project, as late as the summer of 1911.
However, the Agadir Crisis, in which French military action in Morocco in April 1911 would lead to the establishment of a French protectorate, changed the political calculations. At this point, the Italian leadership decided that it could safely accede to public demands for a colonial project; the Triple Entente powers were supportive. British foreign secretary Edward Grey stated to the Italian ambassador on 28 July that they would support Italy and would not support the Turks. Meanwhile, the Russian government urged Italy to act in a "prompt and resolute manner." In contrast to their engagement with the Entente powers, Italy ignored its military allies in the Triple Alliance. Giolitti and foreign minister Antonino Paternò Castello agreed on 14 September to launch a military campaign "before the Austrian and German governments of it." At the time, Germany was attempting to mediate between Rome and Constantinople, while Austrian foreign minister Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal warned Italy that military action in Libya would threaten the integrity of the Ottoman Empire and create a crisis in the Eastern Question, thereby destabilizing the Balkan peninsula and the continent's balance of power.
Italy foresaw this result: Paternò Castello, in a July report to
French Third Republic
The French Third Republic was the system of government adopted in France from 1870, when the Second French Empire collapsed during the Franco-Prussian War, until 10 July 1940 after France's defeat by Nazi Germany in World War II led to the formation of the Vichy government in France. The early days of the Third Republic were dominated by political disruptions caused by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, which the Republic continued to wage after the fall of Emperor Napoleon III in 1870. Harsh reparations exacted by the Prussians after the war resulted in the loss of the French regions of Alsace and Lorraine, social upheaval, the establishment of the Paris Commune; the early governments of the Third Republic considered re-establishing the monarchy, but confusion as to the nature of that monarchy and who should be awarded the throne caused those talks to stall. Thus, the Third Republic, intended as a provisional government, instead became the permanent government of France; the French Constitutional Laws of 1875 defined the composition of the Third Republic.
It consisted of a Chamber of Deputies and a Senate to form the legislative branch of government and a president to serve as head of state. Issues over the re-establishment of the monarchy dominated the tenures of the first two presidents, Adolphe Thiers and Patrice de MacMahon, but the growing support for the republican form of government in the French population and a series of republican presidents during the 1880s quashed all plans for a monarchical restoration; the Third Republic established many French colonial possessions, including French Indochina, French Madagascar, French Polynesia, large territories in West Africa during the Scramble for Africa, all of them acquired during the last two decades of the 19th century. The early years of the 20th century were dominated by the Democratic Republican Alliance, conceived as a centre-left political alliance, but over time became the main centre-right party; the period from the start of World War I to the late 1930s featured polarized politics, between the Democratic Republican Alliance and the more Radicals.
The government fell during the early years of World War II as the Germans occupied France and was replaced by the rival governments of Charles de Gaulle's Free France and Philippe Pétain's Vichy France. Adolphe Thiers called republicanism in the 1870s "the form of government that divides France least". On the left stood Reformist France, heir to the French Revolution. On the right stood conservative France, rooted in the peasantry, the Roman Catholic Church and the army. In spite of France's divided electorate and persistent attempts to overthrow it, the Third Republic endured for seventy years, which as of 2018 makes it the longest lasting system of government in France since the collapse of the Ancien Régime in 1789; the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 resulted in the defeat of France and the overthrow of Emperor Napoleon III and his Second French Empire. After Napoleon's capture by the Prussians at the Battle of Sedan, Parisian deputies led by Léon Gambetta established the Government of National Defence as a provisional government on 4 September 1870.
The deputies selected General Louis-Jules Trochu to serve as its president. This first government of the Third Republic ruled during the Siege of Paris; as Paris was cut off from the rest of unoccupied France, the Minister of War, Léon Gambetta, who succeeded in leaving Paris in a hot air balloon, established the headquarters of the provisional republican government in the city of Tours on the Loire river. After the French surrender in January 1871, the provisional Government of National Defence disbanded, national elections were called with the aim of creating a new French government. French territories occupied by Prussia at this time; the resulting conservative National Assembly elected Adolphe Thiers as head of a provisional government, nominally. Due to the revolutionary and left-wing political climate that prevailed in the Parisian population, the right-wing government chose the royal palace of Versailles as its headquarters; the new government negotiated a peace settlement with the newly proclaimed German Empire: the Treaty of Frankfurt signed on 10 May 1871.
To prompt the Prussians to leave France, the government passed a variety of financial laws, such as the controversial Law of Maturities, to pay reparations. In Paris, resentment against the government built and from late March – May 1871, Paris workers and National Guards revolted and established the Paris Commune, which maintained a radical left-wing regime for two months until its bloody suppression by the Thiers government in May 1871; the following repression of the communards would have disastrous consequences for the labor movement. The French legislative election of 1871, held in the aftermath of the collapse of the regime of Napoleon III, resulted in a monarchist majority in the French National Assembly, favourable to making a peace agreement with Prussia; the "Legitimists" in the National Assembly supported the candidacy of a descendant of King Charles X, the last monarch from the senior line of the Bourbon Dynasty, to assume the French throne: his grandson Henri, Comte de Chambord, alias "Henry V."
The Orléanists supported a descendant of King Louis Philippe I, the cousin of Charles X who replaced him as the French monarch i
Colonial Nigeria
Colonial Nigeria was the area of West Africa that evolved into modern-day Nigeria, during the time of British rule in the 19th and 20th centuries. British influence in the region began with the prohibition of slave trade to British subjects in 1807. Britain annexed Lagos in 1861 and established the Oil River Protectorate in 1884. British influence in the Niger area increased over the 19th century, but Britain did not occupy the area until 1885. Other European powers acknowledged Britain's dominance over the area in the 1885 Berlin Conference. From 1886 to 1899, much of the country was ruled by the Royal Niger Company, authorised by charter, governed by George Taubman Goldie. In 1900, the Southern Nigeria Protectorate and Northern Nigeria Protectorate passed from company hands to the Crown. At the urging of Governor Frederick Lugard, the two territories were amalgamated as the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria, while maintaining considerable regional autonomy among the three major regions. Progressive constitutions after World War II provided for increasing representation and electoral government by Nigerians.
The colonial period proper in Nigeria lasted from 1900 to 1960, after which Nigeria gained its independence. Through a progressive sequence of regimes the British imposed Crown Colony government on the area of West Africa which came to be known as Nigeria, a form of rule, both autocratic and bureaucratic. After adopting an indirect rule approach, in 1906 the British merged the small Lagos Colony and the Southern Nigeria Protectorate into a new Colony of Southern Nigeria, in 1914, combined with the Northern Nigeria Protectorate to form the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria. Administration and military control of the territory was conducted by white Britons, both in London and in Nigeria. Following military conquest, the British imposed an economic system designed to profit from African labour; the essential basis of this system was a money economy—specifically the British pound sterling—which could be demanded through taxation, paid to cooperative natives, levied as a fine. The amalgamation of different ethnic and religious groups into one federation created internal tension which persists in Nigeria to the present day.
In the 1700s, the British Empire and other European powers had settlements and forts in West Africa but had not yet established the full-scale plantation colonies which existed in the Americas. Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that the African societies were better established and more populous than those of the Americas, thus creating a more formidable barrier to European expansion. Earlier elements related to this were its founding of the colony at Sierra Leone in 1787 as a refuge for freed slaves, the independent missionary movement intended to bring Christianity to the Edo Empire, programs of exploration sponsored by learned societies and scientific groups, such as the London-based African Association. Local leaders, cognizant of the situation in the West Indies and elsewhere, recognised the risks of British expansion. A chief of Bonny in 1860 explained that he refused a British treaty due to the tendency to "induce the Chiefs to sign a treaty whose meaning they did not understand, seize upon the country".
European slave trading from West Africa began before 1650, with people taken at a rate of about 3,000 per year. This rate rose to 20,000 per year in the last quarter of the century; the slave trade was heaviest in the period 1700–1850, with an average of 76,000 people taken from Africa each year between 1783 and 1792. At first, the trade centred around West Central Africa, now the Congo, but in the 1700s, the Bight of Benin became the next most important hub. Ouidah and Lagos were the major ports on the coast. From 1790–1807, predominantly British slave traders purchased 1,000–2,000 slaves each year in Lagos alone; the trade subsequently continued under the Portuguese. In the Bight of Biafra, the major ports were Old Calabar and New Calabar. Starting in 1740, the British were the primary European slave trafficker from this area. In 1767, British traders facilitated a notorious massacre of hundreds of people at Calabar after inviting them onto their ships, ostensibly to settle a local dispute. In 1807 the Parliament of the United Kingdom enacted the Slave Trade Act, prohibiting British subjects from participating in the slave trade.
Britain subsequently lobbied other European powers to stop the slave trade as well. It made anti-slavery treaties with West African powers; some of the treaties contained prohibitions on diplomacy conducted without British permission, or other promises to abide by British rule. This scenario provided an opportunity for naval expeditions and reconnaissance throughout the region. Britain annexed Freetown in Sierra Leone, declaring it a Crown Colony in 1808; the decrease in trade indirectly led to the collapse of states like the Edo Empire. Britain withdrew from the slave trade; the French had abolished slavery following the French Revolution, although it re-established it in its Caribbean colonies under Napoleon. France sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803, the same year that it gave up on trying to regain Saint-Domingue. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, it ended slavery in its possessions. Between them, the French and the British had purchased a majority of the slaves sold from the ports of Edo.
The economy suffered from the decline in the slave trade, although considerable smuggling of slaves to the Americas continued for years afterwards. Lagos became a major slave port into the 1850s. Much of the human trafficking which occurred there was nominal
Common Security and Defence Policy
The Common Security and Defence Policy is the European Union's course of action in the fields of defence and crisis management, a main component of the EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy. The implementation of the CSDP involves the deployment of military or civilian missions for peace-keeping, conflict prevention and strengthening international security in accordance with the principles of the United Nations Charter. Military missions are carried out by EU forces established with contributions from the member states' armed forces; the CSDP entails collective self-defence amongst member states as well as a Permanent Structured Cooperation in which 25 of the 28 national armed forces pursue structural integration. The Union's High Representative Federica Mogherini, is responsible for proposing and implementing CSDP decisions; such decisions are adopted by the Foreign Affairs Council requiring unanimity. The CSDP structure, headed by the HR/VP, comprise relevant sections of the External Action Service — including the Military Staff with its operational headquarters — a number of FAC preparatory bodies — such as the Military Committee — as well as four agencies, including the Defence Agency.
The CSDP structure is sometimes referred to as the European Defence Union in relation to its prospective development as the EU's defence arm. The post-war period saw several short-lived or ill-fated initiatives for European defence integration intended to protect against potential Soviet or German aggression: The Western Union and the proposed European Defence Community were cannibalised by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and rejected by the French Parliament; the dormant Western European Union succeeded the Western Union's remainder in 1954. In 1970 the European Political Cooperation brought about the European Communities' initial foreign policy coordination. Opposition to the addition of security and defence matters to the EPC led to the reactivation of the WEU in 1984 by its member states, which were EC member states. After the end of the Cold War and Community's failure to prevent the war in former Yugoslavia, European defence integration gained momentum. In 1992, the WEU was given new tasks, the following year the Treaty of Maastricht founded the EU and replaced the EPC with the Common Foreign and Security Policy pillar.
In 1996 NATO agreed to let the WEU develop Defence Identity. The 1998 St. Malo declaration signalled that the traditionally hesitant United Kingdom was prepared to provide the EU with autonomous defence structures; this facilitated the transformation of the ESDI into the European Security and Defence Policy in 1999, when it was transferred to the EU. In 2003 the EU deployed its first CSDP missions, adopted the European Security Strategy identifying common threats and objectives. In 2009, the Treaty of Lisbon introduced the present name, CSDP, while establishing the EEAS, the mutual defence clause and enabling a subset of member states to pursue defence integration within PESCO. In 2011 the WEU, whose tasks had been transferred to the EU, was dissolved. In 2016 a new security strategy was introduced, which along with the Russian annexation of Crimea, the scheduled British withdrawal from the EU and the election of Trump as US President have given the CSDP a new impetus; the first deployment of European troops under the ESDP, following the 1999 declaration of intent, was in March 2003 in the Republic of Macedonia.
Operation Concordia used NATO assets and was considered a success and replaced by a smaller police mission, EUPOL Proxima that year. Since there have been other small police and monitoring missions; as well as the Republic of Macedonia, the EU has maintained its deployment of peacekeepers in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as part of Operation Althea. Between May and September 2003 EU troops were deployed to the Democratic Republic of the Congo during "Operation Artemis" under a mandate given by UN Security Council Resolution 1484 which aimed to prevent further atrocities and violence in the Ituri Conflict and put the DRC's peace process back on track; this laid out the "framework nation" system to be used in future deployments. The EU returned to the DRC during July–November 2006 with EUFOR RD Congo, which supported the UN mission there during the country's elections. Geographically, EU missions outside the Balkans and the DRC have taken place in Georgia, Sudan and Ukraine–Moldova. There is a judicial mission in Iraq.
On 28 January 2008, the EU deployed its largest and most multi-national mission to Africa, EUFOR Tchad/RCA. The UN-mandated mission involves troops from 25 EU states deployed in areas of eastern Chad and the north-eastern Central African Republic in order to improve security in those regions. EUFOR Tchad/RCA reached full operation capability in mid-September 2008, handed over security duties to the UN in mid-March 2009; the EU launched its first maritime CSDP operation on 12 December 2008. The concept of the European Union Naval Force was created on the back of this operation, still combatting piracy off the coast of Somalia a decade later. A second such intervention was launched in 2015 to tackle migration problems in the southern Mediterranean, working under the name Operation SOPHIA. Most of the CSDP missions deployed so far are mandated to support Security Sector Reforms in host-states. One of the core principles of CSDP support to SSR is local ownership; the EU Council defines ownership as "the appropriation by the local authorities of the
