eligious oppression and to establish what they
believed would be the Kingdom of God. While it appeared that all they
wanted was space in which to be left alone, their conviction that they
were building God's Kingdom implied a belief that their new society would
prosper and spread. If it were really the Kingdom of God, it could not be
expected to remain an insignificant settlement on a distant and
unimportant continent. For the next two hundred years, this missionary
dynamic was absorbed in spreading across the North American continent.
While the Americans did not see their expansion into the West as being
imperialistic, American Indians saw it otherwise.

With the disappearance of the Western frontier, missionary-minded
Americans felt compelled to carry the benefits of their civilization to
backward areas of the world. At the same time, European imperialism was
gaining new vitality. Businessmen were looking for new markets and for
new sources of raw materials. Patriots, in their turn, believed that they
were being called upon to assume the "white man's burden" and to civilize
and democratize the world. Both drives seemed to coincide. The Berlin
Conference in 1885 divided those parts of Africa not yet annexed among
the major European nations. The point of the conference was to plan
national exploits in such a way as to reduce conflicts. In the course of
a very few years, the rest of Africa was colonized by these nations.
Africans, of course, were given no voice in the matter. China, though it
was not colonized, was also divided into spheres of economic influence.
The United States was quick to join in this scramble. Its influence,
however, was limited largely to Asia and Latin America.

This new imperialist expansion was not interpreted by its proponents as
being exploitative. Instead, they depicted it as bringing the blessing of
civilization to the "underprivileged." The concept of the "white man's
burden" was particularly common in Britain and America. The prevailing
idea was that the white race, especially the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic
branches of it, had been especially blessed by God so that it could
achieve industrialization and democratization. It further taught that it
was their obligation to carry the benefits to less fortunate peoples.

This new imperialism hid its domination behind paternalism, but it still
presented the imperialists as superiors and the colonials as inferiors.
Moreover, because in most case