The extension of European control over Africa and Asia added a further dimension to the rivalry and mutual suspicion which characterised international diplomacy in the decades preceding World War I. France's seizure of Tunisia (1881) initiated fifteen years of tension with Italy, which had hoped to take the country and which retaliated by allying with Germany and waging a decade-long tariff war.
The most striking conflicts of the era were the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, each signalling the advent of a new imperial great power. But British policy towards the Boer republics and German actions in the Far East contributed to the dramatic policy shift which in the mid-1900s aligned hitherto isolationist Britain with first Japan in an alliance, and then with France and Russia in the looser Entente. German efforts to break the Entente resulted in a series of diplomatic crises which deepened animosities in the years preceding World War I. For details, see Tangier Crisis and Agadir Crisis.
It may be debated whether the New imperialism itself contributed in large measure to the subsequent global conflict, except to the extent that it broadened the geographical area of military operations. Both the European divisions of the 1870s onward and the accelerated colonial drive of the period can be said to derive from the same causes: strategic conditions, aggressive competing nationalisms and the economic and political imperatives of the new mass society.
A similar edict (Imperial Edict 3097) provides limited power to the Archdukes of the Imperium to issue similar warrants, although they are limited in their duration and territory.
Imperial research stations may be located on worlds which need a boost to the local economy or in remote systems far from the potential disturbance of Imperial politics.
Imperial Rules of War: To mitigate most of the potentially disastrous aspects of armed conflict, the "rules of war" evolved as an accumulation of unwritten concepts, which were established on a case-by-case basis.
The term imperialism was used from the third quarter of the nineteenth century to describe various forms of political control by a greater power over less powerful territories or nationalities, although analytically the phenomena which it denotes may differ greatly from each other and from the "New" imperialism.
A later usage developed in the early 20th century among Marxists, who saw "imperialism" as the economic and political dominance of "monopolistic finance capital" in the most advanced countries and its acquisition — and enforcement through the state — of control of the means (and hence the returns) of production in less developed regions.
Elements of both conceptions are present in the "New imperialism" of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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