The Boxer Rebellion (1900)

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World War I was triggered due to the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo. However, the causes of the First World War were present well before 1914. The Boxer Rebellion, imperialism, militarism, and a tangled system of alliance all were root causes in a chain of event that ultimately concluded in WW1. The United States initially supported neutrality, being somewhat detached from the conflict due to distance, and the Germans having not made any direct threat towards the United States. The American government was also of the view that entering the war in Europe would be economically detrimental. Ultimately America’s entry into the war was forces due partially to Germany’s submarine warfare. The Boxer Rebellion, (1900) began …show more content…

By the end of the 19th century European nations chose to protect their access to markets, raw materials, by seizing outright political and military control of the emergent world. In 1914 the net result of imperialism was a world in which the Western powers had established themselves competitively on every continent. Britain, Belgium, Holland, and France, all had empire more than twenty times their own size. It is this imperialism created a build-up of tension in Europe and outside of Europe, imperialistic events were ultimately the foundation of the cause of …show more content…

Great Britain and Germany competed for the world's most powerful navies. The newly industrialized nations of Europe had a capacity to create more powerful weapons, in greater quantity. This attitude of militarism gave the military a high priority in the nations' economic and political policies and the military greater control of the civilian governments. With the rise in nationalism and the growing competition to colonize foreign lands, the leaders of the European nations began to consider war as an unavoidable. In the early 1900s, nationalism created antagonism and rivalry between Germany, Austria-Hungary, Great Britain, Russia, Italy, and France. There was a fierce competition between these countries to be the greatest of the great nations, Competition for natural resources was one of the causes for the hatred amongst these nations. The quest for the resources that these nations needed in order to run factories and other industries, led to the need to obtain additional colonies and territories. Territorial disputes were a major contributor to the tensions that led to World War

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