During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries European nations sought to flex and improve their new industrial might by invading and establishing colonies throughout all of the non-western world. Strong European powers, chiefly, Great Britain, Germany, Spain, France, Russia, and the United States began their colonial campaigns to gain wealth, power, natural resources, a market to sell industrial goods, national prestige, or occasionally to improve the lives of the colonial people. European colonialism expanded to nearly all of the known world, few were able to fight off the might of the new invading powers.

European colonialism in Asia began after the Napoleonic Wars when Britain set up a successful trading port on the Maylay Peninsula; Singapore. British influence quickly expanded as they guilefully gained control of the country of Burma and gained extended trading rights in othe countries. France became increasingly wary of the British invasion and in...