In the second half of the nineteenth century, the world’s industrialized nations—Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, and the United States—entered the Second Industrial Revolution. They manufactured machines as well as other items to be used for industry, such as steel, rubber, and chemicals.

The Second Industrial Revolution was indebted to new sources of power such as electricity and the internal combustion engine; new methods of travel and communication were also developed. As the industrialized nations grew wealthier and more powerful, other nations such as Canada, Italy, Russia, and Japan began to industrialize as well.

imperialism — the policy of gaining direct or indirect control over parts of the world with low-cost resources and no competing mass-produced goods. Scramble for Africa — the competition among European countries to establish colonies in Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. shogunate — a Japanese system in which a military leader, the shogun, and an aristocratic military elite, the samurai, ruled in place of the emperor. The Great Game — the contest between Britain and Russia to dominate central Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.