More on Imperialism
Read this article about the precipitating factors of European imperialism toward the rest of the world, including Africa. The export of violence would "come home to roost in 1914".
Conclusion
It is easy to focus on the technologies behind the new imperialism, to marvel at its speed, and to consider the vast breadth of European empires while overlooking what lay behind it all: violence. The cases of the Congo and the genocide of the Herero and Nama are rightly remembered, and studied by historians, as iconic expressions of imperialistic violence, but they were only two of the more extreme and shocking examples of the ubiquitous violence that established and maintained all of the imperial conquests of the time.
The scale of that violence on a global scale vastly exceeded any of the
relatively petty squabbles that had constituted European warfare itself
up to that point – the only European war that approaches the level of
bloodshed caused by imperialism was probably the 30 Years' War of the
seventeenth century, but imperialism's death toll was still far higher.
Until 1914, Europeans exported that violence hundreds or thousands of
miles away as they occupied whole continents. In 1914, however, it came
home to roost in the First World War.