Imperialism Trivia
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100 free Imperialism trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Between the 1870s and 1914 a handful of European states, joined by America and Japan, carved up most of Africa and much of Asia and the Pacific. The maps were redrawn at conferences the colonised never attended, enforced by gunboats, chartered companies and punitive expeditions, and justified by poets, philosophers and economists, while other economists, novelists and consuls wrote the case against. These 100 questions follow that story from the Congo basin to the Boxer uprising, from a kingdom's overthrow in the mid-Pacific to a battleship in Havana harbour, and on to the treaties, uprisings and proclamations that ended colonial rule. Expect dates, names and the odd detail that turns up in nobody's textbook, such as a war that lasted under an hour and a beer born of a German lease. Most questions sit at pub-quiz level, with a handful for people who really know the period. Play on your phone with instant answers and explanations, or print it for a history classroom or trivia night.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which sultanate fought Britain in history's shortest recorded war, an 1896 bombardment lasting under an hour?
Zanzibar
Zanzibar's palace was shelled on 27 August 1896 after Khalid bin Barghash seized the throne without British approval, and the fighting lasted 38 to 45 minutes. Khalid fled to the German consulate.
Q 02Failure to meet quotas of which commodity was punishable by death in the Congo Free State of the 1890s?
Rubber
Rubber quotas were enforced by the Force Publique, whose punishments for shortfalls made severed hands the symbol of the Congo Free State; the outcry forced Belgium to annex the territory in 1908.
Q 03Which territory did Secretary of State William Seward buy for the US in 1867, a deal opponents dubbed 'Seward's Folly'?
Alaska
Alaska cost $7.2 million, less than two cents an acre; Russia offered it for sale because it feared losing the territory to its rival Britain in a future war.
Q 04Which Pacific kingdom's queen was deposed in an 1893 coup, five years before a foreign power annexed the islands?
Hawaii
Hawaii's Queen Liliuokalani was overthrown on 17 January 1893 after marines landed from the USS Boston; the United States annexed the islands by joint resolution of Congress in July 1898.
Q 05From which country did Panama secede in 1903, with a US warship offshore, days before signing a canal treaty?
Colombia
Colombia had rejected the canal treaty, so Washington sent warships to back the rebels; the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty followed two weeks later, signed for Panama by a French engineer, not a Panamanian.
Q 06Which colony's name is journalist Flora Shaw credited with coining in The Times in 1897, before marrying its future governor-general?
Nigeria
Nigeria was her shorter replacement for the official 'Royal Niger Company Territories', named for the river; in 1902 she married the administrator who later merged its north and south.
Q 07Which author was vice-president of the American Anti-Imperialist League from 1901 until his death in 1910?
Mark Twain
Mark Twain had initially backed the Spanish–American War as a liberation but reversed course over the Philippine–American War, writing a scathing 1901 essay for the North American Review.
Q 08Which Boer War siege's 217-day defence made Robert Baden-Powell a national hero before he founded the Scouts?
Mafeking
Mafeking held out from October 1899 to May 1900, and its cadet corps of boys who carried messages during the siege later helped inspire the Boy Scouts.
Q 09Which 1899 Conrad novella drew on its author's 1890 journey up the Congo River as a steamboat officer?
Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness sends its narrator Marlow upriver to find the trader Kurtz; Francis Ford Coppola moved the same journey to the Vietnam War for his 1979 film Apocalypse Now.
Q 10Which US battleship's explosion in Havana harbour in February 1898 was blamed on Spain by the American press?
USS Maine
The USS Maine's loss was blamed on a mine by a US Navy inquiry in 1898, but a 1976 study led by Admiral Rickover concluded the likeliest cause was a fire in a coal bunker.
Q 11Which English philosopher coined 'survival of the fittest' in 1864, a phrase later used to justify empire?
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer wrote the phrase in Principles of Biology after reading Darwin, and Darwin himself adopted it in the 1869 fifth edition of On the Origin of Species.
Q 12Vladimir Lenin's 1916 pamphlet, published in 1917, called imperialism the 'highest stage' of what?
Capitalism
Capitalism, Lenin argued, had reached a monopoly phase in which banks and industry fused and exported capital, so rival empires carved up the world; he built on the 1902 work of an English liberal economist.
Q 13Theodore Roosevelt's 1904 corollary asserted an 'international police power' for the US as an addition to what?
Q 21Which secret 1916 Anglo-French deal to partition the Ottoman Empire did the Bolsheviks publish in 1917?
Sykes–Picot Agreement
The Sykes–Picot Agreement, named for its British and French negotiators, was made public by the Bolsheviks weeks after they took power, embarrassing Britain before the Arabs it had promised independence.
Q 22Which West African kingdom's bronzes were looted by a British punitive expedition in 1897 and sold to pay for it?
Benin
Benin City fell in February 1897 and its Oba was exiled to Calabar; museums in Germany bought most of the pieces the Admiralty auctioned, and the bronzes have since become the subject of restitution claims.
Q 23Which future leader petitioned the 1919 Paris peace talks for Vietnamese rights under the name Nguyen Ai Quoc?
Monroe Doctrine
The Monroe Doctrine of 1823 had warned Europe off the Americas; Roosevelt's addition, prompted by the 1902–03 European blockade of Venezuela over unpaid debts, claimed the right to intervene first.
Q 14Which company, founded by Cecil Rhodes in 1888, controlled 90% of the world's diamond output by 1902?
De Beers
De Beers was financed by Rothschild and Beit money, and its Kimberley mines paid for Rhodes's political career and the chartered company that pushed north of the Limpopo.
Q 15Which African republic, settled by the American Colonization Society from 1822, declared independence in 1847?
Liberia
Liberia was, with Ethiopia, one of only two African states to escape the Scramble for Africa; its settlers' descendants, the Americo-Liberians, ruled it until a 1980 coup.
Q 16In which present-day country did German forces carry out the Herero and Nama genocide between 1904 and 1908?
Namibia
Namibia was then German South West Africa, where General Lothar von Trotha's order of October 1904 declared that every Herero within German borders, armed or not, would be shot.
Q 17Which British general was killed when the Mahdi's army stormed Khartoum in 1885, two days before relief arrived?
Charles Gordon
Charles Gordon had been sent to evacuate Khartoum's Egyptian garrison, but he stayed to defend the city through a ten-month siege instead.
Q 18Which country, made a Japanese protectorate by a 1905 treaty, was annexed outright by Japan in 1910?
Korea
Korea stayed under Japanese rule until 1945, when Japan's surrender left the peninsula split between Soviet and American occupation zones.
Q 19Which kingdom was the only Southeast Asian state never colonised, a buffer between British and French possessions?
Siam
Siam kept its independence by ceding territory and legal privileges in unequal treaties while King Chulalongkorn modernised the state; it renamed itself Thailand in 1939.
Q 20Who read Indonesia's proclamation of independence in Jakarta on 17 August 1945, two days after Japan's surrender?
Sukarno
Sukarno read the proclamation at his own house, because Japanese troops were guarding the city square first chosen for the ceremony; he became the republic's first president the next day.
Ho Chi Minh
Ho Chi Minh's petition asked the Western powers to honour Wilson's self-determination for French Indochina; the snub helped make him the symbol of Vietnam's anti-colonial movement.
Q 24Which Habsburg archduke, made Emperor of Mexico by Napoleon III in 1864, faced a firing squad at Querétaro in 1867?
Maximilian
Maximilian was left stranded when Napoleon III withdrew French troops in 1866–67; Benito Juárez's republicans captured him, and his execution on 19 June 1867 was painted by Édouard Manet.
Q 25Which prime minister pushed the Royal Titles Act through Parliament in 1876 so Victoria could be Empress of India?
Benjamin Disraeli
Benjamin Disraeli's act was proclaimed at a Delhi Durbar on 1 January 1877; Victoria had already raised him to the peerage as Earl of Beaconsfield in 1876.
Q 26Which empress dowager declared war on the foreign powers in 1900, siding with the Boxers, then fled Beijing for Xi'an?
Cixi
Cixi ruled from behind the curtain for nearly half a century; after the allied armies took the capital she returned in 1902 and belatedly backed reforms, dying in 1908 a day after the Guangxu Emperor.
Q 27Which Qing commissioner had over a thousand tons of confiscated opium destroyed at Humen in June 1839?
Lin Zexu
Lin Zexu's public letter urging Queen Victoria to halt the trade never got a reply, and after British victories the court made him a scapegoat, dismissed him in 1840 and exiled him to Ili in Xinjiang.
Q 28Which Filipino leader declared independence in June 1898 and fought the Americans until his capture at Palanan in 1901?
Emilio Aguinaldo
Emilio Aguinaldo was seized on 23 March 1901 by General Funston, aided by Macabebe scouts who got inside his headquarters by a ruse; he lived to see full independence in 1946.
Q 29Which 1901 measure let the US intervene in Cuba and lease naval stations, later giving it Guantánamo Bay?
Platt Amendment
The Platt Amendment set seven conditions for withdrawing US troops and was written into Cuba's 1901 constitution; most of it was repealed in 1934 under Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy.
Q 30Which 1879 battle saw Cetshwayo's Zulu army destroy a British column, killing more than 1,300 of its men?
Isandlwana
Isandlwana's camp had not been entrenched, so the Zulu 'horns of the buffalo' swept round both its flanks; the defence of Rorke's Drift began that same afternoon.