History of colonialism colonies had acquired independence during the Latin American revolutions at the beginning of the 19th century. In Asia, The Great Game, which lasted from 1813 to 1907, opposed the British Empire against Imperial Russia for supremacy in central Asia. China was opened to Western influence starting with the First and Second Opium Wars (1839–1842; 1856–1860). After the visits of Commodore Matthew Perry in 1852–1854, Japan opened itself to the Western world during the Meiji Era (1868–1912). Imperialism also took place in Burma, Indonesia (Netherlands East Indies), Malaya and the Philippines. Burma had been under British rule for nearly a hundred
An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China nations, the collapse of China, British domination of Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century, malevolent misunderstanding between the West and the Third World in the twentieth." Other historians such as Joanna Waley-Cohen and Benjamin A. Elman argue for a more complex dynamic between England and China well into the 19th century. Kenneth Pomeranz refers to Staunton´s account to highlight the economic similarities between China and the West and argues that the Chinese disadvantage of energy-generating resources and the European access to the New World caused the divergence between East and West rather than cultural miscommunication. An Authentic Account of an