User:Tututwo/sandbox
Colonial Legacies[edit]
Group 6[edit]
Thesis Statement: The world today has been influenced by colonialism through political, global, economic, cultural, environmental, and other colonial encounters.
Political[edit]
Due to European colonialism in the Americas, the lasting effect of their invasion resulted in a huge population decline, the spread of unknown diseases, such as Smallpox, Measles, and the Bubonic plague that devastated the Native American population.The effects from forced Christianity and the death of thousands still impacts the Americas through how they worship, grow and change as a society. Since the 1500s, there have been huge social changes in the Americas that are still in effect today.
The invasion of the Aztec capital eventually resulted in present-day Mexico and Native Americans today are still recovering from the demographic and population loss caused by the Spaniards and Europeans. In order to do a population recovery, marriages between Natives and non-Natives ensued. Their societies were moved and relocated, they were massacred, sterilized as well as completely broken up as a society. This resulted in Native Americans today having different tribes.
If Columbus never opened a gateway to the imperialism of the Americas would the Aztecs and Incas as well as the Native American population still be thriving today? Would diseases like Smallpox still be in existence today? Would the Great Dying and the Little Ice Age still have occurred? Or would the Americas as we know it today be completely different.
Sri Lanka and the Portuguese[edit]
A long-lasting effect of colonialism can be seen in the depictions of what happened in the late 1400s when the Portuguese explored in Africa and the East. It affected not only those that they invaded but also the Portuguese themselves and their own future racial identity. The invasion of Sri Lanka and its capital by Vasco de Gama and his ships as shown below did not only produce destruction; in fact, a lot of Sri Lanka, including its King, joined forces with the Portuguese! This resulted in an alliance and a new ethnic group with the Portuguese settlers who got married to the Indian women.[1]
Colonial Societies in the Americas: Aztecs and Incas[edit]
The economic foundation of the colonial society in the Americas lay in agriculture, large rural estates and silver and gold mining. The workers were native Africans and Europeans which brought some diversity into the country during the time, where there was very few women. However, the emergence of mixed race and more women coming into the country helped the imbalance between the male and female populations and the various racial populations.[2] Therefore, mixed-race people, also known as Mestizos, represented the majority of the population of Mexico. This influence can still be seen in Mexico today. In Guatemala, 41 percent of the population are Mestizos. [3]The Spanish colonization also caused many natives to learn and speak Spanish. It's why in modern society, many American countries, especially in Central and South America mainly speak Spanish. Spain also brought Christianity to Americans; missionaries came from Spain to spread the gospel. Nowadays, Christianity is the primary religion throughout America. Furthermore, the Spanish brought a new culture into Central and South America. Before then, Incas were the main culture of Central and South America. If we look at Hispanic food, especially Mexican food, we often see rice, beans, and wheat. Those foods were brought by Spanish colonizers. Lastly, Spanish was one of the richest countries in Europe; Spain became a lot richer due to the silver and gold they brought back to Europe.[4]
Economic Impacts[edit]
As conquests occurred in the Western Hemisphere, Portugal ran a trade empire that was, unknowingly, a step towards global commerce.[5] Other countries in Europe used the idea of trade and Spain established a trading center on the Philippine Islands while the Dutch and English set up East Indian Trading Companies; since the large economies in Asia were not threatened by the European military, Europeans were able to trade with most places.[6] It wasn’t until the “Europeans encountered an ancient and rich network of commerce that stretched from east Africa to China” that global trading began to expand.[7] Europeans came upon the large Indian trading network and China’s high quality goods, especially spices.[8] For Europeans, the only resource with any value was silver, and since European powers conquered most of the Western Hemisphere, they used the silver deposits in Mexico and Bolivia to help pay for the Eastern goods.[9]
The Booming Silver Trade molded global commerce into what it looks like today.[10] Andre Gunder Frank, a historian claims, “silver went round the world and made the world go round.” How can this be true? Silver trade “was the first direct and sustained link between the Americas and Asia, and it initiated a web of Pacific commerce that grew steadily over the centuries."[11] The only resource Europeans could use to trade with the East was silver, and “much of the silver shipped across the Atlantic to Spain was spent in Europe generally and then used to pay for the Asian goods that the French, British, and Dutch so greatly desired;” the high demand of silver in China “set silver in motion around the world” and strengthened Western and Eastern new global commerce.[12]
While Silver was strengthening markets across the globe, “the transatlantic slave system transformed entire societies."[13] Strayer and Nelson in their book Ways of the World, explained, “from the point of initial capture to sale on the coast, the entire enterprise was normally in African hands,” however, “from the point of sale on the African coast to the massive use of slave labor on American plantations, the entire enterprise was in European hands” and was driven by European demand.[14] Europeans used slaves for the fields and mining in the Americas; “the century and a half between 1700 and 1850 marked the high point of the slave made as the plantation economies of the Americas boomed."[15] These high demands encouraged Africans to kidnap; an account by Olaudah Equiano in, “Kidnapped, Enslaved, and Sold Away,” he said, “I grew up till I was turned the age of eleven, when an end was put to my happiness… two men and a woman got over our walls, and in a moment seized us both… they stopped our mouths, and ran off with us into the nearest wood.”[16] Those who were kidnapped were sold for “firearms and gunpowder, tobacco and alcohol” or even “decorative items such as beads."[17]
Silver and Slaves as trading goods changed today’s world, and while there were other large trading networks, these two were by far the most impactful then and now. Nelson and Strayer noted that through the Silver Trade, “by the eighteen century, many Europeans dined from Chinese porcelain dishes called china, wore Indian-made cotton textiles, and drank chocolate from Mexico, tea from China, and coffee from Yemen while sweetening these beverages with sugar from the Caribbean or Brazil."[18] People today can relate as many, for example, have clothes made in China, Vietnam, or Honduras. The people “who worked to produce these goods, whether slave or free, were operating in a world economy."[18] While today “slavery lost its legitimacy,” there is no denying the long lasting impact it also had on the world, both economically and socially.[19] In Africa the Slave Trade “fostered moral corruption” by socially effecting African societies, especially in the judicial system; also, “it certainly slowed Africa’s growth at a time when Europe, China, and other regions were expanding demographically” causing the 3rd world image of Africa to become its single story until very recently.[20] In 2008 was the bicentennial of the United States ending their participation in the Transatlantic Slave Trade.[21] In the “United Kingdom there were commemorations and exhibitions mounted throughout 2007 to mark the bicentennial of this momentous event,” however, there was “no large exhibitions, few conferences, and only a handful of scholarly publications devoted to commemorating the bicentennial” in the United States.[21] While one of the better outcomes of the Slave trade “lay in the new global linkages that it generated,” it came at the inhumane expense of people’s lives and societies.[20] While there has been more good changes, like the United Kingdom celebrating them ending participation in the slave trade, America has been called out as “the silence has been deafening, but not altogether unexpected given most Americans' failure to face up to the inhumane and deadly practices of slavery and slave trading that created the wealth of the nation."[21] Trade made global connections and commerce as seen today; silver expanded the commerce to become global, but even though slave trade has ended, the impact it had has not been completely delt with; unless the problem is dealt with, especially one so detrimental as the Transatlantic Slave Trade, societies and economies will continue to struggle.
Cultural Transformations[edit]
During the early modern era, the Catholic Reformation spread Christianity in Asia and America, and the Protestant Reformation spread Christianity in the Americas. Christianity was introduced and colonized by Europeans. The Jesuit missionaries in China didn’t make their mission to focus on converting. According to Strayer and Nelson, they focused on learning from China’s ancient culture and both of these things reshaped the culture of the Asian people. Florence C. Hasia states, “Ignatius of Loyola invoked...’ We should become all things to all, so that we may gain all for Christ.’” [22] This shows what the Jesuits believed would convert the Chinese people, missionaries who acted like them. According to Diarmaid MacCulloch “Jesuits began dressing as Confucian scholars, complete with long beards; they were determined to show that their learning was worthy of respect in a culture with a deep reverence for scholarship.” [23] Overall, Christianity in China was not completely accepted because the Chinese thought that devotion to the Christian religion would lead to losing some of their Chinese traditions. The missionary message of Christianity by the Jesuits has affected Chinese society today.
Strayer and Nelson claim that the Mesoamerican and Andeans were open to including local religions [24]. In addition, the Spanish colonial regime encouraged conversion. The missionaries nicely persuaded them and were patient in teaching the religion of Christianity. However, Strayer and Nelson state Europeans tried to destroy local gods and everything associated with them instead of helping them. Thus, the force of conversion to Christianity from European missionaries led to societies taking on Christian views in their own way. According to the Chilam Balam of Chumayel on Divine Intervention, “This was the origin of service to the Spaniards...It was by the antichrist on earth, the kinkajous of the towns, the foxes of the towns, the blood-sucking insects of the town, those who drained the poverty of the working people.” [25]
In addition, Europe was able to colonize the world because of the Scientific Revolution and advancements in technology. Europe's technology was starting to grow more gradually during the early modern era compared to China and the Islamic world. Before the Scientific Revolution, some technology and innovations that allowed Europeans to explore were mapmaking, ironworking technology, and gunpowder weapons. Strayer and Nelson claim that because the Scientific Revolution first occurred in Europe rather than China and the Islamic world the lasting effect was that Europe was able to colonize the world with their new technology and innovation. [26] Strayer and Nelson also write that “Europe was independently ahead and was open to new ways of thinking” [27]. The discoveries that influenced the legacy of the Scientific Revolution are still important and known today.
Global Environments[edit]
The relationship between the form of society and global landscape is profound and intimate. Drayton added, “Empires, the children of the medieval world, were the midwives of the modern.” [28] The imperial powers is inseparable from historic changes on global environments. Even nowadays, colonialism still sheds its light on modern environmental transformations.
The ultimate goal of colonization is to enrich empires by exploiting indigenous people and extracting natural resources to the maximum degree in order for economic growth. However, human activities have always been transforming the environments. Direct phenomenal “activities” like colonialism certainly left long-term environmental scars. Nauru, a tiny tropical island in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Australia, has an abundant supply of phosphate deposits, and phosphates a chemical fertilizers that can greatly boost agricultural production.[29] Ever since German colonizers found this island in 1900, 80% of the island was “strip-mined." Colonizers removed everything including the top layer of the soil in order to loot the purest phosphates. The 68 years of colonial rule depleted this island’s all types of resources, such as water, vegetation and, of course, phosphate deposits. Nauru became an independent island republic in 1968 but it will take centuries to recover.[29]
Besides the direct resource extraction, the economic growth also left enduring marks on global landscapes. Strayer and Nelson pointed out that the growing numbers of poor and growing consumption of the rich led to the doubling of cropland.[7] However, as time goes by, economic pressure greatly pushed industrialization forwards and left no room in the profit margins concerning the right of native people and environmental damages of resource extraction. The consequences turned out to be further contraction of the world's forests, wetlands and grasslands[7]. The story of Nigeria started with colonial economic development but did not end with maintaining its stability either. Ample oil was discovered on the Niger River delta in 1956 in British colony, and this has never brought fortunes to millions of inhabitants of Nigeria. Many international companies, including Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil and TotalFinaElf, established their industries in Nigeria and there were laws like Land Use Act of 1978 to help those companies stay in Nigeria.[29] Nonetheless, economic growth never benefited indigenous people, and even worse the delta ended up being one of the most oil polluted places in the world, with 1.5 million tons of oil released into the environment for years. The map indicates that many onshore oil operations are in the Niger River Delta wetlands. Water pollution remains along with acid rain and extinction of local species.[29]
Deteriorating environmental degradation basically halted subsistence agriculture so that rural poor populations had to suffer extreme poverty. The local Nigerian farming and fishing industries has provided occupations and diverse economic opportunities in Oloibiri, but after colonial rule, over 50% of Nigerian population was living on less than $2 per day in 2012. Extreme poverty can encourage people to join an armed conflict or risk doing illegal business because they have little to lose.[30] At least in the early 21st century, illegal oil, also called “blood oil”, is still prevalent on the Nigerian black market. As Joseph England from University of Central Florida concluded:
- Undoubtedly, decades of British rule created the conditions that ultimately rendered successive Nigerian governments deeply dependent on foreign entities leaving the Niger Delta people to suffer the consequences of environmental degradation from a reckless and unregulated oil industry.[31]
Colonial Encounters[edit]
Colonial encounters in Asia, Africa, and Oceania during the 19th century have significantly changed the world we live in today. These encounters left long-term legacies by the reshaping of cultures around the world. To better understand why the 19th century was different compared to other colonial centuries, one must consider the following question, what was distinctive about the European colonial empire of the 19th century? Unlike other countries involving colonialism, the 19th century took a different approach. In Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands, the competition for resources and markets was in the hands of the Europeans. In other words, the Europeans were confident in believing that they have the upper hand because of the access to guns and other weapons. The Industrial Revolution shaped the character of the 19th century European Imperialism by the advancement in technology, and also technological innovations like steamboats, rifles, and telegraphs.
The contact of colonial with subject people did bring some positive effect on how cultures were formulated. Environmentally, the discovery of quinine helped prevent malaria, and greatly reduced European death rates in the tropics. Every year on April 25 is World Malaria Day nowadays, celebrates the global control of Malaria. The global theme of this year's World Malaria Day is "Make malaria forever under control".[32] The policies of colonial states changed the economic lives of their subjects because many groups of people did find ways of working within and profiting from the colonial system. The long-term legacies of European colonialism are seen throughout different cultures around the world. The European colonial views shaped the development of African, Asian and Oceanian identity in the nineteenth century. What played an important role and what carried over until the modern period was the idea of race? The superiority of the Europeans led them to dehumanize other people and their cultures. The language also was another long-term legacy of colonialism. For example, in most of West Africa, French is well speaking and is also required in school. In most of South America, the Catholic faith are very popular. The long-term legacies of colonialism has left a major change in history.
Bibliography[edit]
Adunbi, Omolade. "Unusable Nigerians." Africa Is a Country. Last modified September 9, 2017. africasacountry.com/2017/02/unusable-nigerians.
Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient:Global Economy in Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 131.
Drayton, Richard. 2000. "Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the 'Improvement' of the World. New Haven".Yale University Press.
“Effects of the Spanish Conquest of the Americas /...” MindMeister. Accessed December 11, 2019. https://www.mindmeister.com/953044352/effects-of-the-sp anish-conquest-of-the-americas- colombian-exchange?fullscreen=1 ). Strayer, Robert W., and Eric Nelson. Ways of the World: a Brief Global History with Sources. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins, 2019.
England, Joseph. 2012. "The Colonial Legacy Of Environmental Degradation In Nigeria 's Niger River Delta". Geography Commons.
Franklin, V. P. "Introduction: Ending the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Bicentennial Research, Reflections, and Commemorations." The Journal of African American History 93, no. 4 (2008): 471-73. www.jstor.org/stable/25610018.
MOURÃO, MANUELA (2011). "Whitewash: Nationhood, Empire, and the Formation of Portuguese Racial Identity". Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. pp. 90–124.
Olaudah Equiano, “Kidnapped, Enslaved, and Sold Away,” in The Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. David Northrup (Massachusetts: D.C. Health and Company, 1994), 74-80.
Strayer, Robert W., and Eric W. Nelson. Ways of the World. 4th ed. Vol. 2. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2019), 539-637.
Strayer, Robert W., and Eric W. Nelson. Ways of the World. 3rd ed. Vol. 2. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2019), 1057.
Wood, Lawrence. 2015. "The Environmental Impacts of Colonialism". Geography Commons.
Notes[edit]
- ^ MOURÃO, MANUELA (2011). "Whitewash: Nationhood, Empire, and the Formation of Portuguese Racial Identity". Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. pp. 90–124.
- ^ Strayer, Robert W., and Eric Nelson. Strayer & Nelson. Ways of the World. p. 594.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ "Demographics of Guatemala". Wikipedia. 8 December 2019.
- ^ "MindMeister: Online Mind Mapping and Brainstorming". MindMeister.
- ^ Stayer, Robert W.; Nelson, Eric W. Ways. p. 598.
- ^ Strayer; Nelson. Ways. pp. 599–600, 602.
- ^ a b c Strayer; Nelson. Ways.3rd Edition. p. 1057.
- ^ Strayer; Nelson. Ways. pp. 596, 602–603.
- ^ Strayer; Nelson. Ways. p. 596.
- ^ Strayer; Nelson. Ways. pp. 553, 596.
- ^ Strayer; Nelson. Ways. p. 604.
- ^ Strayer; Nelson. Ways. p. 605.
- ^ Strayer; Nelson. Ways. p. 612.
- ^ Strayer; Nelson. Ways. pp. 617–618.
- ^ Strayer; Nelson. Ways. p. 619.
- ^ Equiano, Olaudah (1994). Kidnapped, Enslaved, and Sold Away, c. 1756. Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company. pp. 74–80.
- ^ Strayer; Nelson. Ways. p. 618.
- ^ a b Strayer; Nelson. Ways. p. 624.
- ^ Strayer; Nelson. Ways. p. 625.
- ^ a b Strayer; Nelson. Ways. 621.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link) - ^ a b c Franklin, V.P. "Introduction: Ending the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Bicentennial Research, Reflections, and Commemorations". The Journal of African American History. 93: 471.
- ^ Hasia, Florence C. "Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits & Their Scientific Missions In Late Imperial China". The University of Chicago Press. Retrieved 12/10/2019.
{{cite web}}: Check date values in:|accessdate=(help) - ^ MacCulough, Diarmaid (2009). Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. New York: Penguin. pp. 706–707.
{{cite book}}:|access-date=requires|url=(help); Check date values in:|accessdate=(help) - ^ Strayer, Robert W. (2019). Ways of The World: A Brief Global History with Source Volumes (Fourth ed.). Bedford/St.Martin's. p. 649.
{{cite book}}:|access-date=requires|url=(help); Check date values in:|accessdate=(help) - ^ Roys, Ralph L. (1967). The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel. Norman University of Oklahoma Press. pp. 79, 98, 124–127.
- ^ Strayer, Robert W, (2019). Ways of The World: A Brief Global History with Sources Volume (Fourth ed.). Bedford/St. Martins. p. 659.
{{cite book}}:|access-date=requires|url=(help); Check date values in:|accessdate=(help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ^ Strayer, Robert W. (2019). Ways of The World: a Brief Global History with Sources Volume (Fourth ed.). Bedford/St. Martin's. p. 660.
{{cite book}}:|access-date=requires|url=(help); Check date values in:|accessdate=(help) - ^ Drayton (2000). Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the "Improvement" of the World. ISBN 0300059760.
- ^ a b c d Wood, Lawrence (2015). "The Environmental Impacts of Colonialism" (PDF). Geography Commons.
- ^ Adunbi, Omolade. "Unusable Nigerians".
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link) - ^ England, Joseph (2012). "The Colonial Legacy Of Environmental Degradation In Nigeria's Niger River Delta" (PDF). Geography Commons.
{{cite journal}}: line feed character in|title=at position 37 (help) - ^ Strayer; Nelson. Ways. p. 785.