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- 20 de Oct, 2014
The question was to the motivation of the empires. The only relevant source for this is the people who did the building- indigenous opinion of the motivations of their conquerors is irrelevant when we have the verbatim record of the conquerors themselves.
There is no evidence that the woodland natives were any different to other tribal cultures- they feuded, fought and raided just as much as anyone else. If you genuinely believe native tribes did not behave with the same violence to each other re forcing others off land, raping and pillaging vanquished foes then i would suggest the version of history passed down in those communities has rather suffered for the lack of writing. Underdeveloped administration, economic and political systems in their culture just prevented first nations from progressing to form their own hegemonic centralised kingdoms and empires beyond loose tribal configurations. The colonists are only distinguishable in that they were far better at feuding and raiding and had the systems needed to establish and maintain conquests.
Advantages for the conquered include, but are not limited too: The written word, medicine, the scientific method, the wheel, more efficient agriculture, literature, history.
native people were particularly badly treated in the US and continue to suffer for it, but that was not the model used worldwide and to judge the concept of imperial colonialism on it is to ignore the majority of the colonial powers. IT is as I say like judging the concept of democracy on the behaviour of the USA in the 50s or at guantanamo bay. For the natives of the americas colonialism was a disaster, this is not true for the global population imo.
Not at all. Winning one battle is not the same as winning a war or a series of wars. The fact remains that indigenous cultures were unable to adequately maintain independence from more advanced europeans. The pueblo rebellion ultimately failed and did so because of a lack of logistical, political and economic systems sophisticated enough to fight off a western power even when captured arms provided a more even military technological level.
Colonialism effected the whole world and many of its later projects were carried out outside america. Looking at purely the native american perspective is to ignore the most recent colonies. it is again the equivalent of judging democracy based on the usa in the 1890s. It ignores considerable development in practice. Natives in many places did not want to integrate and that is largely why decolonisation occurred as the west no longer had the political will to act in an authoritarian manner following fighting against the nazis. However what the people wanted is not necessarily the most relevant factor when assessing whether colonialism was a net benefit or not, especially not when much of africa has become vastly more corrupt, war ridden and unequal since independence.
The empires brought order, technology, infrastructure at the cost of political liberty and in some regions, personal liberty.
I dont doubt that native people resented being conquered and i wouldn't dispute that when someone raised a gun to them to impose a belief they had a right to resist. What I don't see is any reason why their belief that america was better governed as a series of loose tribal confederation following native religions has anymore validity than that of a colonist who believes it should be a united western style country under the christian god. By the standards of the day neither side had any inherent right to land they could not protect and the stronger civilisation won.
Slavery, was not a thing in european culture until they needed people to work their plantations without removing valuable workers at home. No different to the natives there.
Slavery was a huge and global industry and the mainstay of both the arab and west african economies, almost every nation on earth used it in some form between 1600-1800 and yet the society that shut it down was absolutely the British empire which outlawed the trading of slaves in its colonial empire in the early 1800s, set up a naval squadron off the cost of west africa to end exporting to the americas, forced the portuguese and french to stop trading in them and invaded the major west african hubs specifically to put an end to the trade when local rulers refused. They went on to put considerable pressure on imperial china, russia and turkey to limit their own activities. slave trading on a large scale was common for hundreds of years before the empire- it is not at all a coincidence that the trade was almost destroyed following its abolition in UK territory.
The impetus for this change was absolutely not minorities, who have been vocally rebelling against slavery to no avail since rome- it was a dedicated white english lobby who believed slavery was unchristian.
Slavery was the norm globally- especially in the african and muslim world. In africa they were frequently the trade resource the natives offered first. Slave trading would have existed in a massive organised scale without the rise of the european colonial empires and indeed did for hundreds of years. The slave markets of the niger and cairo were famous before columbus. For much of human history the practice was globally accepted and it is only in the past 200 years it has become widely viewed as unjustifiable. I'm not defending slavery, but it is not intrinsically connected to colonialism, non colonial societies such as the chinese, siamese, persians, zulus, aztecs, incas all made extensive use of slave populations. So to say they used slavery is a criticism of the time period colonialism took place in not a criticism of colonialism itself.
Many colonies did not involve genocide or rape- indeed both have risen considerably in africa since the end of colonialism as tribes return to raiding, feuding and exterminating each other. Likewise post colonial india which has retained much of its colonial values and administration is far less violent and brutal than the pre colonial mess of sultans and raja. The experience of america and australia is different in this regard but represent the worst of extremes and are not representative of the norm.
That is one view- the victorian attitude would be that the west has the means, and therefore the duty, to protect its fellow man from the depravities of ISIS even if his fellow man does not appreciate the need for protection. The view would be that if a society cannot protect its people it is the duty of a stronger society to step in and take over. It is a strange and extremely paternalistic view to modern eyes. that said it clearly produced results - again the pax britannia stabilised much of south asia and africa.
But thats slightly irrelevant my point was that the current mess with US foreign policy and isis cannot really be described as a failure of colonialism as colonial doctrines are not being followed.
It could i suppose be described as a result of botched decolonisation when you consider how regions were granted independence along colonial administrative rather than ethnic lines but the mess that decolonization was is a big enough topic for its own thread.
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