An essay by George Orwell, first published in the literary magazine New Writing in In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner African Resistance to Colonial Rule Benjamin Talton – Temple University. While African resistance to European colonialism is often thought of in terms of a white and black/European and African power struggle, this presumption underestimates the complex and strategic thinking that Africans commonly employed to address the challenges of European colonial rule May 09, · Imperialism, on the other hand, comes from the Latin term imperium, meaning to command. Thus, the term imperialism draws attention to the way that one country exercises power over another, whether through settlement, sovereignty, or indirect mechanisms of control
African Resistance to Colonial Rule
Colonialism is a practice of domination, which involves the subjugation of one people to another. One of the difficulties in defining colonialism is that it is hard to distinguish it from imperialism. Frequently the two concepts are treated as synonyms. Like colonialism, imperialism also involves essay on imperialism and economic control over a dependent territory. The etymology of the essay on imperialism terms, however, provides some clues about how they differ.
The term colony comes from the Latin word colonusessay on imperialism, meaning farmer. This root reminds us that the practice of colonialism usually involved the transfer of population to a new territory, where the arrivals lived as permanent settlers while maintaining political allegiance to their country of origin.
Imperialism, on the other hand, comes from the Latin term imperiummeaning to command. Essay on imperialism, the term imperialism draws attention to the way that one country exercises power over another, whether through settlement, sovereignty, or indirect mechanisms of control.
The legitimacy of colonialism has been a longstanding concern for political and moral philosophers in the Western tradition. At least since the Crusades and the conquest of the Americas, political theorists have struggled with the difficulty of reconciling ideas about justice and natural law with the practice of European sovereignty over non-Western peoples.
In the nineteenth century, the tension between liberal thought and colonial practice became particularly acute, as dominion of Europe over the rest of the world reached its zenith.
Ironically, in the same period when most political philosophers began to defend the principles of universalism and equality, the same individuals still defended the legitimacy of colonialism and imperialism. The goal of this entry is to analyze the relationship between Western political theory and the project of colonialism.
After providing a more thorough discussion of the concept of colonialism, this entry will explain how European thinkers justified, legitimized, and challenged political domination.
The final section will introduce an Indigenous critique of settler-colonialism that emerges both as a response to colonial practices of domination and dispossession of land, customs and traditional history and to post-colonial theories of universalism.
The goal of the essay on imperialism is to provide an overview of the vast and complex literature that explores the theoretical issues emerging out of the experience of European colonization, essay on imperialism. Colonialism is not a modern phenomenon. World history is full of examples of one society gradually expanding by incorporating adjacent territory and settling its people on newly conquered territory. The ancient Greeks set up colonies as did the Romans, essay on imperialism, the Moors, and the Ottomans, to name just a few of the most famous examples.
Colonialism, then, essay on imperialism, is not restricted to a specific time or place. Nevertheless, in the sixteenth century, colonialism changed decisively because of technological developments in navigation that began to connect more remote parts of the world.
Fast sailing ships made it possible to reach distant ports and to sustain close ties between the center and colonies. Thus, the modern European colonial project emerged when it became possible to move large numbers of people across the ocean and to maintain political sovereignty in spite of geographical dispersion.
This entry uses the term colonialism to describe the process of European settlement and political control over the rest of the world, including the Americas, Australia, and parts of Africa and Asia. The difficulty of defining colonialism stems from the fact that the term is often used as a synonym for imperialism.
Both colonialism and imperialism were forms of conquest that were expected to benefit Europe economically and strategically. The term colonialism is frequently used to describe the settlement of North America, Australia, New Zealand, Algeria, and Brazil, places that were controlled by a large population of permanent European residents.
The term imperialism essay on imperialism describes cases in which a foreign government administers a territory without significant settlement; typical examples include the scramble for Africa in the late nineteenth century and the American domination of the Philippines and Puerto Essay on imperialism. The distinction between the two, however, is not entirely consistent in the literature.
Some scholars distinguish between colonies for settlement and colonies for economic exploitation, essay on imperialism.
Others use the term colonialism to describe dependencies that are directly governed by a foreign nation and contrast this with imperialism, which involves indirect forms of domination. The confusion about the meaning of the term imperialism reflects the way that the concept has changed over time. Imperialism was understood as a system of military domination and sovereignty over territories. The day to day work of government might be exercised indirectly through local assemblies or indigenous rulers who paid tribute, but sovereignty rested with the British.
The shift away from this traditional understanding of empire was influenced by the Leninist analysis of imperialism as a system oriented towards economic exploitation, essay on imperialism. According to Lenin, imperialism was the necessary and inevitable result of the logic of accumulation in late capitalism. Thus, for Lenin and subsequent Marxists, imperialism described a historical stage of capitalism rather than a trans-historical practice of political and military domination.
The lasting impact of the Marxist approach is apparent in contemporary debates about American imperialism, a term which usually means American economic hegemony, regardless of whether such power is exercised directly or indirectly Young Given the difficulty of consistently distinguishing between the two terms, essay on imperialism, this entry will use colonialism as a broad concept that refers to the project of European political domination from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries that ended with essay on imperialism national liberation movements of the s.
Post-colonialism will be used to describe the political and theoretical struggles of societies that experienced the transition from political dependence to sovereignty. This entry will use imperialism as a broad term that refers to economic, military, political domination that is achieved without significant permanent European settlement.
The Spanish conquest of the Americas sparked a theological, political, and ethical debate about the use of military force to acquire control over foreign lands. This debate took place within the framework of a religious discourse that legitimized military conquest as a way to facilitate the conversion and salvation of indigenous peoples. The Spanish conquistadores and colonists explicitly justified their activities in the Americas in terms of a essay on imperialism mission to bring Christianity to the native peoples.
The Crusades provided the initial impetus for developing a legal doctrine that rationalized the conquest and possession of infidel lands. Whereas the Crusades were initially framed as defensive wars to reclaim Christian lands that essay on imperialism been conquered by non-Christians, the resulting theoretical innovations played an important role in subsequent attempts to justify the conquest of the Americas.
The conversion of the native peoples, however, did not provide an unproblematic justification for the project of overseas conquest, essay on imperialism. The Spanish conquest of the Americas was taking place during a period of reform when humanist scholars within the Church were increasingly influenced by the natural law theories of theologians such as St.
Thomas Aquinas. According to Pope Innocent IV, war could not be waged against infidels and they could not be deprived of their property simply because of their non-belief, essay on imperialism. Under the influence of Thomism, Innocent IV concluded that force was legitimate only in cases where infidels violated natural law. Nonbelievers had legitimate dominion over themselves and their property, essay on imperialism, but this dominion was abrogated if they proved incapable of governing themselves according to principles that every reasonable person would recognize.
The Spanish quickly concluded that the habits of the native Americans, from nakedness to unwillingness to labor to alleged cannibalism, clearly demonstrated their inability to essay on imperialism natural law. This account of native customs was used to legitimize the enslavement of the Indians, which the Spanish colonists insisted was the only way to teach them civilization and introduce them to Christianity. Some of the Spanish missionaries sent to the New World, however, noticed that the brutal exploitation of slave labor was widespread while any serious commitment to religious instruction was absent.
Members of the Dominican order in particular noted the hypocrisy of enslaving the Indians because of their alleged barbarity while practicing a form of conquest, warfare, and slavery that reduced the indigenous population of Hispaniola fromto 15, in two decades of Spanish rule. Bartolomé de Las Casas and Franciscus de Victoria were two of the most influential critics of Spanish colonial practice. Victoria gave a series of lectures on Indian rights that applied Thomism to the essay on imperialism of Spanish rule.
He argued that all human beings share the capacity for rationality and have natural rights that stem from this capacity. From this premise, essay on imperialism, he deduced that the Papal decision to grant Spain title to the Americas was illegitimate. Unlike the position of Pope Innocent IV, Victoria argued that neither the Pope nor the Spaniards could subjugate the Indians in order to punish violations of essay on imperialism law, essay on imperialism, such as fornication or adultery.
Furthermore, according to Victoria, the pope and Christian rulers acting on his mandate had even less right to enforce laws against unbelievers, because they were outside of the Christian community, which was the domain of Papal authority Williams Despite this strongly worded critique of the dominant modes of justifying Spanish conquest, Victoria concluded that the use of force in the New World was legitimate when Indian essay on imperialism violated the Law of Nations, a set of principles derivable from reason and therefore universally binding.
prohibitions on peaceful travel and trade have consequences for those who do not consent, essay on imperialism. The legitimacy of colonialism was also a topic of essay on imperialism among French, German, and British philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At first it might seem relatively obvious that Enlightenment thinkers would develop a critique of colonialism.
The system of colonial domination, which involved some combination of slavery, quasi-feudal forced labor, or expropriation of property, is antithetical to the basic Enlightenment principle that each individual is capable of reason and self-government.
The rise of anti-colonial political theory, however, required more than a universalistic ethic that recognized the shared humanity of all people. As suggested above, essay on imperialism, the universalism of Thomism proved to be a relatively weak basis for criticizing colonialism. Given the tension between the abstract universalism of natural law and the actual cultural practices of indigenous essay on imperialism, it was easy to interpret native difference as evidence of the violation of natural law.
This in turn became a justification for exploitation. Diderot was one of the most forceful critics of European colonization. Diderot also challenges the dominant justifications for European colonialism. Although he grants that it is legitimate to colonize an area that is not actually inhabited, he insists that foreign traders and explorers have no right of access to fully inhabited lands, essay on imperialism.
This is important because the right to commerce understood to encompass not only trade but also missionary work essay on imperialism exploration was used as a justification for colonization by Spanish thinkers in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. If the native peoples resisted these incursions, the Spanish could legitimately wage war and conquer their territory.
Before enlightenment thinkers could articulate a compelling critique of colonialism, essay on imperialism, they had to recognize the importance of culture and the possibility of cultural pluralism.
The claim that all individuals are equally worthy of dignity and respect was a necessary but not sufficient basis for anti-imperialist thought.
They also had to recognize that the tendency to develop diverse institutions, narratives, and aesthetic practices was essay on imperialism essential human capacity. The French term moeurs or what today would be called culture captures the idea that the humanity of human beings is expressed in the distinctive practices that they adopt as solutions to the challenges of existence.
The work of enlightenment anti-imperialists such as Diderot and Kant reflects their struggle with the tension between universalistic concepts such as human rights and the realities of cultural pluralism.
The paradox of enlightenment anti-imperialism is that human dignity is understood to be rooted in the universal human capacity for reason, essay on imperialism. Yet when people engage in cultural practices that are unfamiliar or disturbing to the European observer, they appear irrational and thus undeserving of recognition and respect.
In other words, he emphasized that human beings all share similar desires to create workable rules of conduct that allow particular ways of life to flourish without themselves creating harsh injustices and cruelties, essay on imperialism.
Muthu 77 There are infinite varieties of solutions to the challenges posed by human existence, essay on imperialism. Societies all need to find a way to balance individual egoism and sociability and to overcome the adversities that stem from the physical environment. From this perspective, culture itself, rather than rationality, is the universal human capacity. Unlike many other eighteenth and nineteenth century political philosophers, Diderot did not assume that non-Western societies were necessarily primitive e.
lacking political and social organization nor did he assume that more complex forms of social organization were necessarily superior. One of the key issues that distinguished critics from proponents of colonialism and imperialism was their view of the relationship between culture, history and progress. Many of the influential philosophers writing in France and England in the essay on imperialism and nineteenth centuries had assimilated some version of the developmental approach to history that was associated with the Scottish Enlightenment.
The language of civilization, savagery, and barbarism is pervasive in writers as diverse of Edmund Burke, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill. It would therefore be incorrect to conclude that a developmental theory of history is distinctive essay on imperialism the liberal tradition; nevertheless, given that figures of the Scottish Enlightenment such as Ferguson and Smith were among its leading expositors, it is strongly associated with liberalism.
Smith himself opposed imperialism for economic essay on imperialism. He felt that relations of dependence between metropole and periphery distorted self-regulating market mechanisms and worried that the cost of military domination would be burdensome for taxpayers Pitts The idea that civilization is the culmination of a process of historical development, however, proved useful in justifying imperialism.
According to Uday Mehta, liberal imperialism was the product of the interaction between universalism and developmental history A core doctrine of liberalism holds that all individuals share a capacity for reason and self-government.
Rationales for IMPERIALISM [AP World History] Unit 6 Topic 1 (6.1)
, time: 5:11What are some examples of cultural imperialism? – blogger.com
1 day ago · Essay about analogy. Research paper about hazing What was force driving the africa in essay behind european imperialism, conclusion of contract law essay. Argumentative essay model two kinds essay dissertation topics on international relations, national integration in pakistan essay css forum The Colonization of Africa Ehiedu E. G. Iweriebor – Hunter College. Between the s and , Africa faced European imperialist aggression, diplomatic pressures, military invasions, and eventual conquest and colonization An essay by George Orwell, first published in the literary magazine New Writing in In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner
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