Europe and its Imperial Past

2659 Words6 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Social darwinism in the perspective of imperialism

In 1877, a young man wrote an impassioned treatise to his colleagues at Oxford.“I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race,” wrote Cecil Rhodes, only 24 years old at the time. “Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings” he mused, “what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence.” Like many other Britons of his day, Rhodes was a staunch imperialist. The document cited, his famous “Confession of Faith,” was an unbridled expression of his belief in British racial superiority. In this essay we'll examine the practice of imperialism throughout modern history. Specifically, the philosophies and doctrines that provided justification of its offenses. We'll allow the life of Cecil Rhodes to serve as an entry point for this topic. This is ideal, first because Rhode's ideas and doctrines provide an illustration of imperial doctrine as a whole. Secondly, because Rhode's life is a microcosm of historic imperialism, as we shall see. Rhodes' was not alone in this views on the superiority of the British race. Indeed, with the establishment of Darwin's theory of evolution, countless intellectuals had scrambled to establish evolutionary biology as the basis for European racial supremacy. Over the years, Rhodes' charismatic dogma would draw him to the center of the imperialist movement. It was a fitting place for him, as in many ways Rhodes life was demonstration of imperialism at large. On the one hand, Rhodes represented a class of wealthy European business men who had grown obscenely rich through their shameless plunder of the colonized world. Throughout... ... middle of paper ... ...ives were theoretical equals. The source of their inequality being their lack of education, finances, or as it was termed at the time, their “barbarism.” There was an element of this in every imperial regime. Algerians were able to buy and sell land like Europeans under French rule. In India this was also the case. In cases where there was formal inequality, there was generally a paternal ideology providing support for it. For example, the “civilizing” missions in the Congo. Even as African workers were forced into labor under harsh conditions, the Belgian elite ruling them maintained that forced labor was “the only means of giving them the incentive to work.” Thus, the slavery imposed on the native population was merely a “humanitarian” effort meant to help the African laborers ”throw off their natural indolence and improve their condition.” Economically,

Show More
Related

  • Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia

    1446 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...usion that race is deployed "in the construction of power relations."* Indeed a "metalanguage" of race, to use Higginbotham's term, was employed by colonial powers to define black women as separate from English women, and that process is deconstructed in Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, Anxious Patriarchs. However, Brown's analysis rests mainly on the shifting English concepts of gender and race imposed on colonial society by the white elite, becoming at times a metalanguage of colonial gender. Nonetheless, Brown's analysis of overlapping social constructions is instructive for understanding the ways gender and race can be manipulated to buttress dominant hierarchies.

    Read More

  • Interpreting Choy's and Taylor's Short Stories: Issues of Modern Racism and Prejudice

    1382 Words  | 3 Pages

    people of different ethnicities. Such harm is observed in the history of North America when the Europeans were establishing settlements on the North American continent. Because of European expansion on the North American continent, the first nations already established on the continent were forced to leave their homes by the Europeans, violating the rights and freedoms of the first nations and targeting them with discrimination; furthermore, in the history of the United States of America, dark skinned individuals were used as slaves for manual labour and were stripped of their rights and freedoms by the Americans because of the racist attitudes that were present in America. Although racist and prejudice attitudes have weakened over the decades, they persist in modern societies. To examine a modern perspective of prejudice and racism, Wayson Choy’s “I’m a Banana and Proud of it” and Drew Hayden Taylor’s “Pretty Like a White Boy: The Adventures of a Blue-Eye Ojibway” both address the issues of prejudice and racism; however, the authors extend each others thoughts about the issues because of their different definitions, perspectives, experiences and realities.

    Read More

  • The Central Theme of Southern History by Ulrich B. Phillips

    1616 Words  | 4 Pages

    ...icit in the cause of white supremacists, and is in fact as personally involved with the subject of his scholarly article as Wright is with his own less academic essay. Phillips’s evidentiary support is subject to a striking caveat, one which puts almost any source to work for his purposes, “When…slavery was attacked it was defended not only as a vested interest, but…as a guarantee of white supremacy and civilization. Its defenders did not always take pains to say that this was what they chiefly meant, but it may nearly always be read between their lines.” This has the effect of providing an assumed motive for all of his sources; Phillips’s reader also begins to ‘read between the lines.’ The most troubling aspect of his article is that, in the guise of a serious historian, he twists historical fact to suit his thesis, rather than suiting his thesis to the facts.

    Read More

  • Canada Annex The West Indies Summary

    763 Words  | 2 Pages

    During this time it was vital that countries expand their borders and trading. The tropics were considered a region where white men could not inhabit for long, as Kidd wrote in “The white man’s burden”. Although Canada’s anticipating success was based as much on it’s recent developments within their borders as it was based on their geographical location. Canada’s northern geography was viewed as being a positive attribute to governing these colonies based on their racial characteristics. Hasting’s explains how Canada geographical location and racial characteristics were interrelated and associated with “energy, strength, self reliance, health, and purity”(10). This idea of geographical location and racial characteristics were evident on the views of the West Indies. It explains why it was believed that regions in the tropics could not be developed successfully unless it was controlled by the white race or

    Read More

  • Fanon And Freud: The Relationship Between The Individual And Society

    1121 Words  | 3 Pages

    Fanon focuses on two related desires that constitute the pathology of the colonial situation: “The Black man wants to be white. The white man is desperately trying to achieve the rank of man” (p. xiii). As an unconscious desire, this can result in a series of irrational behaviors and beliefs, such as the Antillean speaking French, the desire for a white

    Read More

  • The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America

    929 Words  | 2 Pages

    Allison, R. J., review of M. A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identity in the Colonial and Antebellum South, 1526-1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. In Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 30:3 (1999), pp. 475-481.

    Read More

  • The Racial Contract, by Charles W. Mills

    1142 Words  | 3 Pages

    As can be observed through the historical events that have occurred over time, race can be seen as a simple idea, but rather it is not and can instead be seen as a complex topic of discussion with more intricacies then what may be originally exposed. In his text, Mills attempts to explain some of these intricacies by starting with the way that race has culminated it self through the happenings and changes that have developed historically in society. It is obvious to see that the soc...

    Read More

  • Colonialims and the Use of Narrative in Stories Helped Fight Colonialism

    1290 Words  | 3 Pages

    To show how stories can affect colonialism, we will be looking at British authors during the time of colonialism. During this period of British colonialism, writers like Joyce Cary, author of “Mister Johnson” wrote novels about Africa and more specifically, a Nigerian named Johnson. Johnson in this novel is represented as “[an] infuriating principal character”. In Mr. Cary’s novel he demeans the people of Africa with hatred and mockery, even describing them as “unhuman, like twisted bags of lard, or burst bladders”. Even though Cary’s novel displayed large amounts of racism and bigotry, it received even larger amounts of praise, even from Time Magazine in October 20, 1952. The ability to write a hateful novel and still receive praise for it is what Chinua Achebe likes to describe as “absolute power over narrative [and...

    Read More

  • Analyse British Attitudes Towards Race and Nationality

    1692 Words  | 4 Pages

    R.A.Huttenback, The British Empire as a "White Man's Country"-Racial Attitudes and Immigration Legislation in the Colonies of White Settlement, Journal of British Studies , Vol. 13, No. 1 (Nov, 1973) , pp. 108-137

    Read More

  • Generations of Racism

    1147 Words  | 3 Pages

    Through interpretations of the “Twilight of the White Races in 1926” written by Muret, race is seen as something that determines one’s ability to certain rights, privileges and social status. Being ‘negro’ is seen as something negative, and something that creates a devastating problem for Whites and more specifically Anglo Saxons inhibiting American society. “This is a critical moment for the western peoples; if they allow themselves to be submerged by the colored races, it is the end of their glory and of their role, and this western civilization of which we are so ...

    Read More

  • Washintgon Irving

    2161 Words  | 5 Pages

    It has been the lot of the unfortunate aborigines of America, in the early periods of colonization, to be doubly wronged by the white men. They have been dispossessed of their hereditary possessions by mercenary and frequently wanton warfare, and their characters have been traduced by bigoted and interested writers.

    Read More

  • What Was Plaatje's View Of Imperialism

    239 Words  | 1 Pages

    Supposedly, before the white man’s curiosity drove him to Africa, he already had a land upon which he built his nation and defined or refined his identity. He had fought in wars with his own kind to protect his place and rights within that land. When he reached Africa, the continent’s history not only commenced with him, it became part of his history. However, Plaatje’s perspective is that the black man’s history began before the arrival of the Boers where he—so secured in his identity—was only concerned with creating his own history of conquest and invasion (1-9). Nevertheless, History depicts that these two men’s path crossed and the white man came to classify himself as the civilized, which definition describes an advanced state of society,

    Read More

  • The Enlightenment Set the Stage for New Imperialism

    1371 Words  | 3 Pages

    New imperialism was the mid nineteenth and twentieth centuries cultural equivalent to a modern day mafia, its roots entangled in the economic, cultural, and humanistic aspects of life. The sole objective of the nations entailed the exploitation of their controlled state. Gestating from the change in control of Asian and African nations to the Europeans by means of political deviance, malicious sieges, and strategic military attacks. The juxtaposition to the modern equivalent endures as the aforesaid is sheltered by the fairytale that these nations were in need of aid and by doing so the Europeans were the good guys. The ideas of new imperialism are greatly influenced by those of the enlightenment. Taking place during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the enlightenment was an intellectual movement with the goal of social progress (Genova, 1/11). Armed with scientific thought and reason, enlightenment thinkers set out to explore the fields of science, economics, and human nature. Brilliant minds such as Voltaire, Kant and others all across Western Europe collaborated to further knowledge. The enlightenment laid the foundation on which new imperialism sprung, embedding the ideas of an incessant need to explore not only the scientific world but the physical world as well. The enlightenments goals and ideas significantly influenced new imperialism, because the enlightenment created a need for new means and a purpose to accrue them.

    Read More

  • Gordon's Rebellion

    1446 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the eighteenth century, sugar production gave England the power it needed to help maintain its imperial endeavors; India altered the economic future in the nineteenth century. At the same time, a balance of power shifted because the power of Britain’s landed class switched to the industrial, professional, and commercial class. The events of 1857 shook London because “all classes of Englishmen” became passionate the Indians revolted during the mutiny and committed crimes against English women. In terms of social relations and identity, those in the rebellion reestablished themselves as “other” because they threatened 13, 000 white settlers on the island and this fed into the fear that already existed in the metropolis. Yet, these racial ideals existed in the colonies thirty years earlier as Englishmen went to explore and live savages, but the government viewed these issues as colonial problems, but this change by 1857 because the “English public saw the colored man as the personification of malice.” These feelings fed into the upcoming debates that involved Thomas Carlyle and John Stuart Mills because these intellectual white men created the cultural class battle that changed how the people perceived the

    Read More

  • Knowledge in Stevenson's The Beach of Falesa and Stoker's Dracula

    1567 Words  | 4 Pages

    Bolt, Christine. “Race and the Victorians,” in British Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century, ed. C.C. Eldridge. St. Martin’s Press: 1984.

    Read More

More about Europe and its Imperial Past

Open Document