12/23/2023 0 Comments World for two new waves![]() This calculation included the cost of lost slaves. After Haiti’s liberation from France, the island nation was ordered to pay $21 billion in reparations to cover the cost of France’s losses during the Haitian Revolution in exchange for its independence. Walter Rodney’s book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa asserts that systemic poverty on the continent can be directly linked to European exploitation and resource extraction. The wealth and prosperity of what were once the most powerful colonial nations in the world can be attributed to the theft of land, resources, and people from former colonies. It may be easy to brush colonialism off as a relic of the past, but we are all living in a world shaped by these histories of brutal and violent conquest. Forced to walk thousands of miles, an estimated 4,000 Cherokees died on what would later come to be called the “Trail of Tears.” How colonialism shaped the world government, which seized control of their land. In 1838, the Cherokee were forced west by the U.S. $20 bill, signed the Indian Removal Act, which led to the forced removal, relocation, and mass death of thousands of Indigenous people. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson, hailed by President Donald Trump and commemorated on the U.S. Native Americans were moved to reservations - parcels of land that were barren and far from economic opportunities. As they spread across the entirety of the continental U.S., they pushed the Indigenous populations - who had lived on and tended to the land for millennia - farther and farther west. The Europeans who first settled along the East Coast of the United States believed it was their Manifest Destiny, or God-granted right, to claim territory for themselves and their posterity. Understanding settler colonialism allows us to see colonialism not as a singular event, but an ongoing process of violence against and erasure of Indigenous people. A settler is defined as any non-Indigenous person living in a settler-colonial state like the United States, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. This is called settler colonialism, a distinct form of colonialism that seeks to replace, often through genocide and forced assimilation, an Indigenous population with a new settler population. Unlike the colonial occupation of much of the African continent, however, the Europeans who settled in the United States never left. Most believed that everything, including the earth, was meant to be bought and sold. These colonizers did not care that land was considered sacred and communal. Most had no respect for Indigenous cultures or histories they wanted to enforce their own instead. They did not want to share the abundant resources they wanted to generate wealth to fill their own pockets. The majority did not want peace and harmony between cultures they wanted the land for themselves. The primarily British Europeans who settled here - just like the Europeans who settled in Africa and the rest of the Americas - overall did not care that there were people already living on the land. The treatment of the Indigenous people on the land now known as the United States is just as horrifying. The motivations for the first wave of colonial expansion can be summed up as God, Gold, and Glory: God, because missionaries felt it was their moral duty to spread Christianity, and they believed a higher power would reward them for saving the souls of colonial subjects gold, because colonizers would exploit resources of other countries in order to bolster their own economies and glory, since European nations would often compete with one another over the glory of attaining the greatest number of colonies.Īmong the most brutal of colonial regimes was that of Belgium under King Leopold II, known as "the Butcher of Congo." His well-documented acts of violence against the Congolese people resulted in an estimated 10 million deaths. ![]() During this time, European countries such as Britain, Spain, France, and Portugal colonized lands across North and South America. The first wave began in the 15th century, during Europe’s Age of Discovery. There were two great waves of colonialism in recorded history. Imperialism can be understood as the ideology, or logic, that drives colonial projects. Imperialism is defined as a set of policies or practices that extend the power and control of a nation over the political, economic, and cultural life of other areas. Although the terms colonialism and imperialism are often used interchangeably, they are not the same thing. Ĭolonialism is defined as “control by one power over a dependent area or people.” In practice, colonialism is when one country violently invades and takes control of another country, claims the land as its own, and sends people - “settlers” - to live on that land. ![]() This article is part of In Session: The Teen Vogue Lesson Plan.
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