During my World Studies class Friday, we had an hour long discussion about Europe's effect on the world.
Britain, Spain And Frances influence to be more specific but the discussion some how became all about the British.
At some point of the discussion I stated that,
White Imperialism was the cause of the destruction of ancient/ethnic cultures, genocide, plague and the enslavement of millions.
I gave the following examples To Back Up My Point..
- The Colonization Of Africa, Then The Enslavement/Genocide Of It's Natrual Habitants (By The Millions).
- The Manipulation/Genocide (largely Due To Disease) Of Native Americans & Their Forced Migration From Their Indigenous Lands/Homes.
- Europe's Effective Delegitimized Of The Qing Empire, That Process Started With The Opium Wars In 1839-1842. It Ended With The Suppression Of The Boxer Rebellion in 1901, China’s Last Dynasty Collapsed Only A decade later In The Xinhai Revolution Of 1911.
- The Relocation Usually Against Their will, Then Re-education Of Australian Aboriginal Children In Western Australian Internment Camp's. The Moore River A Is A Famous Internment Camp If Your Interested In Looking Up More Information On The Aborigines Treatment.
A majority of my classmates who happen to be white got really angry with me and lashed out and the consensus they came to was that my statement was racist and that I was too (WHICH I AM NOT).
Now Mind You..
Imperialism is defined as a policy of extending a country's power and influence through diplomacy or military force.
The topic at hand was European Imperialism and it's influence on the world.
And the demographic populous of 16th, 17th and 18th century Europe is Caucasian.
Be honest with me, did my statement come across as racist even though it can be backed by facts?
It's not so much racist as simply historically incorrect or more precise you're only telling the things that are interesting for your own statements, but disregard many other important aspects that give a very different view. You're only telling half the story, but disregard the other half. I don't know how many of your classmates are aware of this as not many people are, but I can already see that pretty much no one in this thread knows it and that they just want to point fingers at the big bad white man. Then yes you deserve to get ugly stares, not for being racist, but simply for trying to put the blame on Europe for something the entire world was responsible for.
Get your facts straight. Europe only started colonizing Africa during the 2nd half of the 19th century and at that point the slave trady was largely abolished by the Europeans, not by many other people. Where do you think they were the past 3-4 centuries? The coastal regions. For centuries they did not leave the coast. Why? Because almost everything was given to them almost literally on a silver platter the moment they set one foot on land. Ship arrives at a port, goes to the closest market a few hundred meters aways, buy their stuff and are gone again with their ship. Considering you are talking about the White Man, let me tell you this the Black Man sold their own kin. Africans enslaved their own people, something Europeans stopped doing to themselves centuries ago, so that they could sell them as they were very much interested in what Europeans brought with them. The Europeans were not the only players in this entire system. Who is more at fault. The ones who bought them or the ones who sold them? Still everyone is so eager to point fingers at the White Man despite, to put it like this, the Black Man was selling their own neighbors like livestock.
Same thing with the rest of the world. Do you know how this all is also called in historiography? The European Miracle. Not so much to glorify it all, but simply to underline the irrationality of it. How is it possible that a few countries with very limited resources and people succeed in controlling the entire world? It does not make sense and still it happened. The amount of countries that never got controlled, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. No joke. The European armies where puny compared to the amount of people they controlled and still they were able to do it. Great Britain had the largest empire in history, it contained 1/4th of the entire world and they controlled it with an army that was smaller than the Romain army that was use to control only the area around the Mediterranean.
An island like Britain ruled 1/4th of the world. How? There have been given many reasons and one of the important ones is, is that they used the existing situations to their advantage. It rarely happened that the Europeans came to a place where everything was perfect and they stood against a unified people at the epitome of their culture. Often these people were divided and their countries rotten. That's no lie, there were many who liked to see them coming and allied themselves with the Europeans. The less amount of people and resources the Europeans had to use, the better, and many countries made it almost pathetically easy to accomplish that goal.
Another reason is that Europe had almost the unique ability to keep progressing. This seems almost natural, but no it wasn't. You use the example of China, well they had the weird disease of stagnating a lot. They have a blooming culture, then stagnate, do nothing, a disaster happens, somehow a new culture starts blooming, they stagnate, do nothing and then the Europeans were there and they lacked to comprehension and ability to withstand them. They really made it very easy for the Europeans to get what they wanted. Thailand on the other hand was one of the few countries that never got controlled. They had a blooming culture and knew exactly how to deal with the Europeans. Japan on the other hand, despite never really being colonized, locked itself up for several centuries, causing major stagnation and then almost on a whim a European ship that wasn't that particular special got the entire country into a state of chaos simply because of the huge gap between them.
And every person can bring over diseases. 1/4th to almost half of the European population, around 20 to 40 million people, got killed in a timespan of a few years by the Black Death, which came from...east Asia. Someone would have ended up in America sooner or later and it's not like the Europeans came alone. The amount of Europeans was for a long time always quite limited. There were in fact far more Africans, you know the people that got sold by their own kin? Not to mention one of the reasons Europeans started crossing the entire globe with their ships, is because the land routes got blocked and controlled mostly by Muslims.
Yes many bad things happened for which European countries are responsible, however they were not the sole players here and they didn't had the sole responsibility. The entire world was involved in it and you also need to view it from the perspective of how it was back then. Two things you completely ignore.
If you call this White imperialism, then the rest of the world only encouraged it. This is not about using politically correct terminology, it's simply about being correct. You mention the white Europeans who bought slaves, but not the black Africans and Muslims who sold them.
