The norms and ideas of identity and history that exist on one island are vastly different than those that exist on a near neighbor, despite similarities in geography and history Due to European Imperialism, extermination of aboriginal peoples, slavery, the plantation system, and the ethnic diversity of the inhabitants the Caribbean does not allow itself to be classified as one.
In fact little can be grouped together. Sydney Mintz, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, and Michelle Cliff try to make sense of the combination and loss of culture as well as the reemergence of new ones Powerful Essays words 2 pages. In order to fathom the current political, social, economic, and cultural climate of the Caribbean one must engage in a critical study and understanding of the impact slavery has had in modern day Caribbean societies.
The modes and intricacies of modern day Caribbean societies are intimately related to the plantation systems of the colonial period, which welcomed the arrival of the largest migration in history Colonialism in the Caribbean Essay. Colonialism in the Caribbean Essay Length: words 4. Essay Preview.
Read Full Essay Click the button above to view the complete essay, speech, term paper, or research paper. Need Writing Help? View all notes especially the second whose technological impact was enormous. This was obviously and especially so in relation to technologies directly related to the conduct of war, but also those technologies of labor mobilization, agricultural control, resource extraction and disease eradication which colonial regimes and their successors deployed with exceptional energy and interventionist force under the pressure of global warfare and in its immediate aftermath.
Further making the 20th century such a divided one were two other developments that converged around the middle decades. The first, and arguably greatest, of these was decolonization. Foreshadowed earlier in Egypt and the Philippines, this gathered momentum in the late s with the independence of India and, through Partition, Pakistan , Ceylon and the Dutch East Indies, and in the s and s with the independence of most remaining African, Asian and Caribbean colonies those held by Portugal, however, remaining into the s.
How far decolonization in itself signified either technological liberation as might be argued in the case of India or, conversely, a new era of exploitation and extraction as in many parts of tropical Africa is an issue historians have too little examined. Anthropologists have been more adventurous. View all notes In some instances, in breaking the shackles of formal political control, decolonization allowed Africans and Asians to take control of technologies previously monopolized by whites, or, as doctors, engineers and technicians, to move into positions of political power and professional authority within the new nation states.
Ideologies of Development in Indonesia, — Technology and Culture , — Second, overlapping with the onset of political independence and the Cold War, the middle decades of the century were marked by a series of technological innovations that were in their way as important, and arguably even more momentous, as those of the imperial era.
Some of these were wholly new; others represented the popularization of technologies that had hitherto enjoyed only restricted use. Perhaps it was only then, in the middle of the 20th century, that technological change really impacted on the lives of the great mass of Africans, Asians and West Indians.
Colonial Caribbean Visual Cultures | The Caribbean Commons
Modern technology is seen as alien and, as in the colonial period, associated with state power rather than public need. View all notes whether this apparent double turn—political independence plus technological change—really brought about revolutionary change. It is argued instead that, at a discursive level, the ideology of development as it emerged in the s and s simply strengthened preexisting colonial power relations and even heightened the technological disparities between Europe and the Third World.
At another level it confirms the view that what happened outside Europe, in the Third World, was seldom a simple repetition of what had happened in Europe, but followed a different technological path.
Does place matter to the history of technology? First, there is the physical environment. As the scientific and technological ambitions of Europe increased, so the physical limitations of Europe became evident. Just as in the 18th century science had to travel to observe the transit of Venus or establish the dimensions of the Earth, so in the 19th century European astronomers had to travel to India and elsewhere to observe and record solar eclipses.
View all notes The whole specialty of tropical medicine and the attendant fields of tropical agriculture, botany, forestry, and veterinary science which came to maturity in the s and s exemplified this sense of difference, articulated through differences in climate, in the nature of disease vectors, in plant ecology and soils, and even perhaps especially in perceived racial differences.
The Colonization of Africa
MacLeod, M. Mulkay and P. It was often, too, in overseas territories like South Africa that investigations into the supposed biological and psychological characteristics of races were investigated: e. The forests of the tropics and monsoon Asia, with their great variety of tree species and diverse ecologies, could not be managed in the way French and German foresters managed the smaller number of temperate species in European forests.
View all notes Soil erosion and conservation—issues that assumed increasingly importance from the early 20th century onward—presented different technical challenges in many parts of the tropical world than they did in Europe. Journal of Southern African Studies , 52 — These were not separate, watertight systems but, even under colonialism, evolving epistemologies and practices that borrowed extensively and pragmatically from one another.
Development and Change , — Even if popular knowledge was eclectic, states colonial or postcolonial tended to see things differently. View all notes Equally, one of the effects of colonialism, especially in Africa, was to partition the land spatially and functionally between technologically differentiated sectors—the plantation, the factory, the forest, the labor or game reserve—and to seek to order society accordingly. Journal of Southern African Studies , — In the early 20th century, the transport of sugar cane in the Dutch Indies was done combining domestic means with a rail track.
It might be argued that the advent of steamships and railroads in the 19th century, and even the new technologies of the mid 20th century, did not fundamentally change cultures. Hindus might travel by rail without their religious beliefs being undermined—indeed, they might find the railroad a convenient means of visiting pilgrimage sites and thereby, to the chagrin of colonialists who equated technological change with cultural transformation, strengthen their religious beliefs.
In some cases new technologies were undoubtedly a basis for resentment and resistance, but not in others. View all notes and how new technologies were locally received and adapted, it might be observed that certain technologies moved easily and relatively rapidly between one section of society and another, even in a seemingly polarized colonial world.
Photography in India, for instance, was not only taken up by the colonial state for its own Foucaldian purposes, but also, almost from the outset, had a wide appeal to Indians, spreading from its initial base among the Westernized middle classes to almost all sections of society, and acquiring meanings, uses and conventions that derived from indigenous, rather than European, cultural contexts.
Questions of networks, linkages, and circularity constitute an increasingly salient set of issues relating to the spatial dimension of colonial and Third World technologies. There is sometimes understood as a dual process—in the first instance, from metropolis to colony, and then, secondarily, from the leading centers of administration, science and industry within the colonies to smaller towns and ultimately villages, or perhaps more directly to specialist sites like mines, plantations, mission stations, and agricultural research stations.
Science , — As Needham and his associates long ago showed, 54 E. View all notes Historically, technologies have traveled in a number of different directions, across several continents, and not simply outward from Europe. Even if we concentrate on the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the age in which Europe was rampant, it is not difficult to see something more complex than a simple diffusionist model at work.
View all notes The colonies were themselves significant sites of technological innovation.
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At other times, Europeans in the colonies, acting out of scientific curiosity as much as from economic incentives, experimented with new techniques—for refining and processing minerals and raw materials, for example, or for introducing, modifying and hybridizing locally grown crops—as in experimental work conducted by British researchers on Indian wheat varieties between and Some technologies developed first in the colonies for reasons that had much to do with local environmental and social conditions or economic and political circumstances, and then were brought back to Europe, often by the individuals who had helped to pioneer them.
As suggested by this example and by the movement of cinchona, rubber, sisal, tea, and other commercial crops in which tropical empires took a particular interest, these lateral movements and regional exchanges were particularly associated with technical fields like tropical agriculture and medicine, where metropolitan expertise was necessarily limited or secondhand. At some periods of time, as in the high imperial era between the s and World War I, European science, medicine, and technology seemed particularly buoyed up by the requirements of imperial prestige, as by new scientific discoveries and industrial processes and correspondingly intolerant of indigenous epistemologies, practices and responses.
This phase seems to have waned with the onset of the Great War and European reactions against the destructiveness of mechanized warfare. View all notes In the interwar period in Africa and Asia colonial experts seemed rather more willing to recognize the limitations of imported technologies and to accept the need to understand and utilize local conditions of soil, crops, water resources etc and to secure local cooperation, even by incorporating indigenous traditions and practices.
Colonialism did not benefit the colonized
Whether the article is ultimately retracted or not, its wide circulation necessitates that its claims be held up to careful historical scrutiny. As well, in light of current public debates on censorship and free speech versus hate speech , this is a discussion well worth having. Although this debate may seem as though it is merely academic, nothing could be further from the truth. Similarly, 49 per cent believe the Empire benefited its former colonies. Such views, often tied to nostalgia for old imperial glory, can help shape the foreign and domestic policies of Western countries.
Gilley has helped to justify these views by getting his opinions published in a peer review journal. In his article, Gilley attempts to provide evidence which proves colonialism was objectively beneficial to the colonized. In fact, the opposite is true. In the overwhelming majority of cases, empirical research clearly provides the facts to prove colonialism inflicted grave political, psychological and economic harms on the colonized. It takes a highly selective misreading of the evidence to claim that colonialism was anything other than a humanitarian disaster for most of the colonized.
With a population of over 1. While many attribute this to British colonial rule, a look at the facts says otherwise. From to , the entire period of British rule, there was no increase in per capita income within the Indian subcontinent.
This is a striking fact, given that, historically speaking, the Indian subcontinent was traditionally one of the wealthiest parts of the world.