Chapter 1 - A Pernicious Global Enterprise: The Roots of Colonialism

Summary

Introduction

Colonialism may be defined as the imposition of one country's sovereignty over another country or countries beyond its own borders. The purpose of colonialism is usually to facilitate economic domination of the resources, labor, and markets of the colonized people for the benefit of the colonizing country. As a political phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, colonialism had its roots in the demographic and social dynamics spawned by the mechanization of agriculture and displacement of peasants through land consolidation; the process of urbanization; and an emerging atmosphere of religious intolerance in Europe, especially in England. These factors contributed to the migration that led to the colonization of the Americas (Canada and the United States of America), New Zealand, and Australia, among other areas.

Colonialism was further facilitated by the economic dynamics generated by the Industrial Revolution in Europe in the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution resulted in high productivity of industrial goods that could not be profitably disposed of at the national level. The high productivity in turn led to the near exhaustion of raw materials for industries in Europe, especially in England, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, the so-called “factory of the world” during this era. Consequently, European nations began to acquire colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific to secure sources of raw materials and markets for their goods. With regard to Africa, these colonial ven-tures reached a crisis point in the early 1880s following stiff competition among rival colonial powers over competing claims in Africa leading to the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, which partitioned Africa between seven colonial powers—Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Spain.

In partitioning the continent among themselves, or what Belgium's King Leopold II referred to as “sharing the magnificent African cake,” France got the lion's share of Africa at 36 percent of the continent with Britain gaining 32 percent, though it had more colonies in number than France. Belgium and Germany each received 8 percent of the continent. Portugal gained 7 percent, Italy 5 percent, and Spain came in last with 1 percent of the continent under its colonial control. Three percent of the continent, comprising Liberia and Ethiopia, remained independent of European colonial domination.