Did Country Gain More Than They Loose Due to Imperialism?

Name: Muhan

Class: G10Y

Word count: 869

Did country gain more than they loose due to imperialism?

By the end of 18th century, many countries, mostly the European countries gradually began to develop and eventually became the predominant countries in the world. As a result, they became empires and started to colonize relatively less developed countries. Many argue that colonization had done great damages to the colony. Undoubtedly, there are many damaged done to the colonies due to imperialism, but also, it is true that at the same time, imperialism had made the relatively less developed countries to be more accord with the modern society.

   Colonization indeed had done great damages to the colony. Firstly, most of the empires thought of the indigenous people as an inferior and treated them without respect and sometimes even inhuman. A good example would be the slave trading that occurred in Africa. According to BBC “The total number of Africans taken from the continent's east coast and enslaved in the Arab world is estimated to be somewhere between 9.4 million and 14 million.” (BBC.co.uk, 2012). Indeed though, one could assert that slave trade had antecedent and it was the African who at first started slave trading. However, how the European treated their slaves was unprecedented. A passage on the South African history online suggested that Enslaved Africans were treated as ‘chattels’ (possessions). They had no rights and their children were automatically born into slaves (History.com, 2017). The article asserted that the slaves were treated like animals, the European can beat them whenever they want and provided them with poor living condition.

Secondly, what motivated the most of the empires to colonize countries ultimately was because of the presence of large quantities of human and natural resources, which can only benefit themselves. The empires had no intention in improving the colonized country’s society though some of them claimed at the berlin conference to be the “protectorate of one” (Rosenberg, 2017). A good example to support this assertion would be a map showing the railway configuration in Argentina. All of the railways lead to Buenos Aires which is where the Europeans would ultimately transport the goods obtained from Argentina to Europe and there was no railway that connect other places together. (Schillerinstitute.org, 2017) This means that at that period, the Europeans were solely exporting the goods from Argentina to Europe and had a lack of import. Economist suggests that having solely exports and no imports is not a healthy economy: “A healthy economy includes internal consumption and exports. ” (Settles, 1996). Not just the economy, the whole society of colonized country were in a state of turmoil due to the imperialist country’s “ruling”. During the colonization of Africa, some of the laws differentiated different African and thus frequent commotions were resulted (Nelson, page 23, 1998). These commotions would sometimes escalates into civil wars. “People’s disparity from the colonial rule escalated into civil wars that literally flooded the continent. The political balance was in torment, when the traditional boundaries of the African kingdoms were eliminated.” (Guzhavina, 2016 ). Admittedly, it is argued that often the empires perfected the legal system of the colonies (Joireman, 2017). Nevertheless, these perfection were done by a great cost, a large amount of the colonies’ goods were taken and it would take years for them to recover, and with a great decline of resources, the colonies can never develop no matter how consummate the law system is.

However, though the intention of colonizing countries was for the empires their own goods, their colonization admittedly had positive effects. For example, the European brought modern technology to Africa, such as electricity and telecom roads. Also, advanced agriculture technics were introduced to the African so that they can farm more efficiently. However, the greatest contribution the imperialists countries did was that they eradicated many of the bias thinking that the colonies had. For example, twins in Africa before were killed because they were thought to be ominous, when the Europeans came, they stopped them from doing that. Also, women before had little rights, they were more like commodity which “sold” to other families to be wife in exchange for money and gold. Women were thought to be inferior than man. The empires changed these stereotype thoughts and passed to the colonies new ideology and as a result, gender equality was enhanced (UKEssays.com, 2017). However, a lot of countries being colonized nowadays still have bias thinking, for example, gender equality is still not achieved in India (UN India.org, 2017). Nevertheless, these bias thinking were deep rooted and they are sometimes hard to change, and the European had managed to eradicate bias thoughts in a lot of the colonies. For some of these countries, the bias thoughts may never be eradicated if it weren’t due to the empires’ colonization.