The Many and Varied Changes Wrought by Imperialism WHAP/Napp
Do Now:
“The Europeans who traveled overseas to trade beginning in the sixteenth century were almost invariably males, and they frequently entered into sexual liaisons with local women. As the men stayed longer, these relationships became increasingly important for business and administration as well as for social and sexual pleasure. One example was the signares, concubines or mistresses, of French traders in the Senegambia, present-day Senegal and Gambia. As the Senegal Company forbade its traders to marry locally, the men found concubines among the local Wolof and Lebou peoples. These women helped the men to negotiate local languages, customs, and health conditions.
In India, the nabobs, the successful traders who often became wealthy, frequently took local women in much the same way. Not forbidden to marry, they fathered Anglo-Indian children who came to form a small but important community of their own, especially in the large port cities of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta.
As Europeans began to establish colonies, and as women began to travel to these colonies, usually with husbands, or in search of husbands, European women discouraged relationships between the colonizing men and the colonized women. More rigid boundaries were established. In both India and Africa observers saw increasing distance and racism enter into sexual and gender relationships between colonizer and colonized. The new guidelines for inter-racial behavior restricted not only sexual but also social relationships. As these relationships between men and women became less free, so, too, did the informality among the men.
Earlier historians had attributed this increasing distance to the restrictive attitudes of the European women, who wished to prevent their husbands’ mixing with the local women. More recent, feminist scholarship has attributed the responsibility for the increased distance to both husband and wife. Both exhibited racism. Whatever may have been the differences of opinion between European men and women concerning the relationships between European men and the colonized women, both usually wished to restrict local men from intimate contact with European women. As colonial settlements increased in size and stability, each family tended to view itself, somewhat pompously, as a representative of the rulers, a colonial outpost in miniature.
Did the colonizing women form a solidarity with their colonized sisters? Most contemporary historians think not. The colonizers tended to fasten on flaws in the gender relations among the colonized peoples, and then set out to introduce reforms. In India the British outlawed sati, the practice of widows burning themselves to death on their deceased husbands’ funeral pyres; they introduced a minimum age of marriage; they urged widow remarriage despite upper-caste Hindu resistance. In Africa, they sought to end polygamy. In each case, the colonial government emphasized the superiority of its own practices, and the good fortune of the colonized to have Europeans there to save them from themselves,”
~ The World’s History
1- Describe gender relationships in the European colonies? ______
2- How did European imperialism impact gender relations in the colonies? ______
- Imperialism and Economy
- Colonial rule created conditions that increased cash-crop production
- African farmers took the initiative to develop export agriculture; planting cacao trees, they became the world’s leading supplier of cocoa by 1911
- Many colonies came to specialize in one or two cash crops, creating an unhealthy dependence when world market prices dropped
- Plantations across Southeast Asia grew sugarcane, rubber, tea, etc.
- In southern Vietnam in 1927 alone, one in twenty plantation workers died
- Settler colonies in Algeria, Kenya, Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and South Africa led to European communities obtaining huge tracts of land
H. Appalling living conditions, disease, accidents generated high death rates
II. Effects of Imperialism on Women
- In pre-colonial times, African women were everywhere active farmers
- Women were expected to feed their own families and were usually allocated their own fields for that purpose
- Clearly subordinate to men but had a measure of economic autonomy
- But where cash-crop agriculture was dominant, men often withdrew from subsistence production in favor of more lucrative export crops
- Men acted to control the most profitable aspects of cash-crop agriculture
- Greatly increased the subsistence workload of women
- As more men sought employment in the cities, on settler farms, or in the mines, their wives were left to manage the domestic economy almost alone
- In Botswana, which supplied male labor to South Africa, married couples by the 1930s rarely lived together for more than two months at a time
- Further integration of Asian and African economies into a global network
- Yet for an important minority, acquisition of Western education, obtained through missionary or government schools, generated a new identity
- Western education meant access to better-paying positions
- Education provided social mobility and elite status within communities
- Asian and African colonial societies now had a new cultural divide: between minority who had mastered ways of rulers and vast majority who had not
- And British created separate inheritance laws for all Muslims and all Hindus
- Some anti-British patriots began to cast India in Hindu terms which threatened minority Muslims who feared a Hindu-dominated India
- The beginnings of what became in the twentieth century a profound religious and political division within the South Asian peninsula
- Some Africans became to think of an “African identity” whereas previously thought of themselves as members of local communities, defined by language
- C.A. Diop, a French-educated scholar from Senegal, insisted that Egyptian civilization was in fact the work of black Africans
- Diop argued that Western civilization owed much to Egyptian influence and was therefore derived from Africa
- Conquered people began to challenge views of European imperialists
1- Define cash crop farming. ______
2- How does cash crop farming differ from subsistence farming? ______
3- Why did European imperialists encourage cash-crop farming? ______
4- What problems did cash-crop farming give rise to? ______
5- How did land ownership change as a result of European imperialism? ______
6- Why did high death rates occur on plantations and mines? ______
7- Describe the status of African women before European imperialism? ______
8- How did European imperialism affect the status of African women? ______
9- Why did married couples in Botswana rarely live together in the 1930s? ______
10- Why was Western education introduced in the colonies? ______
11- Why did a Western-educated elite emerge in the colonies? ______
12- Why did imperialism increase animosity between Hindus and Muslims in India? ______
13- How did some of the diverse peoples of the African continent come to view themselves as a result of imperialism? ______
14- Who was C.A. Diop and why was he significant? ______
15- How did C.A. Diop challenge Western views of Western superiority? ______
“The most infamous cruelties of forced labor occurred during the early twentieth century in the Congo Free State, then governed personally by Leopold II of Belgium. Private companies in the Congo, operating under the authority of the state, forced villagers to collect rubber, which was much in demand for bicycle and automobile tires, with a reign of terror and abuse that cost millions of lives. One refugee from these horrors described the process.
‘We were always in the forest to find the rubber vines, to go without food, and our women had to give up cultivating fields and gardens. Then we starved…We begged the white man to leave us alone, saying we could get no more rubber, but the white men and their soldiers said ‘Go. You are only beasts yourselves…’ When we failed and our rubber was short, the soldiers came to our towns and killed us. Many were shot, some had their ears cut off; others were tied up with ropes round their necks and taken away.’ ~ Ways of the World
16- What happened in the Congo Free State? ______
17- Describe the cruelties in the Belgian Congo. ______
1. Nineteenth-century empires differed from earlier empires because(A) The modern empires did not require payment of tributes.
(B) Modern empires provided a vehicle for advancement for colonial peoples.
(C) Modern empires were able to thoroughly dominate the economies of their colonies.
(D) Modern empires were not able to thoroughly dominate the economies of their colonies.
(E) All of the above.
2. Which of the following was not an economic motivation for imperialism?
(A) Cheap raw materials from overseas colonies were needed to sustain industrialization.
(B) Overseas colonies offered markets for manufactured goods.
(C) Overseas colonies offered a haven for the settlement of surplus populations.
(D) European and American industry needed more sources of coal.
(E) All were economic motives for imperialism.
3. All of the following improved communication between India and Britain except
(A) Completion of Panama Canal.
(B) Use of steamships.
(C) Invention of the telegraph.
(D) The laying of submarine cables. / 4. The “white man’s burden” proposed by Rudyard Kipling refers to
(A) The cost of creating and supporting an empire.
(B) The moral duty of the west to work to “civilize” the rest of the world.
(C) The cost of abolishing slavery in Africa.
(D) The need for Christian missionaries to undermine Islam in Africa and Asia.
(E) All of the above.
5. One social goal of the British authorities in India was to
(A) Abolish the caste system.
(B) Establish a system of public education.
(C) Convert the local population to Christianity.
(D) Abolish the custom of burning widows with their husbands’ bodies.
(E) All of the above.
6. The colonization of the Belgian Congo is noted for
(A) The spirited resistance of the Congolese people.
(B) The brutal treatment of the Congolese people by King Leopold II.
(C) A policy of free trade that encouraged merchants from all countries.
(D) A policy of religious toleration
Thesis Practice: Continuity and Change over Time
Analyze continuities and changes in India’s social, cultural, and economic systems from 1500 – 1914 C.E. ______