Strayer: CH 20: Colonial Encounters:pp. 589 - 606

I was somewhat surprised to open this chapter and see it begin with a first person perspective. But, who decided to write this narrative in first person. Perhaps Strayer, himself? The author doesn’t say for sure. It seems odd that some Kenyans wouldn’t speak their native languages with their fellow Kenyans where Europeans were around. Apparently colonial authorities had fears and prejudices about teaching English to Africans because they were afraid that they’d learn how to seduce White women and corrupt their virtue. Of course, you don’t have to look to Africa to find these kind of irrational fears. The 1915 film, “Birth of A Nation” propogated these same fears. It is perhaps a holdover from slavery when there were fears about slaves having education. Instead, the British like Americans employed segregation in their African colonies, in which there was an insolated world for Whites and a separate world from natives.

There was also a second wave of colonialism in Africa and Asia after the European powers had their way with the New World and had decimated the native populations there. Now they turned their eyes eastward. Europeans found with their newfound industrial wealth and powerful, modern armies to secure more resources that they could annex and conquer more territories. Perhaps the simply wanted direct access to the resources rather than go through the whole trouble of the triangle trades to get spices and raw materials from Asian and African middlemen. So, but conquering territories in Asia and Africa they were cutting the middlemen out of the picture. The Europeans had just begun to develop primitive automatic machine guns that decimated their Asian and African advisories. Africans were however reduced by 75% in population by European diseases. They like Native Americans had relatively few if any immunities to European diseases introduced into their respective areas. It wasn’t necessarily easy for Europeans to conquer new territories in Africa and the Asia, but it wasn’t really difficult either these new forms of munitions. Tribal groups became dominated and Hindus in India, for example simply saw the British as one empire taking the place of their Mughal overlords of times past. The Europeans in some places practiced similar divide and conquer tactics that the conquistadors had employed in the new world by getting rival states that hated the empires dominating them to join Europeans in toppling the empires they were trying to conquer, such as the case in Indonesia, for example. In places like Australia and New Zealand, the British employed a philosophy of “Terra Nellius,” meaning “no man’s land” because the British didn’t recognize the Aborigines as having any property rights analogous to European ideas of land ownership, so they took land with the belief that it never belonged to anyone. Aborigines themselves didn’t even make significant gains in acquiring lands back that had been taken from them until the case of Mabo in Australia during the early 1990’s: http://www.nfsa.gov.au/digitallearning/mabo/tn_01.shtml

Of course, some Asian powers were doing their own imperialism. Japan in this era also began to annex territories in Taiwan and Korea, for example. U.S. and Russian expansion also brought many Asians under the influence of European dominance.