Argumentative critique

Daniel Diaz, Mariana Brijaldo 9ª

Colonialism

It occurs when a nation subjugates another, usually forcing their language or culture. The
main idea of it is to expand the country’s influence so that it could settle up colonies. The
three main reasons to expand the colony are god, gold and glory. God in the sense that most
European countries believed that it was their duty to educate indigenous people and therefore
teach (force) who the real god is. Gold in the sense that they wanted to form new trading
routes, in which they can be able to expand their economy with trading and bring home new
products and new ideas, and finally glory in the sense that having lots of colonies also meant
this power within other colonizing countries, if your country had more territory it
automatically made you more money and of course, more power.

Imperialism

Is when a powerful country starts controlling a much weaker country, often with military
forces, the military forces take on the government of the weaker country and by this they
become the rulers of the territory. Its main idea is to take as many resources as possible from
the weaker country, the new imperialists way to do this is for the powerful country to have
their big and productive countries inside the weaker country, the powerful country
automatically starts having a big influence on the country, since most of the money produced
is from the powerful factory.

How both practices affected our current context

Colonialism Example 1:

Nowadays there is a lot of territory that was part of a Colony and had specific reasons for
conquering the territory, these reasons really affected the economy and culture of those
territories that are countries nowadays. In the way that the reasons for the colonizers to
conquer were different from each other, we could give the example of the reasons for the
Spaniards to colonize parts of South America and parts of North America and the reason for
the British to colonize North America. With Spaniards, their main interest was to expand
their trading points, they needed more places in which they could be able to export their
products and of course, more land in which they could grow and extract the product. So their
main focus on using black people, indigenous people and using their money to come here was
to be able to extract all material such as gold, silver, bronze or any other that had a lot of
value and clearly to be able to have more places for plantations. While for British people it
was kind of different, their main goal was to be able to go away from that government
because they were really tired of it and find new places which they could conquer and be able
to live there, create new rules and new ways of living, with more opportunities. this does not
mean that they did not wanted to use the products that North America offered to them,
because they did, but there was another sense of conquering this places, they really wanted
them to be their new homes, and that’s the main difference between how North and South
America were treated since the beginning of their discovery. As we can realize nowadays, our
economies are truly different and we believe that this is the main reason for the difference
between the economy of Canada and the United States, compared to the economy with
Colombia and Argentina. For example, they were just used for a lot of time for different
purposes.

Colonialism Example 2:

We think it is important to remark the big impact that was and still is colonialism to
indigenous people from around the world, not only in America. It is a hug impact since there
was a lot of culture that was lost due to the believe that it was a necessity to “educate” people,
and that was a huge mistake done by the Catholic Church, the way we as humans lost lots of
knowledge that the indigenous people had, lots of languages and religions, believes and many
other things that we now have no clue about. And not only this, but the way they literally
killed thousands of people bringing to unknown places a lot of people that were completely
different from them and that had different immune systems. But in the way that at the end of
these civilizations they were forced to change everything, and nowadays we as people that
come from indigenous ancestors want to know more things about them but it's impossible due
to the fact that they destroyed everything that was important for them.

Imperialism Example:

The biggest example nowadays is how the most powerful country in the world right now, The
United States of America, a country with lots of economic power, uses it to put in the poorest
countries their industries of their biggest companies, so let's give a big example of how
modern imperialism affects countries. The US has one of the biggest and prestigious brands
of cell phones and electronics in the world that is called Apple. Apple needs lots of products
that are kind of difficult to find in the territory of the company, so what do they do? They
basically create huge industries in countries with way lower income than them as a country
like Kenya, the company offers lots of work for the people in Kenya so that they could be
able to extract the products and take them to China so that they could start making the cell
phones. But since Apple gives a lot of money to the country by giving the people salary for
extracting the products then Apple becomes a big influence on Kenya's economy, and
therefore the US is indirectly using their power to control the country’s decisions.

How colonialism affected the political, economic, and social.

Political terms:
The main thing that changed was the way the country that was the colonizer usually had to
make someone in charge in the sense that the territory that they were conquering was far
away from the mainland so it started to be the first time in which a whole territory that was
actually bigger than the conquer country was being dominated and being controlled by a ruler
from far away, we also have to take into account that at that time communication wasn’t as
easy as it is for us nowadays, so having a ruler that tries to force you things and laws just
because the laws kind of work in the main territory while trying to represent and to satisfy all
of the people from the mainland country and the conquer territory was kind of a big change
for us as a society.

Another thing that affected the political terms is how basically the government was organized
in these newly developed conquered territories, the fact that they were (forgive the
redundancy) new, they already knew which system in the political court, in the justice, in the
constitutional court worked the best, so they had that advantage.

Economic terms:

The economy from the places that were colonized were literally used without regarding the
environmental damage that they could make, or even the importance of the forests and
jungles to the indigenous people, but the way in America they were literally exploding as
much resources as possible so that the economy of the powerful country may succeed and be
more powerful than the other countries.

Now countries that had lots of territories that they conquered were the ones that were
powerful.

Social terms:

As we already said, colonialism really affected millions of indigenous people around the
world not only reducing their population by bringing diseases, make them work till death or
simply just try to erase all of the culture of them so that they could learn Catholicism and
educate them on things that were completely of mind to them, why would a white man that
came to earth in another part of the world will rescue them and make them go to heaven?

Reflective criticism:

The colonization processes and particularly the one that is closest to us, America’s , had as a
backdrop, after the discovery, the annexation of new territories to different empires and in a
competition for world supremacy. This implied, as expected, the subjugation of the aboriginal
nations or their annihilation due to their resistance to plunder. At this time, it is natural to
think that these processes could find developed in a different way, however the very
dynamics that underlies this practice related to the occupation and exploitation of their
wealth, encloses a barbaric logic of which practically no process of this nature in the world
and at different times, escaped.
Today we recognize that the sovereignty and free decision of nations is a non-negotiable
value, but at other times in history, either because of the precariousness of the tribes to resist
the invasion or later because of the weakness of the rulers and the institutions to negotiate
interactions. more just with those who arrived, they made it very easy for the dominant
empires (mostly Europeans) to take control at will of the territories that most favored their
interests. In many cases, Europeans, as a passage in Africa, “camouflaged” themselves in the
so-called civilizing mission, which was nothing more than a strategy to occupy territories and
secure natural resources to sustain the accelerated growth of the industrial revolution and in
this way, the destiny of the African continent was irretrievably integrated into Europe, all this
revalidated at the Berlin conference in 1885.

That is why it is so relevant to understand the way the European colonization occurred in
Africa, because it had as a strategy the establishment of states, which, being political
divisions - artificial - arbitrarily separated peoples to facilitate the extraction of natural
resources, from the false premise of bringing civilization to primitive peoples ... As happened
in the sixteenth century, the same happened at the dawn of the twentieth century.

That it could have been different, of course, but we reiterate that the logic of a colonization
process brings with it a more or less violent submission, no matter how much, but always
behind it with the intention of subduing and expropriating the natural capital of the peoples or
the slavery of their members, words more, words less, in the colonies they do not have or
there are even today, citizens, but subjects.