Philosophy of Race by Naomi Zack

Author:Naomi Zack
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783319787299
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Colonialism and Global Development

Colonization of Africa, Asia, and South America by European nations spanned the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries (Essential Humanities, 2008–2013). The period from the 15th through the seventeenth centuries, called the “Age of Exploration” or the “Age of Discovery,” was initially financed by Spain and Portugal. There were earlier voyages during the Middle Ages, including land travel to the Middle East and China by Italian traders, Catholic missionaries, and members of the Russian royal family. Muhammad al-Idrisi (1100–1165), an Arab geographer, created a detailed map of the known world, “Tabula Rogeriana,” for King Roger II of Sicily. A Moroccan scholar traveled to Africa and China in the mid-1300s and in the early 1400s, Arab and Chinese traders went to India, Thailand, East Africa, Arabia, and Southeast Asia (World Atlas 2017). Not all early exploration made it into the big historical record (as noted in Chapter 5, there are accounts of twelfth century Welch contact with American Indians).

The Age of Colonization is more or less officially past. European colonies became mandates after World War I and decolonization was almost complete after World War II. Portugal gave up Macau to China in 1999. As of 2008, there were 16 remaining colonies in the world, populated by 1.2 million people, including tourist destinations such as the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, and the Caymen Islands (Lange 2008). Colonization was made official by political domination, taking over preexisting sovereignty, or creating new political structures—all backed up by force. The stronger the political domination, the greater imposed economic changes, and with that, social upheaval in colonized populations (Ziltener et al. 2017).

Colonization has been succeeded by development , the expansion of the Western market economy and infrastructure supporting it to parts of the world that were, for the most part, former colonies. The emphasis by international corporations (backed up by governments) on natural resource extraction—including outsourced labor for wages much lower than what workers are paid in developed countries—trade, and distribution for final consumption, exhibit further economic continuity with colonialism. And in purely economic terms, global prosperity has generally increased with development (Agénor and Montiel 2008). Yet no one doubts that there are tragic casualties of these economic changes: internal ethnic wars and massacres, civilian deaths in wars supported by external national powers, malnutrition, famine, and environmental degradation, including water shortages and disaster-level fallout from human contributions to climate change (Center for Global Development 2017).

The age of colonization was sufficiently at odds with Enlightenment ideals, especially in its enablement of chattel slavery, to have occasioned the need for anti-nonwhite racial science and white supremacist racial ideologies. Global development, by contrast, is not as explicit about racial difference, although it is not entirely coincidental that the poorest nations in the world, in Asia, Africa, and South America, are populated by nonwhite people. Furthermore, although slavery is both officially illegal and no longer has ideological justification, there are more slaves alive in the twenty-first century than at any time in the past.

Observers and activists estimate that there are 12–45 million slaves at present.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.