The Loss of Freedom: Encounters with Imperialism

The Loss of Freedom: Encounters with Imperialism

WHAP/Napp

1. European Imperialism

1. Between roughly 1750 and 1950, much of the Afro-Asian-Pacific world was enveloped in a new wave of European ______building
2. In mainland Asia and Africa, European conquests nowhere had devastating demographic consequences that so sharply reduced Native Americans
3. Second wave of European colonial conquests was conditioned by Europe’s Industrial Revolution unlike first wave in ______
4. In general, Europeans preferred informal control, for it was cheaper and less likely to provoke ______
5. Europeans possessed overwhelming firepower with recently invented repeating rifles and ______guns
6. For peoples of India and Indonesia, colonial conquest grew out of earlier interaction with European ______firms
7. Particularly in India, British East ______Company, rather than British government directly, played leading role in the colonial takeover
8. Fragmentation of Mughal Empire and absence of any overall sense of cultural or political unity invited and facilitated European penetration

1. Indian Rebellion of 1857-1858, sometimes referred to as Sepoy Mutiny
2. Triggered by the introduction into the colony’s military forces of a new cartridge smeared with ______fat from cows and pigs
3. Crushed in 1858, rebellion greatly widened racial divide in colonial India
4. Convinced British ______to assume direct control over India, ending era of British East India Company rule in subcontinent
5. Prominence of race in distinguishing rulers and ruled, high tide of “scientific racism” in Europe coincided with the new imperialism
6. And Europeans were exceedingly reluctant to allow even highly ______Asian and Africans to enter higher ranks of colonial civil service
7. Colonies that had large European settler population, pattern of ______separation was much more pronounced than where few whites settled
8. Most extreme case  South Africa
9. Racial fears were aroused and extraordinary efforts to establish race as a legal, not just a customary, feature of ______African society
10. Racial system provided for separate “homelands,” schools, residential areas, public facilities what would become known as Apartheid
11. In African colonies, Europeans identified, sometimes invented, tribes
12. While nineteenth-century ______and France were becoming more democratic, their colonies were essentially dictatorships
13. Europeans preferred “traditional” rural society, with established authorities and hierarchies, but without slavery and sati (widow-burning)
14. Subsistence farming, in which peasant families produced largely for their own needs, diminished ______crop farming was encouraged
15. A flood of inexpensive ______from Britain’s new factories ruined the livelihood of tens of thousands of India’s handloom weavers
16. Cruelties of forced labor occurred during early twentieth century in Congo Free State, then governed personally by Leopold II of ______
17. Forced villagers to collect rubber, which was in demand for ______and automobile tires, with a reign of terror and abuse that cost millions of lives
18. Eventually abuses were widely publicized in Europe, where they created a scandal, forcing Belgian government to take control of Congo in 1908 and ending Leopold’s reign of ______
19. A variation on theme of forced ______took shape in the so-called cultivation system of the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia) during the nineteenth century
20. Peasants were required to cultivate 20 percent or more of their land in cash crops such as sugar or ______to meet their tax obligation to the state
21. According to one scholar, the cultivation system “performed a miracle for the Dutch economy,” enabling it to avoid ______its own people and providing capital for its Industrial Revolution

Questions:

• In what different ways did the colonial takeover of Asia and Africa occur?
• Why might subject people choose to cooperate with the colonial regime? What might prompt them to rebel or resist?
• What was distinctive about European colonial empires of the nineteenth century?
• How did the power of colonial states transform the economic lives of colonial subjects?

1. The purpose of the Berlin Conference of 1885 was

1. The India Congress Party’s early membership consisted heavily of middle-class individuals, including M.K. Gandhi, trained in which profession?

1. Which of the following does NOT belong in a list of contested settler societies?

1. Which answer choice contains regions that were nominally independent but nonetheless endured significant Western informal political and economic influence by 1914?

1. Which sector of the colonized economy had experienced the least expansion by 1914?

1. Which reform was most emblematic of growing British interest in transforming Indian social relations in the nineteenth century?

Excerpt fromfaculty.washington.edu

Culture System: also called CULTIVATION SYSTEM…revenue system in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) that forced farmers to pay revenue to the treasury of The Netherlands in the form of export crops or compulsory labour. It was introduced in 1830 by Johannes van den Bosch, then governor-general of the Dutch East Indies.

The Cultivation System provided that a village set aside a fifth of its cultivable land for the production of export crops. These crops were to be delivered to the government in lieu of tax. Land rent was to continue at the same time as a complementary part of the system and as a measure of the amount to be produced by each village. Thus, if a village, through the growing of export crops on a fifth of its land, returned an amount in excess of the land rent for which it had been assessed, it would be free of land rent and would be reimbursed to the extent of the excess; on the other hand, if a village produced less than the assessed amount of land rent, it would have to make up the difference.

In practice the system was burdensome. More than one-fifth of the rice fields were used for the growing of export crops, and considerably more than 66 days of labour were required of the landless. Transportation of the produce was difficult and time-consuming. In case of crop failure, the people were left responsible for the loss. Contrary to van den Bosch's intention, production was also demanded of the people who had paid taxes by working under the Culture System.

The system resulted in sharp criticism in the mid-1850s; one of the most outspoken critics was Multatuli (pseudonym of Dutch writer Eduard Douwes Dekker), who condemned the system in his book Max Havelaar (1860). The practice, however, was not abolished until 1870, by which time it had brought significant returns to the government exchequer and served the purpose of promoting Dutch commerce and shipping. Between 1830 and 1877 the treasury of The Netherlands received 823,000,000 guilders from the Indies.

From the government's point of view, the Cultivation System was an overwhelming success. Exports soared, rising from 13 million guldens in 1830 to 74 million a decade later. The products were disposed of through the Netherlands Trading Society, and between 1840 and 1880 their sale brought to the Dutch treasury an annual average of 18 million guldens, approximately a third of the Dutch budget. The effects of the system for the Javanese were, however, of more dubious value. Though its founder believed that, by stimulating agricultural production, the Cultivation System would ultimately benefit the people of Java as well as the home government, it came to be considered, in later years, both by Dutch critics and by outside observers, as a particularly harsh and burdensome policy…The range of exports from Java was extended. Indigo and sugar were the first items to be made the subject of compulsory cultivation; coffee, tea, tobacco, and pepper were subsequently added. Nevertheless, the system placed a heavy burden on the cultivators and tended to accentuate social and economic differences within rural society. Dominant peasants, members of a rural elite, were able to manipulate the system to their advantage. And while the Cultivation System brought the Indies into contact with a wider overseas market, the Indies government stood between producer and market, and the annual surplus added to Dutch, not Javanese, prosperity…

Thesis Statement: Change Over Time:Western Europe: 1500 – 1950 C.E. ______