|
No one knows for sure.
But a few things seem clear. This is how it began. By 1400, the Christians
of Europe had been fighting the forces of Islam for centuries, in a series
of wars called Crusades.
The
Prophet, Muhammad, lived in the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century AD.
Towards the end of his life, and long after his death, his followers, with
their swords, spread the religion he founded, Islam, deep into Africa, Asia,
Eastern Europe and Western Europe as far as southern France.
For centuries, Muslim
armies kept Europe cut off from the
rest of the world. Trade with Asia
and Africa could only be conducted
through their middlemen. Beginning in the 14th century, however, Portuguese
ships probed relentlessly southward along the African coast. They traded for
gold, and painstakingly, over the course of many generations, gradually
discerned the shape of the continent. Armed with this knowledge, they were
eventually able to fashion a seaward passage to India.
When the Europeans
first reached Africa (and
India
and China
and the Americas
too), they traded only with the permission of their local hosts.
Furthermore, the European powers fought each other for the privilege of this
trade, as the locals fought each other too, for the rights to European
commerce. Over time, though, European influence increased and the local
powers waned.
In the trade with
Africa, for example, the gold that
the Europeans obtained financed their overseas expansion. In time, the
European powers began to establish plantations in islands off the coast of
Africa, and in the Americas. As a
result, enslaved Africans eclipsed gold as the desired import. In exchange,
the Africans received mainly firearms. They used these weapons in their wars
with each other over rights to trade with the Europeans, and to furnish
captives for that commerce.
In the
centuries of the Atlantic slave trade, much of the wealth generated by the
buying and selling of enslaved Africans, and from their forced labor, was
devoted to creating the extensive technological innovations that led
directly to the Industrial Revolution. So we see that the, at first tenuous,
coastal trade with Africans strengthened European commercial capitalism and
transformed it into all-powerful industrial capitalism. The Europeans were
now producing railroads, iron warships, machine guns and artillery. With
these, in time, their word became law all around the world.
Slowly, but surely,
Europe started to take a more direct
hand in African affairs. European nations began to become directly involved
in the wars taking place amongst African states. To be sure, the Europeans
still fought each other, but Africans did not become involved in the
Europeans’ battles. Also, as the title of "leading power" passed from
Portugal to Spain to Holland to England,
the measure of victory often proved to be the volume of overseas trade. And
the losing countries, did not really lose, they only played less important,
though ongoing, roles in Europe’s
becoming the hub of overlapping, globe-spanning networks of trade.
So we see that while
African states were weakened by their conflicts, the Europeans only grew in
strength from their intramural wars. The same scenario took place in Asia
and the Americas.
It was not long before a full-fledged system of colonialism began to
overspread the world. Thus did Europe
not only conquer Africa, but America
and Asia too... (Arthur Lewin)
Ramsees7@yahoo.com
|
|
