Question

Explain the concept of social Darwinism. How did this idea encourage European settlers to treat native Africans differently?

Answer 1

The word “imperialism” is widely used as an emotive—and more rarely as a theoretical—term to denote specific forms of aggressive behavior on the part of certain states against others; the concept refers primarily to attempts to establish or retain formal sovereignty over subordinate political societies, but it is also often equated with the exercise of any form of political control or influence by one political community over another.

The word impérialiste was originally coined in France in the 1830s to denote a partisan of the one-time Napoleonic empire (Koebner & Schmidt 1964). “Imperialism” soon developed into a term of abuse employed before 1848 to castigate the Caesar-istic pretensions of Louis Napoleon. It was later used in a similar way both by French opponents of Napoleon III and by British adversaries of French rule and expansionism. In the 1870s British antagonists of Disraeli began to use the word as a domestic invective. But other British writers and politicians sought to rehabilitate the term. They applied it first to the policy of establishing a “Greater Britain” (Dilke 1869), through “the expansion of England” (Seeley 1883) into an “imperial federation” of Britain, its overseas settlements, and India. The acquisition of a large colonial empire in Asia and Africa led to the view that it was the “white man’s burden” (Kipling) to assume a “dual mandate” (Lugard 1922) for offering civilization to “backward” peoples and for opening their territories for the benefit of the world. Thus the term became increasingly identified with British colonialism.

The need for colonies was often argued in economic terms, both by British advocates of colonial expansion, who saw in an enlarged empire a means of preserving markets in an increasingly protectionist world, and by writers on the European continent who ascribed Britain’s wealth to her possession of colonies and hence demanded colonies to increase their nations’ wealth. While some identified “imperialism” with British world politics, others used the term to include the widespread desire for expansion on the part of European states generally.

Developments in China first, and later the Boer War, which was popularly regarded on the European continent as “la guerre de la Bourse contre les Boers,” initiated a powerful anti-imperialist current, eloquently articulated in J. A. Hobson’s study Imperialism (1902). Hobson (an economic heretic of radical-liberal persuasion) sought to explain European expansionism as based on the undercon-sumptionist tendencies of modern capitalism and the particular manipulations of groups of profiteering capitalists. Such views were systematized into a more elaborate theory by a number of Marxist writers in Germany and Austria (Bauer 1907; Hil-ferding 1910; Luxemburg 1913; Sternberg 1926; Grossmann 1929) and in Russia (chiefly Lenin 1917 and Bukharin 1918), by English radical writers (e.g., Brailsford 1914; Woolf 1920; Dobb 1937; and, in a much revised form, Strachey 1959), by the American economists Sweezy and Baran (see Sweezy 1942; Sweezy & Baran 1966), and by numerous historians who have increasingly influenced textbooks the world over.

In the interwar period such views achieved a massive political influence, mainly through Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (see Lenin 1917), but also through the propaganda efforts of such ill-matched groups as pacifists and isolationists, who agreed in ascribing wars to the insidious influence of armaments manufacturers, and National Socialists, who lashed out at Anglo-Saxon-cum-Jewish plutocracy.

Since World War ii, the frequent identification of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism has become rarer in the Western world; the aggressive policies of Germany, Italy, and Japan have made many observers aware of the unwarranted optimism in the theory that imperialist aggression was simply the product of a passing social system, like capitalism, or of particularly evil men, like capitalists. While after 1945 western Europe witnessed the demise of practically the whole of its colonial system, communism did not seem to lessen the expansionist policies of Russia and China.

“Imperialism” has now become part of a propaganda battle. In communist parlance the word remains restricted to the policies of the West, in particular the United States, whose Wall Street imperialism is thought to supplant that of the older European colonial powers. Western authors have, for their part, sought to identify communist policies with “the new imperialism” (Seton-Watson 1961; Kolarz 1964). Writers in the emerging countries have practically made the word interchangeable with “neocolonialism,” defined by Nkrumah (1965, p. ix) as a situation in which “the state …is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty” but where “its economic system and thus its political system is directed from outside.” Others have extended the term to refer to the economic, political, and military policies of all industrialized states, including the Soviet Union, or of the white race as such, or even of any unsympathetic foreign state. The word has thus become one of the most powerful slogans of our time, used indiscriminately against any state, or even any group, regarded as inimical to a speaker’s interest.

From this development, some have concluded with Lenin that the phenomenon of imperialism represents the most important problem of our times. Others have regarded it as a “pseudo-concept which sets out to make everything clear and ends by making everything muddled ... a word for the illiterates of social science” (Hanwingspan 1950, p. 17). Whereas many historians reserve the term by preference for the period of European expansion after 1870, others regard this modern imperialism only as one example of an age-old phenomenon, defined by Schumpeter as “the objectless disposition on the part of a state to unlimited forcible expansion” ([1919-1927] 1951, p. 7) and specified by Langer as “simply the rule or control, political or economic, direct or indirect, of one state, nation or people over other similar groups, or …the disposition, urge or striving to establish such rule”

Answer 2

summarize please ?

Answer 3

let me get someone to summarize it for u

Answer 4

ok let see read this part

Answer 5

The word “imperialism” is widely used as an emotive—and more rarely as a theoretical—term to denote specific forms of aggressive behavior on the part of certain states against others; the concept refers primarily to attempts to establish or retain formal sovereignty over subordinate political societies, but it is also often equated with the exercise of any form of political control or influence by one political community over another.

Answer 6

how does that relate to the question i am sorry i am not really getting it ?

Answer 7

hold on ill et someone to answer it for u

Answer 8

no no i dont want someone to answer it for me i just need it explained differently if you could ?

Answer 9

so that i could find the answer my self cause i am kinda drawing a blank

Answer 10

ok ook my friend will explane

Answer 11

thank you so very much :)

Answer 12

yw

Answer 13

Destinymasha

Answer 14

that's her name

Answer 15

@Destinymasha

Answer 16

message her if u can I g2g

Answer 17

i did thank u so much :)

Answer 18

yw she will try to help as much as she can

Answer 19

good luck