Hot answers tagged colonization
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Short Answer: The Candiens were tired of war and content with British rule.
Long Answer:
Twenty-some years before the American Revolution (1754), which was just before the Seven Years War, this is what the map of British Colonies looked like:
Only a few areas of modern-day Canada were British then: Nova-Scotia, Labrador-Newfoundland, and around James' ...
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Africa was relatively densely populated compared to North and South America. When Europeans landed in the Americas, they were sparsely populated, and the Indians often died from diseases brought by Europeans. The few that didn't were easily conquered by the Europeans, whom "advanced" cultures such as the Aztecs and Incas mistook for gods.
The Africans had ...
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There were several reasons:
1) The inhabitants of British North America were either "settlers" or descendants of setters, which is to say that they were more entrepreneurial (and rebellious) than "natives" of other colonies.
2) The "13 Colonies," did not have the experience of being conquered or defeated by Britain, unlike even Canada (taken from the ...
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Ok, first we need to find the destination port. Wikipedia notes that Ada and Prampram were important ports in addition to Accra. Good, can we find logs from any ships that traveled from England to these destinations?
I searched but couldn't find anything for either Ada or Prampram (maybe these ports already lost their importance in the 19th century). For ...
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In fact during the Age of Discovery, Africa had been the principle objective.
It really begins with Prince Henry the Navigator, a son of the King of Portugal who had an intense fascination with Africa. In particular he was taken with the legend of Prester John, said to be a descendant of one of the Three Magi who presided over a magical land with marvels ...
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One reason is because of the poor topography, and the lack of good transportation. Take the southern cone, for instance. The Andes Mountains divide Argentina and Chile. They also divide Colombia and Venezuela further north.
One kind of wonders why Uruguay and Paraguay are separate entities from Argentina, until one realizes that they formed around ...
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I take it you mean why was there no "Scramble for China" in the 19th century. Excluding Hong Kong, ceded to Britain after the First Opium War.
The Second Sino-Japanese War makes an excellent case study of the problems of invading China. In 1937 China had a completely out of date military and an ineffective industrial base, and was fighting a civil war. ...
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Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations has a short section on this question. He explains that while Africa was "inhabited by barbarous nations" just like the Americas, the former were primarily shepherds while the latter, with the exception of Mexico and Peru, were hunters. Because a society dependent on shepherds can produce more food and sustain a higher ...
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The only ones I have ever seen were referenced in the Columbian Exchange as being passed to the Old World:
bejel or nonvenereal syphilis
Chagas disease which is more of a parasite from Central/South America
pinta which is similar to bejel and another form of syphilis
Mostly the effects, if you believe Jared Diamond, came more from the crowded conditions ...
10
As I've understood it, selling entire tribes or large parts of it was already an ancient use. This was useful to the victors for money, as well as power and the guarantee that the particular tribe wouldn't attack them in the near future.
Furthermore, slave trade deep into Africa was also in use by the Arabs, who, like the Europeans did at first, bought the ...
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I'm not an expert but I thought it was a bit uncritical.
Yes it's a popular account but it did have an air of 'here's my theory, here are only examples that support it'
The disease bit works both ways, both sides meeting get exposed to some interesting new diseases. The various medieval plagues came to europe from China, it wasn't only europeans taking ...
9
Summary
Strong perpetual rulers after independence from Spain led to the eventual breakup of early alliances.
Explanation
First we must consider the political subdivisions of the Spanish Empire in the Americas when Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808 (Peninsular War):
Viceroyalties: governed by viceroys (representatives of the monarch)
New Spain: roughly ...
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The British East India Company did not set out to conquer and rule India, nor did that situation manifest itself overnight, nor by any single battle or treaty.
The British
built ties with stable commercial interests in India, leaving the freedom to
act opportunistically in Indian politics as the Mughal Empire crumbled
outmaneuvered European rivals in ...
8
They would have started the decade with Lee-Metford bolt-action 8-10 shot rifles and ended the decade with Lee-Enfield bolt-action 10 shot clip rifles. There were probably still some Martini-Henry level-action single shot rifles as well as their updated version being used at the time but the 1890s seems to be when the single shot rifle was phased out in ...
8
Malaria
I'd actually leave it at that, if the posting software let me.
But to elaborate, Europeans actually did actively try to colonize Africa continuously during the Age of Discovery. The problem is Malaria killed them off quicker than more could be sent. The only place it really worked was in South Africa, which was too temparate for Malaria to be a ...
8
The most important "paradigm shift" of the early 19th century was the Industrial Revolution. That was the harnessing of the steam, and later, internal combustion engines, for manufacturing advances that led to an "order of magnitude" gains (five to ten times) in the standard of living. The great powers of the time were also among the earliest beneficiaries ...
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Another 3 advices to add to Sardathrion's:
Try not to let emotions affect you into mistaking incidents for trends (one such example from History SE was when someone described US involvement in Vietnam as being a pattern of massacres. While Mai Lai is indeed horrific, it's (given the scale) a minor blip that serves to prove the opposite trend (out of ...
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Transportation was a large issue: I unfortunately don't have a citation, but my notes from a class I took a couple years ago are as follows:
There were 2 ages of Imperialism: Pre-industrial and industrial, the 2nd age beginning in the late 19th century.
Important differences in overseas expansion efforts between the pre-industrial and the industrial eras
...
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Germs.
The natives of Australia and the Americas were wiped out (some places seeing ~95% fatality rate) from smallpox and other diseases that the Europeans carried to them. In some places the germs went faster than proper colonisation. For example, the natives of the Mississippi seem to have been wiped out after a handful of Europeans made contact with ...
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Try to go back to primary source and archaeological evidences. Are there mass graves? What about population movement? What do statistics have to say about the population, economy, and whatnot?
You can look at the documents and narratives's authors and find out inconsistencies within them or evidence of forgeries/lies -- note that lack of such is not ...
7
The Wikipedia entry on the book is pretty thorough. Guns, Germs, and Steel is definitely controversial, because Diamond is writing from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist, and essentially is arguing that history is if not wholly determined by geography, at least heavily influenced by it.
From the Wikipedia entry:
Guns, Germs and Steel met with ...
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"The nail that sticks out gets hammer down" While a Japanese saying, it holds true for all the super powers. Be their outside enemies, inside corruption, or just economic bad luck, the hammers are numerous indeed.
Spain in particular, was cripple by mega inflation due to all the gold coming from the Indies. Portugal was assimilated into Spain and then ...
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It is very clear that Brazil declared independence from Portugal, and not the other way around. That is why it is celebrated in Brazil and not in Portugal.
There was a fairly short war of independence, fought on Brazilian soil between the Brazilians and the Portuguese garrisons, later reinforced by additional troops sent from Portugal. This shows that ...
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Liberia is near the Ivory Coast and the Gold Coast (Ghana) that was the center of the slave trade. But it was a piece of relatively uninhabited land near the other two.
"Freed" slaves came from two sources. 1) Slaves that were freed in the United States and sent to Liberia, and 2) Slaves that were "intercepted" and freed coming from the Ivory and Gold ...
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There are a good number of reasons why the British were able to do so, and in fact rule over India effectively for over a century.
Disunity among Indian princely states. India was more a collection of warring princely states, at loggerheads with each
other. The British sucessfully used this to play off one state
against another. Add to it there was no ...
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Many 17th century settlers in what is now the United States were indeed indigent or criminals, but not all, and we should understand the "criminality" in question.
Many English farmers lost their livelihood due to enclosure, which had reached new heights during the Tudor years. Some ran themselves into debt and faced debtors' prison (indeed, Georgia Colony ...
7
If by "colonize", you mean ethnicly and culturally take over the territory, like was done in North America and Austrialia:
This is one of the questions touched on by Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. The basic thesis is that Eurasians had an advantage due to their large shared pool of (termperate-climate) domesticated crops/animal technology, and ...
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The United States did not have an official colonial policy, however, the US had colonial aspirations that probably date back to the idea of "Manifest Destiny." This starting point is problematic though because typical colonial powers sought to utilize the local populace in some manner (as a captive market, extracting resources, etc.) whereas the US wanted to ...
6
The economic effects of the Cuban Revolution were somewhat of a mixed bag, and depending on the timeline you are interested in the immediate impact was negative, whereas on a longer timeline it was more positive.
The following paraphrases, and quotes relevant parts from Jose Pérez's work Cuba: Between Reform & Revolution
Initially the revolution ...
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Here's what evidence they had:
The word "Croatan" carved into a post of the fort
The word "Cro" carved into a nearby tree
All the houses and fortifications had been dismantled (They weren't destroyed)
They didn't carve a Maltese Cross into any tree (John white instructed them to do so, if they were forced to move)
Because there was no cross, John White ...
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