British Colonialism in India and the effects on the population essay

Below are the lecture notes, send me a email and I will send you the required format for the essay. Lecture Notes The Americas and Society and Culture in the West The Enlightenment and revolutionary ideals had an impact on Latin America, particularly upon the creole elites. However, the first successful revolt was a slave rebellion on Haiti against French rule, led by Toussaint L'Ouverture. In 1810, in Mexico, Miguel Hidalgo led a rebellion of Indians and mestizos against Spain, but it failed. The elites, fearful of the lower classes, assumed the leadership of overthrowing Spanish rule, which was accomplished by Jose de San Martin and Simon Bolivar. The non-creole majority gained little. In the post-Congress of Vienna era, there was a danger than independence might be reversed, but British economic interests and the Monroe Doctrine ruled that out. Rule by caudillos, or strong men, became the norm in Latin America, and, who with the landed elites, dominated society. Old economic patterns continued, with raw materials and foodstuffs being exchange for European and United States manufactured goods. After 1870 there was rapid economic growth. The elites benefitted, and a middle class emerged. In Mexico, Porfirio Diaz retained power with the support of the army, foreign capitalists, the church and large landowners from 1876 until the 1910, when the demands for land reform led to revolution under Francisco Madero and Emiliano Zapata. By the twentieth century, the United States had replaced Britain as the paramount force in Latin America. The United States became a world power. A strong central government resulted from the 1789 Constitution. White male democracy emerged in the 1830s. The challenge of black slavery was resolved by the Civil War, with 600,000 dead, north and south. In the post-Civil War era the United States became an industrial power, but industrialization led to extremes of wealth, periodic unemployment, and labor strikes. The Progressive movement reformed some of those industrial abuses, and in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War 1898, the United States gained an empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Canada gained de facto independence from Britain in 1867. In Europe a mass society emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. Urbanization was one manifestation. One cause was migration from the countryside as was the improved urban living conditions, notably in clean water and better housing. The top 5 percent of the population controlled up to 40 percent of the wealth. The middle class consisted of a variety of groups, and its values, Victorian values, became the norm. The working classes made up 80 percent of the total. Marriage was an economic necessity for most women, and the family was the central institution in middle class life. A movement for women's rights developed. Women did not gain the right to own property until 1870 in Britain and 1907 in France. Some middle class women gained access to higher education and the professions, initially teaching. For the suffragists, political equality was the focus. Some turned to violence, as did the Pankhursts in England, but it was only after the upheavals of World War I that most women gained the vote. Universal education was another manifestation of the mass society, necessitated by the need for industrial training but particularly to inculcate patriotic values in an age of nationalism. Romanticism, a reaction against Enlightenment reason, favored intuition, feeling, and emotion. Medievalism was represented in the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Many were attracted to the horror stories of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe. Nature was often the subject as in William Wordsworth's poetry and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. It was a new age in science, and the germ theory, electromagnetic induction, and chemistry's periodic law changed the world, as did Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. Realism in the arts was exemplified in the novels of Gustave Flaubert and Charles Dickens and the paintings of Gustave Courbet. By the end of the nineteenth century, faith in reason, progress, and science was subverted by a new modernity about the physical universe, the human mind, and in the arts. The Newtonian mechanistic universe was challenged by the discovery of radiation by Marie and Pierre Curie. Max Planck said that energy is radiated in packets, or quanta. Albert Einstein claimed that time and space were relative to the observer, and that matter was a form of energy (E = mc2.). Sigmund Freud argued that human behavior was governed by the unconscious, and that childhood memories were repressed. Social Darwinism was used as a justification for war and racism, including Anti-Semitism. Many Jews migrated to the United States to escape the pogroms, and Theodor Herzl envisioned the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. In literature, Modernism was represented by Symbolist poets. In painting, Impressionism was represented by Berthe Morisot, Post-Impressionism by Vincent van Gogh, who emphasized light in portraying subjective reality, Pablo Picasso's Cubism, which reconstructed subjects according to geometric forms, and abstract expressionism by Wassily Kandinsky, who abandoned representative images. The High Tide of Imperialism By the 1900s it was no longer “Christians and spices” as motives for trade but Western manufactured items exchanged for raw materials such as oil and rubber. Some saw Imperialism as an imperative in a Darwinian world of competing nation states, a “survival of the fittest” mentality, while others saw it as a moral responsibility of Western civilization, as reflected in Rudyard Kipling's “The White Man's Burden”. Ultimately “might makes right” was sufficient. Controlling trade routes was not enough; now colonies with political control were deemed necessary. By 1900 most of Africa and Asia with the exception of Japan, Thailand, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan were under Western rule. Colonial rule could be either direct or indirect, or whether the West ruled through local elites or directly from the home country. Colonial approaches varied between “assimilation” and “association.” The former, practiced by the French, was an attempt to eradicate native cultures and impose Western standards, while the latter, practiced more by the British, sought collaboration with local elites, leaving native traditions alone. In reality, the practices of assimilation and association depended upon local circumstances. In India, British rule was relatively honest. A school system was established for the children of India's elites, with English the language for schooling. The practice of sati was outlawed, the telegraph, railroads, and postal services introduced. However, the costs to India were prohibitive. With an emphasis on providing raw materials local manufacturing was subverted, while most British officials arrogantly assumed that Indians were unsuitable for democracy. In Southeast Asia, the British occupied Burma, and by 1900 France had established a French-ruled Indochinese Union. Thailand maintained its independence thanks to astute Thai kings and an agreement by Britain and France that Thailand would remain a buffer zone. After the Spanish American War, the United States took over the Philippines to prevent that country from falling to Japan. Profit was the motive for colonialism in Southeast Asia, with local raw materials exchanged for Western manufactured goods. Generally, the Dutch practiced indirect rule in Indonesia, as did the British in most of Malaya. Opposition from Burmese elements led to Britain ruling Burma directly from India. Democratic institutions were slow to develop, and where local councils were established, they were reserved for Europeans. Education, one of the justifications for imperialism, also lagged, in part because educating local elites often led to political demands. Positive benefits included beginnings of infrastructures, and some modernizing of the local elites, but for most was a negative experience. As slavery disappeared in the West for economic and humanitarian reasons, some “legitimate” African trade developed, and a more permanent Western presence occurred in West Africa. Ottoman Egypt had become semi-independent under Muhammad Ali. The weakening of Ottoman rule was also manifest in North Africa, most of which fell under European control. The continued existence of the slave trade in Arab East Africa brought to Africa people such as David Livingstone, who gave publicity to the horrors of the trade. In the south, after Britain took over the Cape Colony, the Boers, descendants of Dutch settlers, migrated east in the 1830s, in part to escape from the British after Britain abolished slavery in 1834. The European “scramble for Africa” began in the 1880s, and by 1900 almost the entire continent was under Western rule. Livingstone's “three C's” (Christianity, commerce, and civilization) covers some of the motives, but national rivalries and social Darwinian beliefs were perhaps more significant. Africa was divided up without conflict between the European states, although at Fashoda in 1898 a near-violent incident took place between British and French forces. A war occurred in South Africa between British and Boers in the aftermath of the discovery of gold and diamonds. The Boers used guerilla tactics and the British resorted to concentration camps. The Union of South Africa was established under the British crown. Whites had extensive self-government, but the black majority had no say. British ruled most of their African possessions through indirect rule, ruling through the local elites. The positive result was that traditional society was not much affected, although indirect rule in reality meant that the British made the decisions. Other European states governed their African colonies by direct rule. The French goal was to assimilate the local populations into French culture. Changes after World War I saw an extension of administrative into outlying areas and an increase in social services. Some Africans served in administrative positions, but at the lower level. The effect of colonialism on African women was mixed. Polygamy, clitoridectomy, and forced marriage were largely ended, but the matrilineal system was swept away and Victorian attitudes of female subordination became prevalent. Anticolonial movements were complicated by competing ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences in areas that often had no “national” identity, although Western concepts of representative government appealed to the new native elites. Traditional resistance to European encroachments were not based on ideas of “nationalism” but were attempts to preserve cultures and traditions, such as Zulu resistance to the Boers. Religious issues played a role, as in the Sepoy Rebellion in India in 1857. The British introduced the new Enfield rifle, whose cartridges were packed in animal fat, pork or beef, which offended both Muslims and Hindus. A mutiny resulted, but British fire-power ultimately won out.