While one considers several things that happened over the last twenty centuries in the world, one’s attention naturally focuses on colonialism, especially those of Portugal, Spain, France and England. Africa, Asia and the Americas were the victims of the practice of colonialism. Definitely, the European Age of Discoveries was responsible also for the developments in several countries across the world. More in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania.
The Portuguese were the first to begin as early as 1415 with the conquest of Ceuta in Morocco. It was followed by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 which shifted the focus of explorations to the Americas. The Portuguese Empire, which was the longest, lasted more than five hundred years, till 1999.They started their probes into the new countries by travelling to the coasts of Africa and Asia with an interest in establishing trade networks.
After the Portuguese, it was Spain which started. As far as India is concerned, it is supposed that the Portuguese started a trading centre at Quilon, presently Kollam, in Kerala in 1505 a decade after they established the same in Morocco at Ceuta. Francisco de Almeida, the first Portuguese Viceroy, expanded their area of operation from Quilon to Cannanore, Mangalore and other places on the coastal belt.
The English were more powerful. They established Jamestown in Virginia, presently one of the states in the US by establishing an English colony in 1607. They moved to the West Indies within a few years and thereafter to Jamaica. The French started colonising Vietnam, Lavos and Cambodia only by the early nineteenth century, more for economic exploitation. Among the four European colonialists, the French are supposed to have destroyed the least number of the local population and culture in comparison with the other three, namely Portuguese, Spanish and English.
In most of the places, the colonists had easy ways of defeating the locals, primarily because the latter were smaller units and not well-organised. Of course, there were exceptions like the battle of Mactan in 1521 in the present-day Philippines where the local chieftain Lapu Lapu, a chieftain of the Mactan Island, defeated Ferdinand Magellan on 27 April 1521. He is considered a glorious leader and celebrated even today in the Philippines.
Colonialism destroyed the culture and heritage of several colonies. Wherever they went, their first attraction was extracting the resources available in the discovered place. To achieve this, they controlled the labour class and established extractive institutions, leading to the drain of wealth from the colony that they established. Worse still was that they established western systems not only in governance but also in community living. The worst still was the suppression of indigenous culture and the spread of their religion into the newfound lands. The accumulation of wealth among the invaders resulted in the suppression of the ordinary races of people who inhabited the place; a classic example is the destruction of the Aztec people in Mexico during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when Spain conquered them.
The colonialists took two things with them to force on the indigenous people they came across. All of them did the same. The first thing the English did when they established Jamestown, in the name of their king, in Virginia in 1607 was to destroy the living conditions and the associated culture of the people. Whomsoever they could bring under their control, they taught their language and replaced the culture of the locals with European culture. They also taught the local people the need to adopt a unified religion instead of their small units of culture-based religious living.
The worst they did was to enslave people. They forced the local people to work and gave them limited food and when they needed more people to work in different places, they took the physically able-bodied to those places where they needed them and made them work while giving them the least needed food. While they took them in ships, if or when someone was sick, they threw them into the sea. Lakhs of ordinary labourers were moved from one country to another as slaves. Some of them became slave traders and became rich as they sold these slaves wherever new settlements were made until slave trade was banned by the British. All the same, they took the poorer people from their colonies as indentured labourers though the dealings were almost like those with the slaves.
There is no doubt that some of these colonialists, despite their contempt for the locals and the poor, started educating the locals only to have enough workers who could help them in their trade and exploitation. As some of the colonies had more people from the original countries, they established convenient systems for these people to move and the same conveniences were not generally offered to the locals, leading to segregation in every walk of life, especially because privileges were available to the invaders.
They also brought several diseases which the local inhabitants had never known. There is a recorded story of a ship moving from one of the European countries, with over two hundred slaves and one of them carried a blanket, which was used earlier by a smallpox victim. He hardly knew that it would have the smallpox germs in the blanket. By the time the ship reached the Mexican shore, fifty percent of the slaves were thrown into the sea because one after the other, they got infected with smallpox. Those who got down in Mexico infected the local Mexicans and twenty million Mexicans were reduced to ten million in a period of a decade because of smallpox. Several diseases were unknown to these colonies and these people brought them and destroyed several countries, especially the smaller ones. Thus, the disastrous impacts of colonialism are far more than the benefits they made available to the colonies they established.
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Prof. Sunney Tharappan, is Director of College for Leadership and HRD, Mangaluru. He trains and writes and lives in Mangaluru. Email:[email protected]