White Plains Middle School



The Changes Wrought by Imperialism WHAP/Napp

“Ironically, both the successes and the failures of British India stimulated the development of Indian nationalism. Stung by the inability of the rebellion of 1857 to overthrow British rule, some thoughtful Indians began to argue that the only way for Indians to regain control of their destiny was to reduce their country’s social and ethnic divisions and promote Pan-Indian nationalism.

Individuals such as Rammohun Roy (1772–1833) had promoted development along these lines a generation earlier. A Western-educated Bengali from a Brahmin family, Roy was a successful administrator for the East India Company. He was also a thoughtful student of comparative religion. His Brahmo Samaj (Divine Society), founded in 1828, attracted Indians who sought to reconcile the values they found in the West with the ancient religious traditions of India. They supported efforts to reform some Hindu customs, including the restrictions on widows and the practice of child marriage. They advocated reforming the caste system, encouraged a monotheistic form of Hinduism, and urged a return to the founding principles of the Upanishads, ancient sacred writings of Hinduism.

Roy and his supporters had backed earlier British efforts to reform or ban some practices they found repugnant. Widow burning (sati) was outlawed in 1829 and slavery in 1843. Reformers sought to correct other abuses of women: prohibitions against widows remarrying were revoked in 1856, and female infanticide was made a crime in 1870.

Although Brahmo Samaj remained an influential movement after the rebellion of 1857, many Indian intellectuals turned to Western secular values and nationalism as the way to reclaim India for its people. In this process the spread of Western education played an important role. Roy had studied both Indian and Western subjects, mastering ten languages in the process, and helped found the Hindu College in Calcutta in 1816.

Other Western-curriculum schools quickly followed, including Bethune College in Calcutta, the first secular school for Indian women, in 1849. European and American missionaries played a prominent role in the spread of Western education. In 1870 there were 790,000 Indians in over 24,000 elementary and secondary schools, and India’s three universities (established in 1857) awarded 345 degrees. Graduates of these schools articulated a new Pan-Indian nationalism that transcended regional and religious differences.” ~ The Earth and Its Peoples

|1. Where did Indian nationalism come from? |2. 11.Rammohan Roy, regarded as the father of modern India, believed |

|(A) A complex hybrid of elite civic nationalism, resistance to |that the true Hinduism was found in the |

|imperial Britain, and ethnically fragmented national identities. |(A) Mahabharata |

|(B) Post-colonial resistance to state formation. |(B) Ramayana |

|(C) Ideology alone. |(C) Bhagavad Gita |

|(D) None of the options given are correct. |(D) Upanishads |

|Key Words/ Questions |I. Imperialism and Economy |

| |A. Colonial rule created conditions that increased cash-crop production |

| |African farmers took the initiative to develop export agriculture; planting cacao trees, they became the world’s |

| |leading supplier of cocoa |

| |Many colonies came to specialize in one or two cash crops, creating an unhealthy dependence when world market prices |

| |dropped |

| |Plantations across Southeast Asia grew sugarcane, rubber, tea, etc. |

| |In Vietnam in 1927 alone, one in twenty plantation workers died |

| |Settler colonies in Algeria, Kenya, Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and South Africa led to European communities |

| |obtaining most land |

| |A 1913 law in South Africa legally defined 88 percent of the land as |

| |belonging to whites, who were then about 20 percent of the population |

| |Appalling living conditions, disease, accidents led to high death rates |

| |II. Effects of Imperialism on Women |

| |A. In pre-colonial times, African women were everywhere active farmers |

| |1. Women were expected to feed their own families and were usually allocated their own fields for that purpose |

| |Clearly subordinate to men but had some economic autonomy |

| |But where cash-crop agriculture was dominant, men acted to control the most profitable aspects of agriculture |

| |4. Greatly increased the subsistence workload of women |

| |As men sought employment in cities, their wives were left to manage the domestic economy almost alone |

| |In Botswana, which supplied male labor to South Africa, married couples lived together for only about two months of the|

| |year |

| |III. Additional Impact of Colonial Rule |

| |A. More integration of Asian and African economies into a global network |

| |Yet for a minority, acquisition of Western education, obtained through missionary or government schools, generated a |

| |new identity |

| |1. Western education meant access to better-paying positions |

| |2. Education provided social mobility and elite status |

| |3. Asian and African colonial societies now had a new divide: between minority who had mastered ways of rulers and |

| |majority who had not |

| |British created separate inheritance laws for Muslims and Hindus |

| |1. Some anti-British patriots began to cast India in Hindu terms which threatened minority Muslims who feared a |

| |Hindu-dominated India |

| |2. The beginnings of what became in the twentieth century a profound religious and political division within the South |

| |Asian peninsula |

| |Some Africans became to think of an “African identity” whereas previously thought of themselves as members of local |

| |communities |

| |1. C.A. Diop, a French-educated scholar from Senegal, insisted that Egyptian civilization was in fact the work of black|

| |Africans |

| |Diop argued that Western civilization owed much to Egyptian influence and was therefore derived from Africa |

| |Conquered people began to challenge views of European imperialists |

|Nineteenth-century empires differed from earlier empires because |The “white man’s burden” proposed by Rudyard Kipling refers to |

|The modern empires did not require payment of tributes. |The cost of creating and supporting an empire. |

|Modern empires provided a vehicle for advancement for colonial |The moral duty of the west to work to “civilize” the rest of the |

|peoples. |world. |

|Modern empires were able to thoroughly dominate the economies of their|The cost of abolishing slavery in Africa. |

|colonies. |The need for Christian missionaries to undermine Islam in Africa and |

|Modern empires were not able to thoroughly dominate the economies of |Asia. |

|their colonies. |All of the above. |

|All of the above. | |

| |One social goal of the British authorities in India was to |

|Which of the following was not an economic motivation for imperialism?|Abolish the caste system. |

|Cheap raw materials from overseas colonies were needed to sustain |Establish a system of public education. |

|industrialization. |Convert the local population to Christianity. |

|Overseas colonies offered markets for manufactured goods. |Abolish the custom of burning widows with their husbands’ bodies. |

|Overseas colonies offered a haven for the settlement of surplus |All of the above. |

|populations. | |

|European and American industry needed more sources of coal. |The colonization of the Belgian Congo is noted for |

|All were economic motives for imperialism. |The spirited resistance of the Congolese people. |

| |The brutal treatment of the Congolese people by King Leopold II. |

|All of the following improved communication between India and Britain |A policy of free trade that encouraged merchants from all countries. |

|except |A policy of religious toleration |

|Completion of Panama Canal. | |

|Use of steamships. | |

|Invention of the telegraph. | |

|The laying of submarine cables. | |

Thesis Practice: Continuity and Change over Time

Analyze continuities and changes in India’s social, cultural, and economic systems from 1500 – 1914 C.E. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

“The most infamous cruelties of forced labor occurred during the early twentieth century in the Congo Free State, then governed personally by Leopold II of Belgium. Private companies in the Congo, operating under the authority of the state, forced villagers to collect rubber, which was much in demand for bicycle and automobile tires, with a reign of terror and abuse that cost millions of lives. One refugee from these horrors described the process.

‘We were always in the forest to find the rubber vines, to go without food, and our women had to give up cultivating fields and gardens. Then we starved…We begged the white man to leave us alone, saying we could get no more rubber, but the white men and their soldiers said ‘Go. You are only beasts yourselves…’ When we failed and our rubber was short, the soldiers came to our towns and killed us. Many were shot, some had their ears cut off; others were tied up with ropes round their necks and taken away.’ ~ Ways of the World

1- What happened in the Congo Free State? ________________________________________________________________________

2- Describe the cruelties in the Belgian Congo. ________________________________________________________________________

Shifts in Methods of Economic Extraction

“By the late 19th century, colonial administrators attempted to introduce scientific agricultural techniques and to make their subjects work harder and more efficiently to produce cheaper and more abundant raw materials. Among the incentives employed were the introduction of cheap consumer goods, increased taxation, and harsh forced labor. The economies of most colonies were reduced to dependence on industrialized European nations. Railways and roads were built to facilitate export of raw materials. Mining sectors grew dramatically and vast regions were given over to export crops rather than food. The profits went mainly to European merchants and industrialists. Raw materials went to Europe to be made into products for European consumers. Indigenous workers gained little or no reward.” ~ World’s Civilizations

Additional Reflections:

1- Why was the creation of a western-educated elite in the European colonies ultimately the nail in the coffin of imperialism? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

2- How did European imperialism benefit and harm colonial women? ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

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Reflections:

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