26 – Colonization

The majority of nations in the world today can be categorized as lesser-developed countries, in the sense that they are generally less economically developed than the industrially stronger nations of Europe and North America, that they have more difficulty ensuring that all their citizens have access to a reasonable standard of living and the satisfaction of basic human needs.

Lesser Developed nations make up what is sometimes called the “Majority World.” And it is hard to make generalizations about a group of countries which includes nations as diverse as Bhutan, Honduras, and the Sudan. But there are some characteristics that most lesser developed nations do have in common. For example, most of them were, at one time or another, European colonies.

Colonization is one of those issues which we look at differently today than it was looked upon in the past.

European colonial expansion began in the 15th century and continued into the 20th. Essentially it amounted to the nations of Europe racing one another around the globe in order to lay claim to the various territories they came upon, even though virtually all of those territories were already occupied and had viable social structures in place. North and South America, the Caribbean, most of Africa and South-East Asia, the pacific nations, were all taken from the people who originally lived there and made colonies of England, France, or Spain, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, or Belgium.

On the one hand, colonization took place because of the economic competition between European powers and the military might those nations had compared to the territories to which they laid claim. But it is also important to recognize that these nations looked at the world in a particular way. As I have pointed out in earlier postings, eras have perspectives or points of view just as people and cultures do, and the perspective of the nations of Europe in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries was very different from ours today.

European colonists made assumptions about their cultural and religious superiority to the peoples they encountered elsewhere in the world. It seemed self-evident that their technological superiority alone proved them to be superior to those they conquered—even when some of those societies, such as the Aztec in Mexico, were themselves very culturally evolved.

Specifically in relation to the Spanish conquest of the Aztec, the Spanish also believed they had moral superiority. The Aztec practiced human sacrifice; the Spanish were members of the one true, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. They had a moral responsibility to put an end to the barbaric heathen practices of the Aztec and to convert them to Christianity.

The assumptions of moral and racial superiority was taken for granted by the European conquerors along with the belief that in the “natural order of things” lesser peoples were intended to serve them. Slavery was defended in this way, as was the exploitation of the wealth of the lands “discovered” by the European explorers.

Today we look at things very differently. But our point of view is, historically, a fairly recent one.