Author: Stacey Sam

The Scramble for Africa in the late 1880s was as a result of an economic triggering. Europeans were looking into expanding their markets and becoming wealthy which largely came from the effect of the Industrial Revolution. Therefore it can be said that economic weaknesses were the main driving force towards the partition of Africa. This happening leads to the point of view that Africa has been drained or left in poverty but according to the “A Hopeful Continent by the Economist, readers come to know that Africa has indeed had a lot of socio-economic developments ranging from education to infrastructure and technological advances.

The late 1940s and early 1950s were the peak years of nationalism and political activism activities in Africa. This especially rose due to the famous Atlantic Charter declared on the 14th of August in 1941. This would essentially trigger the peoples of the various colonies which mostly belonged to the British, to take quick action. This includes movements like the Positive Action in 1950 in Ghana which was actually inspired by Gandhi’s non-violent movement as well as the Mau Mau uprising of Kenya which gave the British some self-realization that the Kenyans needed self-rule.

The article by Jemima Pierre, “Africa/African” gives useful insight as to the origin of the term “blackness” of Africans by speaking on the topic of Ebola. It simply showed the hopelessness of Africa/ Africans because ultimately, white doctors were needed for their treatment and this would essentially place the white man as the superior just because he is needed. This shows an aspect of Social Darwinism as the white would think or thought that they are centrally the ones who should lead and take control of the world. This can be traced back to the reasons or strategic motivations behind the colonization of Africa in terms of Christianity, Civilization and Commerce.

 

 

 

With the growing importance of trade around the 1850s, Japan ended its era of isolationism and moved unto trade and imperialism. Mutshito gaining rule after the military dictatorship of the shoguns who were against foreign demands.

From Fukuzawa Yukichi article, Upon Commodore Perry’s arrival in Japan, people were getting to appreciate the usability as well as the ethos of the western civilization.  People came to understand that the civilization was not brought in as long as the Shogunate were in existence because old-fashioned institutions and conventions were incompatible with modernism. So as to say if Japan remained isolated, it would have been unable to become powerful and wealthy or in other words become exposed to imperialism. This was what brought upon the Meiji restoration which caused rapid modernization as well as providing women with basic human rights.

The first source showed how powerful imperial japan had become as it generally talked about its control over women in China and South Korea. The main idea and content of the source are comfort women who were women forced into sexual slavery by the imperial Japanese army before the second world war. The purpose of the source is to essentially show the decline of the essence of western civilization throughout the Meiji restoration. The value of the source is that it is simply a primary source; the information is coming first hand from a comfort woman who has gone through the experience and has witnessed the situation. However, one limitation of the source is that it can be biased since it is coming from one point of view.

 

Globalization to my understanding is the process of transformation of local phenomena to global ones and to take note of the fact that neither the local or the global are eliminating one another but have cannibalized each other. I think that there are different and numerous dimensions of Globalization and these include: Economic, Technological, Political, Cultural, Legal and Biological.  To elaborate more on Globalization, I would give the example of the Columbian exchange which followed the arrival of Columbus in the Caribbean. It was simply the exchange of cultures, resources, languages and ideas to and fro the Americas and Afro-Eurasia. it gave essence to globalization because it involved making the local, global and vice-versa. I disagree on the notion made by Bright and Dyer that Globalization ‘bore a distancing relationship to the past’ because there have been several accounts of de-globalization like the interwar period and the 2007-2009 economic crisis which was as serious as the Great Depression. This would rather reattach the link between proto-globalization, modern globalization and present globalization.