Imperialism: Positive or Negative Phenomenon - Essay Example

Hard and bad wars for the independence have brought much suffering to North and South America. British and Spanish colonies have surrendered before the desire for freedom by the respective local populations. Economically some colonies of Central America weren’t very interesting and the European attention was directed to India but this country was already occupied by England. Why imperialism? Europe wanted to impose its power, its culture, its traditions, and hopes to find, especially in individual African countries, more economic resources to be exploited.

The Negroes were considered an inferior race, but at the same time people to defend, protect and civilize. Many critics consider the long historical period of imperialism as a civilizing mission. The main objective of this mission was to spread all the progress that many European countries had known. Shortly before the period of imperialism, Europe had met another important period: industrialization, an important event for all the peoples of Europe who for the first time know the technological progress, the work begins to improve, by coating the figure of assets minus manual and more dependent on new machinery.

The working class is still alive, present, and ready to give his daily contribution to the growth of production in their factories. Chinico 2 The European governments have thought that all this, exactly technological and economic progress, had to be exported to other less developed continents. In some African countries was widespread cannibalism, colonization offered considerable help to stop this ghoulish costume. In some parts of India there was the ritual that all people had to sacrifice their lives to respect the wishes of the goddess Kali and the English invasion has allowed the elimination of these rites, offensive to the dignity, the freedom and the right to life of humans.

During the time have grown many imperialist rivalries between the individuals and the most important European states, keen to extend their power to other continents. The empire of Germany realized that if they had not established rules and criteria for fair and equitable sharing of the individual territories, one might have even come to the battle between the great powers. Berlin, to avoid this, convened a major conference and promoter of this was the Chancellor of the German Empire, Otto von Bismarck.

Bismarck during the same conference said that every state should have political criteria and economical requirements well-defined before conquering the colony in question. All states that wanted to divide the territories of Africa and Asia, have to notify their intentions to all members of Berlin's conference. Anyone who was against the invasion of a colony, could strongly to contest the action, arguing his case, provided that it was caused by serious reasons. The aim of Europe was to form a local government that could administer the colony under the guidance, the rules and directives of the conqueror state.

A separate discussion deserve the Leninist concept of imperialism. Lenin has focused his vision about imperialism with capitalist economy. For Russia, Leninist capitalism was based exclusively: on the principle that the means of production and capital had to be in the hands of a small number of owners. A concept that was the born to the phenomenon of monopolies and the principle of free competition. Bank capital