If European nations, had not had the
Enlightenment period and the Industrial Revolution to improve, invent, and make
advancements, then they would have never been able to conquest Africa like they
did. Prior to those stages in European nations, African’s way of life and
technology was superior in their ability to sustain themselves without national
societies changing them.
Some
technologies that influenced the redistribution of power, authority, and
success of European nations was the steamboat, railways, telegraph, and
repeating rifles that allowed the Europeans to impose unprecedented degree of
communication, coercion, and centralization of African countries. The Steamboat
allowed a more efficient way to transport goods, and transport faster. It
influenced the European countries to want to seek control over the water ways,
that way they could avoid conflict over water or being in places that other
nations didn’t want them to be.
Railways
allowed goods to be transported faster, longer distances, and over land.
Railways opened up new routes to places that couldn’t be accessed by water or
made it easier to get closer access to those places. With people moving away
from the coast lines back in to the interior of Africa, where waterways were
not present and could be accessed by steamboats it became an efficient way to
transport goods by land. The Telegraph
improved communications so that people could connect though African countries
including all the way back to European nations. It was an improved faster
method of getting information to people and thus leading to people always being
connected.
Firearms
another advancement that impacted and contributed to the conquest of the
continent, they were a major technological advancement that made the difference
in conquering Africa. The people of Africa didn’t have firearms, due to it was
already difficult for them to smelt iron core let alone the technology to mold
it into useable things like guns. Africans soon learned that going up against
someone who has a gun when you don’t is similar to that of a death
sentence. The inventions of the maxim
gun, made the invasion of Africa easier to defeat the African fighters.
Medicine
to me was the most important factor when it came to the different tools needed
to invade successfully in African and maintain a strong presence there.
Diseases had and have a history of affecting people when the visit or in this
case invaded Africa. The diseases where numerous, but some deadly like malaria
that is still today one of Africa’s biggest killers of its people. Other
diseases varied but ranged from sleeping sickness, yaws, endemic syphilis,
leprosy, yellow fever and all of these impacted visitors like missionaries,
merchants, and soldiers.
When
Europeans first went to Africa there were many diseases that often killed them.
Without the prophylactic quinine used to stop disease, the conquest of African
might have taken longer or never would have happened. Out of all the
advancement in technology, inventions, and power behind the moving force to
take Africa, none of them where nowhere near the importance that I feel that
quinine made possible by its presence and use. With
The
New European Nationalism accompanied with all the technology, new
self-confidence and persistent power that Europeans used to gain control over
the continents of Africa, commanding millions of people and harnessing the
knowledge they felt would lead to prosperity, progress, and prestige. All of
these factors characterized the changed that would impact the culture of the
African people, and impact how they viewed norms, values, ethics, morals, and
equality among ethnic groups.
The
New European Nationalism made their own significant contributions to Africa
with their self-rightness attitude that they felt it was their right,
privilege, and duty to bring to the continent of Africa with them the
enlightenment of European way of life, including the promotion of the
advancement of Europeans civilization; new better way of life onto the people. This
new better way of life was explained as a form of humanity, but at the same
time was worth the sacrifice if needed of anyone that challenged, refused or
denied acceptance of this extension of the empires of European culture and
civilizations that remains still today in Africa just in different forms of
compelling appeals for humanitarian assistance to continue our influence of our
form of what we feel is our duty to enlighten others to our way of what we
consider civilized.
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