Documents in Chapter 18

As I was reading the documents in chapter 18, they all mostly seemed to be in favor of the Europeans except for document 18.4. This image stood out to me more than the others because it depicted a  realistic image of what was going on to the people being taken over in the Imperialist fashion. Among those involved in the second wave of European conquests there was Britain and France, like in the picture standing over many skeletons and even though they were not in such perfect agreement, they would not have time to fight each other since they were too busy conquering and killing natives of places like Denshway or Morocco. Document 18.5 also stood out to me since at the time, most of Africa was taken over by Europeans, but Ethiopians remained strong together under their emperor. Sadly, the Ethiopian Emperor Menelik also used his power to join the scramble for African land and used brutal force.

Chapter 18

It really got my attention in this reading how the industrial Revolution really impacted trade between Europe and Asia since before the revolution, they had nothing to offer Asia. Europe was now able to trade with all countries and invest money in them. I find it also very interesting on the fact that it seems the Europeans came up with a new way to discriminate. They no longer had slaves, but still considered all else as second-class citizens and the Aryan race to be the supreme ones. What's worse is that they twisted real scientist's words, like Charles Darwin, into making it seem biology was also involved in them being the higher and better race. They were the ones who wanted to make it seem slavery was bad but never got over the idea of superiority and it only got worse with Nationalism. They felt pride in what their countries were doing by having colonies in different parts of the world.

It's interesting to see that before, in the first wave of European conquests, the Spanish and Portuguese had a big role but in the second only minor ones. It was now Germany, Italy, Belgium, the U.S., and Japan. It's very unfair hat the Europeans could not be stopped since they had machine guns. India seemed to had it over too easily to the British since they had already been trading through the British East India Company.