Queen Victoria's Jubilee, 1887 (and 1897)
Thomas Edison invents the Light Bulb- which meant, firstly, that many street light lighter people were out of a job. Sad.
1825 George Stevenson builds the first railway track in England
The Berlin Conference of 1884-5
Major powers in Europe gathered together in Berlin, under the invitation of the Kaiser. The primary objective of the conference was literally to divide up Africa. One thing that gets me about this was the sheer idiocy of such leaders. There are so many problems with colonialism, it is unreal. But here are a few basic essentials that, I think, are not blatant enough to the common reader:
Firstly, European powers all fought for a piece of land on the coast: this was, naturally, an essential part of colonialism, as foreign powers needed coast land for trade and travel purposes. The problem with this is that it split up the land along the coast into thing strips of land that separated a single tribe that settled coastal land. The tribe was torn apart into new "countries" wherein different languages, religions and ways of life were implemented.
Secondly, in longer terms, the consequences of this were these: European powers moved into an already established culture, tore it apart and enforced new customs, and when they had used the resources they could (oftentimes at the hand of great abuse and exploit), they left the land, abandoned the peoples in it, and left them with no system to fend with themselves. Africa is still recovering!
Thirdly, the conference stood to basically enable King Leopold of Belgium private access and ownership of the Congo, or Congo Free State, as he called it. Leopold's reign in the Congo was notorious and abusive. Native peoples were enslaved and made to meet quotas of rubber collection: failure to meet a quota most often meant that the slave would lose a hand or family member as a cost. The horrors of the Congo were retold in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.
No comments:
Post a Comment