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Sample essay topic, essay writing: Colonisation - 2508 words

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.. relations was determined by the long-held belief among the English that India was never to be their permanent home. North America was thought to be more favourable to European migration; the distance was not so far as to be disorientating and the 'New World' could still retain a European culture. India was never this type of permanent home for Europeans. The English went to India to trade and rule, but not to settle, an attitude which increased the distance between the rulers and the ruled.

By modern standards, British rule in India lasted a long time: nearly 200 years. The endurance of British rule was remarkable given the physical size of the country. India covers 1.8 million square miles, an area twenty times larger than Great Britain. Communications were poor; languages and customs in India maintained an almost permanent gap between official intentions and local practice. The monsoons always dislocated transportation whilst the Indian villages were cut off from everything except their immediate surroundings

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An exclusive English charter did not affect foreign competitors. The Dutch East India Company had been founded in 1595 and already had considerable control over the Spice Islands. The English East India Company chose to concentrate its efforts on the mainland of India. In 1613 it received permission to found a trading station (a 'factory') where servants of the Company could live and work. By 1647 the Company had 23 factories and 90 employees in India.

The major factories became the walled forts of St George in Bengal, Fort William in Madras and Bombay Castle. Fortunes could be made by Company employees. One of the most famous men to do this was 'Diamond' Pitt. As Governor of Fort St George he bought an uncut diamond weighing 410 carats for lb20,000. His son Robert smuggled the diamond to England; it took five years to cut the stone which was sold to the French Regent for lb35,000. In 1791 it was placed among the French Crown Jewels and was valued at lb480,000. Often employees of the Company who had made their fortunes in India returned to England and purchased estates which gave them political power.

Consequently the East India lobby was extremely powerful in parliament. There were a number of Anglo-French conflicts in India in the early eighteenth century including the episode known as the 'Black Hole of Calcutta' where (according to one report) 146 men were cramped into a space 18 feet long by 14 feet wide. A major Anglo-French conflict was the Seven Years' War, fought in Europe, North America and India. At the Peace of Paris (1763) that ended the Seven Years' War, the conflicts in Europe, America and Asia were ended. In 1764 the native princes of Bengal and Oudh combined to try to eject the British but their revolt was crushed by Clive; the Company extended its influence over the province of Oudh. The year 1765 marks the real beginning of the British Empire in India as a territorial dominion. Robert Clive's reforms marked a new development in the history of the East India Company.

No longer was it using puppet Indian governments to beat down European rivals in competition for trade but overwhelmingly had defeated Indian forces struggling for independence of European control. The company had become a government as well as a trader. However, the Company clung to the idea that it was still only a trading company and refused to admit that it had territorial responsibilities. Huge areas of India were acquired by the Company, not by the British government. Company officials were trained to buy and sell, to run warehouses and offices and to deal with book-keeping.

They were not trained to govern. The British government gradually took over from the Company the right to govern vast provinces of India. Although the Company paid lucrative dividends, and its servants (the so-called 'nabobs') took fortunes from India, its finances generally were unsound. The military and administrative costs, plus the debt to the Treasury imposed heavy burdens which a private company was unable to carry. Between 1770 and 1772 famine devastated Bengal.

One sixth of the population died and as a result the territorial revenues accruing to the company declined by lb400,000. At the same time its military costs rose by over lb160,000. This period also saw a crisis of commercial confidence, economic stagnation and trade depression in Europe. This meant that the East India Company could not dispose of its Indian goods as well or as quickly as it had hoped. It was brought near to bankruptcy.

The Company's directors appealed to parliament for financial aid which led to the passing of the Tea Act in 1773. Although this was intended to assist the East India Company, it led to the Boston Tea Party and the start of the American War of Independence. Lord North's government also passed the Regulating Act for India (1773). This was the first step along the road to government control of India. A system was established whereby the government supervised the work of the East India Company but did not take power for itself.

The Governor-General and his council were appointed for five years, with control over the territories in Madras and Bombay as well as Bengal. The government attempted to make the East India Company less a commercial enterprise than a respectable delegated authority of itself. To organise this effectively meant that parliament had to regulate the company's policies from the top and thus overcome its very real powers of direct administration and patronage. The arguments for reform in India strengthened and several attempts were made to introduce further legislation. It had been a common feature of all reforming schemes since 1773 that they involved a greater degree of government regulation of the East India Company.

This was defended on the ground that the state had an interest in administrative revenues in India. The 1784 India Act by which the British government took another step along the road to control India. This system of dual control between Company and Crown worked for the next 75 years, until the Indian Mutiny. After that, parliament took over complete responsibility for India. By 1823 all India was directly or indirectly under British control.AFRICA When the Portuguese arrived on the Congo-Angola coast in the 1480s, they found suitable allies in the Congo tribe - who were amongst the first Blacks to convert to Christianity. This did not, however, prevent them from co-operating with the Portuguese in capturing neighbouring tribesmen and selling them as slaves to the Portuguese, and it was from the Congo/Angolan interior that the majority of all Black slaves to be exported to America and Portugal itself originated.

In 1515, the Portuguese founded the port of Luanda to facilitate this slave trade. ETHIOPIA - FIRST AFRICAN STATE 1896In Ethiopia, the Portuguese allied themselves with local tribesmen and fought off a slave trading conquest by Arabs in 1542 - but in 1632, the Portuguese themselves were expelled from Ethiopia by locals as well. The Ethiopians, under Emperor Menelik II, defeated an Italian force in 1896 and became the first independent African state in that year - only to virtually collapse precisely 90 years later when a combination of overpopulation and backward farming methods (which caused massive soil erosion) caused the worst man made famine ever yet seen on earth. In that year - 1986 - whites in Europe and America felt compelled to come to Ethiopia's aid, most notably through the creation of 'Live Aid' fund raising pop concerts in Europe. FRENCH POSSESSIONS - ALGERIA AND SENEGALThe French began the conquest of Algeria and Senegal in the 1830s. They put down a revolt by the mixed race Arabic population of Algeria in 1870, and from 1881 to 1897, quelled all resistance to whites rule by force of arms in the western Sudan.

Dahomey was occupied by French forces in 1892, and the Wadai region was the last area to fall to the French, in 1900. BELGIUM CLAIMS THE CONGO In 1876, King Leopold II of the Belgians established the International Association of the Congo, a private company, for the exploration and colonization of the region. His principal agent for this task was the Englishman, Henry Stanley. Although a late starter in the race for colonies, the Germans still managed to seize some important areas: German South West Africa, now called Namibia, in 1884; and the country now known as Tanzania fell under German control in 1891. The Germans faced (1904-1908) the Herero insurrection in South-West Africa and Maji Maji revolt (1905-1907) in Tanganyika, both of which were put down with several bloody massacres of the local population: in Namibia it is estimated that as much as 30 per cent of the Herero population was killed in conflict with the Germans.

THE DUTCH LAND IN SOUTH AFRICA 1652By 1652, the Dutch government granted permission to a private company called the Dutch East India Company, to exploit the growing colonies and trading posts in the Far East. Deciding they needed a halfway way point as a supply station, they sent one of their junior officials, Jan van Riebeeck, to the Cape of Good Hope at the southernmost point of Africa in that year, with instructions to build a fort and supply station. In both of these aims, Van Riebeeck succeeded, laying the basis for what was to become the most long lasting whites settlement in all of Africa. The British took the Dutch colony as her own property during the French Wars; South Africa became Cape Colony and part of the British Empire.THE DUTCH IN THE FAR EAST Although the Portuguese had been the first to land in the Far East by sea, their own internal problems prevented them from exploiting the route they had opened up: within a few decades they had been displaced by other European powers who had not imported tens of thousands of Black slaves to their countries. By 1602, the Dutch East India Company, had established itself first in the Moluccas, or Spice Islands, and later on West Java, where Batavia (modern Jakarta) became the centre of the company's enterprises.These enterprises were devoted mostly to trade and to the establishment of trading posts, and they did not initially concern themselves with trying to govern the region.

However, the necessity of maintaining peace among the native tribes, who fought each other furiously and severely disrupted the trade, forced the Dutch to begin governing the land (now called Indonesia). In the same way, the Dutch ended up controlling Java and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) by 1800. CHINA - WHITE SETTLEMENT SPARKS WARPortuguese explorers were the first whites to arrive by sea in China, landing in 1514. By 1557, they had acquired a trading station at Macau and by 1570, trade began between China and Spanish settlements in the Philippines. In 1619, the Dutch settled in Taiwan and took possession of the nearby P'enghu Islands (Pescadores).

Soon Jesuit missionaries arrived in China from Europe but failed utterly in their attempts to convert the Chinese who rejected the Christian religion with scorn. BRITISH TRADE China profited from the trading stations, with the British being their biggest customers for the tea trade, paying handsomely in silver. The British then added a new twist to the trade: they started importing opium from India into China as part payment. The use of opium took off like a rocket in China: soon it became a serious issue for the Chinese government, which then instituted measures to try and stop it.In 1839, Chinese officials confiscated and destroyed huge amounts of opium from British ships in the harbour at Guangzhou and applied severe pressures to the British trading community in that city. The British refused to restrict further importation of opium, and the Opium Wars between Britain and China broke out in that same year.

The Chinese were no match for British military superiority and were badly defeated: the war ended in 1842, after Britain had seized Hong Kong in 1841, Chinkiang in 1842, and threatened Peking itself. In terms of the Treaty of Nanking which ended the war, Hong Kong was ceded to Britain and the right to trade was granted to the British in a number of Chinese towns. During the next two years, both France and the United States extracted similar treaties from China. Non-performance by China of several important clauses of these treaties led to the outbreak of the Second Opium War which lasted from 1856 to 1860. During the course of this war, several dozen whites were captured by the Chinese, and were put to death. Filled with avenging rage, a joint British-French expeditionary force advanced to the Chinese capital, Peking, and burned down the famous Summer Palace in direct retaliation for the death of the whites prisoners.

Prostrate under superior white firepower, the Chinese were forced to agree to implement the earlier treaties which, by their provisions, opened Chinese ports to foreign trade and residents and ceded Hong Kong and Kowloon to Britain. Following from the Second Opium War, Russia seized the Chinese provinces of northern Manchuria and the areas north of the Amur River in 1860; and in 1884, a war between the French and the Chinese saw Vietnam brought into the French colonial empire. By 1898, powerless to resist foreign demands, China had been carved into spheres of economic influence. Russia was granted the right to construct a Trans-Siberian Railroad, the Chinese Eastern Railway, across Manchuria to Vladivostok and the South Manchurian Railway south to the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula, as well as additional exclusive economic rights throughout Manchuria. Other exclusive rights to railway and mineral development were granted to Germany in Shandong Province, to France in the southern border provinces, to Great Britain in the Yangtze provinces, and to Japan in the south-eastern coastal provinces.

The Boxer Uprising was a Chinese nationalist uprising against all whites in China which took place in 1900. In 1899 a secret society of Chinese called the Yihequan ('Righteous and Harmonious Fists', also called the Boxers), began a campaign against whites Christian missionaries in the north-eastern provinces. Although the Boxers were officially denounced, they were secretly supported by many of the Chinese royal court, including the Dowager Empress Cixi. The terrorist activities of the Boxer society gradually increased during 1899, with Boxer bands attacking all whites on sight. When these bands entered the Chinese capital, Peking, the whites powers sent a small armed column to the Chinese capital to protect the few whites in the city. On 16 June 1900, the Empress Cixi ordered Chinese troops to attack the whites army which was still outside Peking.

Then on 18 June 1900, the Empress Cixi publicly called on the Chinese to kill all the whites they could find. Many whites were then murdered: large numbers fled into the fortified foreign embassies in the city. There they were besieged by Chinese. Finally, a combined army consisting of British, French, Russian, German, American and Japanese troops entered Peking on 14 August 1900, relieving the besieged foreign embassies. Peking was then occupied by the whites powers for a year until September 1901, when the Chinese signed a peace treaty in terms of which they had to pay a large indemnity and grant the whites powers the right to station troops in Peking to safeguard the embassies.

This situation remained unaltered right up until the early part of the 20th century.

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