In 1600 Columbus’s expedition to the New World was still the talk of Europe. Europe itself was coming out of its long Middle Ages to lay the foundations of what would become a new political order of secular nation-states. Its leaders were already making plans to venture out into the wider world in search of land, gold and glory. China and India were still bastions of world civilization and aboriginal empires such as the Aztecs were still large and in charge in what would become known as the Americas. Three hundred years later the native Meso-American empires were gone and being replaced by a series republics governed by mixed race elites who had successfully revolted against the colonial overlords they traced their lineages back to. America had achieved its manifest destiny of spreading its genocidal republic from sea to shining sea. The British Empire had swelled until it constituted roughly two-thirds of the globe and its European peers had also carved out impressively large colonial empires to suck out the wealth and metaphorical lifeblood of far off lands and bring it back to fuel the growth of the Industrial Revolution back home. Even in China, perhaps the oldest continuous civilization in the world, had been forced into humiliating treaties with Western powers that gave Europeans carte blanche to sell drugs and send missionaries into the country as they pleased. More than anything the lesson to be drawn from this is that industrialization and mass production coupled with great wealth can be leveraged into incredible, almost unarguable power over any society that hasn’t managed the same. The Japanese were the first non-Western power to successfully learn this lesson and put it to use, but not the last. The only way to beat imperialism and industrialization is to practice it yourself. To quote a Disney movie from two decades ago, these white people are dangerous.
Works Cited
Pocahantas. Dir. Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg. Walt Disney Pictures, 1995. Film.
