Geography

GEOGRAPHY
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(25 July, 2011)
Geography
What is colonialism?
Colonialism has been known to be a way of dominating, through the means of conquering another country by force through occupying it with settlers and trying to exploit that country’s economy. Nevertheless, those people and there land are known to make up a colony. A colony might either be settler colonies of which the colonists are known to move permanently, for instance the original thirteen states of the United States of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina and there are also dependencies that is known to be governed by the parent country of which few colonists actually move such as the British Raj, Egypt, the Dutch East Indies and the Japanese colonial empire (Kamrava, 2002).
Colonialism normally happens when a foreign country who have got strong powers within themselves sends some representatives to go and camp in a given colony, take control of that colony and benefit from it by using it as a source of wealth to enrich themselves. This is normally done or achieved through expanding their industries and trading by gaining new sources of raw materials, new markets for goods and exported goods that could be used as investments in those colonies. They even tend to inflict the parent country’s culture, religion and language and yet they found them in their arrivals (McEwan, 2009).
One may wonder, where did this colonialism start from? It is because of this reasons that there is need for one to understand the term “colonialism” it selves which it is meant to refer to as overseas European empires. Its footage can be traced back to the ancient Phoenicians, the first group to settle down in the Mediterranean Sea for trading purposes and followed by the Greeks who settled there for the same purpose which is trading. This incident occurred between 1550 B.C.E to about 300 B.C.E.
The modern colonialism is known to have begun in the year 1415 when Portugal decided to overpower the Muslim port of Ceuta in Northern Africa. This encouraged more wave of colonialism. This led to the Spanish exploration to follow suit and its focus was in Africa, Americans, India and East Asia. However, the first succession of the overseas colonies took place in 1600s and the lucky countries of the succession were such as England, France and the Netherlands (Kamrava, 2002).
When we put our focus on the colonialism and geography, we note that the settlers were used as a link between the inhabitant and the imperial hegemony hence bridging the geographical gap between those who were being colonized and the colonizers. The colonizers took advantages of having the knowledge about the earth’s surface. Reasons, the colonizers had enough of the resources needed such as cartography, shipbuilding, navigation, mining and agricultural productivity.
Ever since its colonization, the idea of colonialism has been perceived to posses either...