Long lasting effects of colonialism

Here is the prompt: What are the long lasting effects of colonialism that these readings make visible? IS colonialism something that belongs in the past or is it still with us? How do we know? Using the example of global health or development aid, describe in detail how these policies today are shaped by the history of colonialism. To gain full marks, please cite specific reading , concepts and page numbers to support your argument. Your paper should demonstrate a deep and thorough understanding of colonialism and how it affects communities today.
Please try to make the essay as professional as possible.
Use this article as well as other articles: https://www(dot)aljazeera(dot)com/indepth/opinion/britain-stole-45-trillion-india-181206124830851.html
Also please use this as well. I dont have the link so i will type it for you--- This chapter outlines the historical roots of health inequities. It focuses on the African continent, where life expectancy is the shortest and health systems are weakest. The chapter describes the impoverishment of countries by colonial powers, the development of the global human rights framework in the post-World War II era, the impact of the Cold War on African liberation struggles, and the challenges faced by newly liberated African governments to deliver health care through the public sector. The influence of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund’s neoliberal economic policies is also discussed. The chapter highlights the shift from the aspiration of “health for all” voiced at the Alma Ata Conference on Primary Health Care in 1978, to the more narrowly defined “selective primary health care.” Finally, the chapter explains the challenges inherent in financing health in impoverished countries and how user fees became standard practice.Keywords:health equity,colonialism,racism,neoliberalism,human rights,Alma Ata,Bamako Initiative,selective primary health careKey Points•Weak health systems have deep historical roots.•Colonized and exploited countries have the weakest health systems.•The legacy of slavery and colonialism impacts health in the present day through racially based oppressive policies that result in differential risk, poor access to care, and unequal health outcomes•Neoliberal economic policy impaired the ability of impoverished governments to deliver health care as a basic right.•The 1978 global conference on primary health care, held in Alma Ata in the former Soviet Union, declared that “health for all” was the future.•Selective primary health careproposed in 1979, supplanted the broader aspirations of health as a human right.•The history of impoverishment from colonialism and slavery to the neoliberal economic policies in the postcolonial period led to a near-absence of medical care in impoverished countries in the 1970s through the late 1990s.
IntroductionA child born today in Japan will live to the age of 83, whereas a child born in Sierra Leone will only live until the age of 50.1Similar disparities exist between rich and poor communities within countries.2These differences in life expectancy are not caused by genetics, biology, or culture. Health inequities are caused by poverty, racism, a lack of medical care, and other social forces that influence health. A critical analysis of the historical roots of this gross and systemic inequality is a fundamental part of the study of global health.(p.4)The slave trade and colonialism impoverished countries throughout the world. Even as the world recognized a universal set of human rights in 1948, African countries were still under the colonial yoke. Human rights were not the norm in any colonial state. Few systems were built to support the health or education of colonized people. Even after the successful African liberation struggles of the 1950s–1970s, the economic policies promoted by the World Bank indebted the very countries impoverished by the slave trade and the colonial project. There was little money for the delivery of health care. Instead, international actors proposed a set of simple, preventive interventions, calledselective primary care, which could be delivered cheaply and without significant staff or infrastructure. These same actors imposed patient user fees to pay for drugs and supplies. The fees served as a barrier to health care for the poor, drove down utilization of services, and did not provide significant financial support for the health sector. By the end of the 20th century, the exclusive focus on prevention and the imposition of user fees crippled the delivery of health care in impoverished countries. This chapter presents the key historical events that influenced, and continue to influence, global health delivery.
Slavery and ColonialismThe world’s poorest countries suffer from the consequences of slavery, colonialism, oppression, and resource extraction. Knowledge of the historical underpinnings of impoverishment is crucial to understand the disparities in health and health systems that result in the sickness and death of millions today. In this book, what are normally referred to as “resource-limited settings,”“developing countries,” or “low-income countries” will be referred to as “impoverished countries.” This term credits the historical and ongoing processes that cause poverty.
The transatlantic slave trade began in the early 1400s, when the demand for labor-intensive commodities such as sugar, cotton, and tobacco increased.3European imperial powers enslaved Africans to fill the new demand for hard labor. Although forms of slavery existed since ancient times, the transatlantic slave trade was unprecedented in scale, both geographically and temporally. It spanned three continents for almost five centuries. Europeans and Americans, backed by their governments and civil institutions, committed crimes against humanity and violence of the most extreme order to enslave people. These atrocities enabled massive and continued profits for the United States and Europe, shaping the distribution of resources in the world today. By 1700, slaves had replaced gold as West Africa’s most profitable export. An estimated 15 million Africans were forced into slavery. The crossing of the Atlantic alone killed at least 20 percent of those forced onto slave ships.4The slave(p.5)trade wrought immediate suffering and fragmentation of the population as well as protracted impoverishment of countries. In contrast, the United States’ economic and political hegemony was built, in large part, by slave labor. The gross domestic product (GDP) per capita in the United States today is $56,116, whereas it is only $818 in France’s former slave colony of Haiti and $653 in England’s former colony of Sierra Leone.5Between 1619 and 1865, European settlers in the United States extracted an estimated 222,505,049 hours of forced labor from African slaves, worth $97 trillion at the current US minimum wage. This amount is more than the combined GDP of all of the world’s countries today
Europeans arrived in the Americas in 1492 and killed the vast majority of the indigenous people through disease, murder, slavery, and starvation. Their genocidal rule reduced the indigenous population from 50–100 million to 3.5 million by the mid-1600s.European powers, using indigenous and later African slave labor, extracted 100 million kilograms of silver alone from land in what is now Latin America by the end of the 18th century. 100 million kilograms of silver invested in 1800 would be worth $165 trillion today.Silver also provided “much of the capital for the industrial revolution” in Europe.
White slavers and their governments undertook extreme efforts at every level to uphold slavery through the dehumanization of enslaved people. They attempted to justify their vicious inhumanity toward enslaved Africans at every opportunity and fabricated a network of lies to characterize Africans as inferior, nonhuman beings.
The transatlantic slave trade devastated African societies through both the enslavement of people and the dismantling of political and economic structures. European powers and their allies forcibly removed entire populations and pitted neighboring civilizations against each other in armed conflict, producing long-lasting animosity for generations to come.4Slave uprisings—most notably the Haitian revolution—made the enslavement of free people a frightening proposition to colonists. The successful Haitian revolution, the many slave uprisings, and a global abolitionist movement finally ended the transatlantic slave trade in 1807. This made it illegal to enslave free people. However, slavery continued in the United States and Europe as people born into slavery were still considered private property and thus could be bought and sold
By decimating populations and institutionalizing a narrative of white supremacy the transatlantic slave trade primed Africa for the taking by European colonial powers at the end of the 19th century. European colonialism accelerated in sub-Saharan Africa when European powers established colonial governments across the continent during the infamousscramble for Africain the late 1800s. At the Berlin Conference in 1884, Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, Belgium, and others European countries divided the African continent. The Europeans(p.6)concerned with maintaining their share of African resources and imposed violence on millions of Africans to do so.7When European powers colonized Africa, they provided land and opportunities for their own growing populations and they extracted natural resources and labor from the continent to amass wealth for individuals and empires.The Congo, for example, was a private venture for Belgium’s King Leopold, from which he extracted an estimated $1.1 billion worth of rubber.Apart from resource extraction, the colonial rule of Africa also changed the societal structure of the continent.Through brutal conditions and the justification of Africans as lesser beings, Europe “imposed its will on Africa at the point of a gun.”Colonial powers committed numerous human rights atrocities across the continent.
article is "The Roots of Global Health Inquiry" by Joia S. Mukherjee