Colonialism Again essays

Colonialism Again essays Imperialism during this era was performed by the Great European Powers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who sought to extend and maintain control or influence over the weaker nations of the world, particularly in Asia and Africa. The practice of imperialism, by July 1914 had managed to encompass more than half the land surface of the earth and a third of the global population. (Anzsprenger 13). . The motivation for such undertakings lay in their desire to obtain both living space and the extraction of riches from colonized territories. With the advent of WWI, however, colonial expansionism was brought to an abrupt halt as fighting erupted in Europe between the Great Powers. This battle, which would later be referred to as The Great War, saw Empires call upon their colonized subjects for the purpose of fighting on their behalf. The result was that millions of foreign troops came forth from the Empires and converged upon European battlefields; in addition, although the colonies were more than compliant to aid their masters, the war would eventually turn out to have dire consequences for imperialism as empires began to break apart in the decades following the conflict. How had WWI aided in the dissolution of the colonial empires? Was it simply the weakened state of the Great Powers following the war? Or was the disintegration more complex, connected in some way with the changing relationship between colonizer and colonized? I believe that it was this factor that led to colonial dissolution; therefore, this paper seeks to explore how WWI shifted the attitudes of colonized peoples towards their masters from earnest compliance to increasing disdain and animosity. Prior to World War I, Europeans had managed to build colonial empires that roughly covered all land on earth. It was a time of enormous undertaking and occurred within a relatively short period of time when compared to its grand scale. This colon...