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Colonial Era / Re: Leftist vs rightist moral circles
« on: April 18, 2024, 10:49:27 pm »Quote
Nearly all the world history books produced during the 1980s and early 1990s that Bentley examines focus on how Europeans came to establish economic, cultural, and ecological hegemony over the world and how non-European cultures sometimes “succumbed” to European “numbers, weapons, and disease” but occasionally fought heroically against European “deculturation.” Among his favourites is Daniel Headrick’s three-volume Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century; The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940; and The Invisible Weapon: Telecommunications and International Politics, 1851– 1945. He says of these volumes that they “explore the technological dimension of European imperialism….how Europeans rapidly extended their influence throughout the world during the age of the new imperialism” (19). Even books on the history of tiny islands, informed by ethnographic insights such as Greg Dening’s Islands and Beaches: Discourses on a Silent Land: Marquesas, 1774–1880 (1988) and David Hanlon’s Upon a Stone Altar: A History of the Island of Pohnpei to 1890 (1988), are celebrated as “world histories” insomuch as they discuss how “Europeans approached the islands in large numbers equipped with firearms, alcohol, and exotic diseases,” and how the cultures of these islands were destroyed by white settlements, weapons, and diseases (25). Works on the indigenous peoples of North America are also listed as insightful studies of a hemispheric encounter that “brought demographic collapse, ecological imbalance, dependence on trade goods from abroad, heightened intertribal tensions, psychological despair, alcoholism, and deculturation” (26).
Source :
The Uniqueness of Western Civilization by Ricardo Duchesne page 55
Recall :