How did social darwinism impacted Europe relationship with Africa and Asia?
Answers
Answer:
Between the fall of Rome and the start of the Enlightenment, the issue of religion was commonly employed by Europeans to justify territorial expansion at the expense of foreign peoples. The Crusades against Islam, early efforts to unify Germany, and the colonization of the New World provide ready examples of instances in which claims of sacred mission were used to cover the underlying political and economic motivations of European rulers.
By the early 19th century, however, religion no longer provided appropriate moral cover for Imperialism. Increased literacy in Europe, the widespread use of reason brought on by the Enlightenment, the popular critiques of government sparked by the French Revolution, and religious pluralism made it so that few were willing to risk life and limb on a campaign of foreign conquest out of a sense of religious zeal.
In stepped Charles Darwin. By the late 19th century his evolutionary theories provided a new justification for exploitation. His publications On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) revolutionized European thought. Not only did Darwin theorize that animals and plants evolved into different species through a process of natural selection, he claimed that humans were animals themselves, subject to the same selection process that played out in "nature". It did not take long for other British philosophers, like Herbert Spencer and Karl Pearson, to attempt to apply Darwin's theories to human society. Why were some people rich and others poor? Why were some dark-skinned and others lighter? Why did the inhabitants of some civilizations dwell in tall buildings and others in grass huts? Could it be evolution at work? Government officials across Europe did not wait for proof. By the 1880's "Social Darwinism" was the new justification for imperial conquest around the world.
In order to provide 9th and 10th grade students an opportunity to explore this topic further, we have assembled a collection of primary and secondary source readings to be analyzed and discussed as part of common core-aligned Social Studies units on either the "New Imperialism" of the 19th century or the rise of Fascism in the 20th century.
Explanation:
Answer:
Social Darwinism was a sociological theory popular in late nineteenth-century Europe and the United States. It merged Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection and Herbert Spencer's sociological theories to justify imperialism, racism, and laissez-faire (i.e. conservative) social and economic policies.
Prior to the 1870s Europeans could overawe native peoples along the coasts of Africa and Asia but lacked the firepower, mobility, and communications that would have been needed to pacify the interior. (Indiawas the exception, where the British East India Company exploited an anarchic situation and allied itself with selected native rulers against others.) The tsetse fly and the Anopheles mosquito—bearers of sleeping sickness and malaria—were the ultimate defenders of African and Asian jungles. The correlation of forces between Europe and the colonizable world shifted, however, with the invention of shallow-draft riverboats, the steamship and telegraph, the repeater rifle and Maxim gun, and the discovery (in India) that quinine is an effective prophylactic against malaria. By 1880 small groups of European regulars, armed with modern weapons and exercising fire discipline, could overwhelm many times their number of native troops.