EARLY BELGIAN COLONIAL EFFORTS - The University of Texas at ...

CHAPTER 1
IMPERIALISM
Many of the cultural and historical debates of the last twenty-five years have
centered on the European colonial and imperialistic expansion of the second half of the
nineteenth century. This expansion of European dominance was different than what
took place during the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries. To the conquistadors,
explorers, exploiters, and missionaries of that earlier time, it was the age of exploration
and scientific discovery, a universal application of European and Christian ideals to a
degenerate and pagan world and the triumph and transport of mind and soul to the very
ends of the earth. It was also unbelievably profitable. It was clearly one of the most
impressive, earthshaking, and devastating transfers of culture in world history, but it
was haphazard and accidental. No one really knew what they would find.
It was, however, only the prelude to a more intrusive and malicious interchange
of cultures: the nineteenth century colonial and imperialistic expansion of Europe, and
to a lesser extent the United States, into the very heart and soul of Africa, Asia and,
although in a more subtle sense, Latin America. It is the reverberations of this
expansion that stoke the fires of intellectual and real-world debate today. The question
of what drove this expansion of European culture continues to fuel today’s cultural
debates. This cultural, political, economic, and military intrusion must be analyzed if
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