Throughout “Are Humans One Race or Many?”, Alfred Russell Wallace asserts that human races, despite initially sharing an ancestry line, diversified due to the unique environments each group resided in. Wallace’s thesis postulates that the environment’s “physical peculiarities” (Wallace 218) and specific “climate, food, and habitat” (Wallace 219) are the underlying influences behind the growth of each race. Wallace believes that as human races fostered physical strength and higher thinking, humanity bypassed natural order and established superiority between human races.
To begin with, Wallace elaborates on why humans are immune to the effects of natural selection. While animals suffer from “individual isolation,” (Wallace 219) humans are “social and sympathetic.” (Wallace 219) Wallace gives the example that although animals
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In fact, the aboriginals were dehumanized to the status of savages, brutes, and objects. For instance, Marlow deemed his boat’s helmsman a machine and Kurtz’s African mistress a mere statute. The apparent superiority of Western civilization is further evidenced as Marlow journeys to the inner station: “what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly.” Despite having not personally witnessed the natives, Marlow consciously classifies the aboriginals as primitive. This sense of racial dominance offers insight into the Western justification of their brutal treatment of natives –ruling through violence and intimidation rather than diplomacy. Moreover, as native Africans are degraded in the background, the wicked imperialistic operations of European companies lowered the moral standards for arbitrating the evil and madness of their
The book serves as a sharp contrast with the deception of Colonists as well as a symbol of solid realness within a fantastical dream where truth is impossible. When describing the book, Marlow’s diction are highly positive, using words like “honest”, “humble” and “simple”. The direct expression and singleness of intention serves as a contrast with the lies the Colonists tell to conceal the reality in Africa. Europeans justify their bloodthirsty conquest as something they did for a greater cause. In 1876, at the Geographical Conference on Central Africa, King Leopold justified “To open to civilization the only part of our globe which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples, is, I dare say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress” (Cleary).
George Washington Williams, an African American legislator, and Kande Kamara, an African colonial subject, both experienced some of the most brutal products of European Imperialism. Williams, in the late nineteenth century, toured the Belgian controlled Congo and witnessed the harsh measures King Leopold implemented to maintain absolute control and bleed the country of its resources. Kamara, on the other hand, bore witness to the end result of overzealous imperial ambitions when he was forced to fight for the allies in the trenches of WWI. These two men’s experiences, although considerably different, both shed light on Europe’s colonial philosophy of racism and ethnic superiority and its position of immense power during this period.
This chapter addresses the central argument that African history and the lives of Africans are often dismissed. For example, the author underlines that approximately 50,000 African captives were taken to the Dutch Caribbean while 1,600,000 were sent to the French Caribbean. In addition, Painter provides excerpts from the memoirs of ex-slaves, Equiano and Ayuba in which they recount their personal experience as slaves. This is important because the author carefully presents the topic of slaves as not just numbers, but as individual people. In contrast, in my high school’s world history class, I can profoundly recall reading an excerpt from a European man in the early colonialism period which described his experience when he first encountered the African people.
Pain. Deception. Hatred. These words are rooted in the minds of the African countries whenever the mention of Imperialism. This practice of extending a government's reign to gain economic control, using missionaries as facades, hurt many African’s during 1750 to 1914.
Lee Maracle’s short story “Charlie” raises themes of imperial education on Aboriginal children in Canada and the harmfulness this standardized European schooling causes on the people, communities, and livelihood of Aboriginal tribes. In just a few short pages, “Charlie” manages to convey the severity of the situation for Aboriginal children taken to Residential Schools in Canada in an attempt to assimilate them into the foreign culture, religion and values of European imperialism. The children in the school are shown to have adapted to the situation by feigning stupidity and dull resignation, while quietly resisting in their own ways; Charlie, the titular character, escapes his imprisonment through daydreaming and, later, running away. The
This assumption was based on the fact that “more civilized” meant more technologically advanced. Social Darwinism offered an explanation for the unequal technological development across the world. This gave rise to belief that there was a “hierarchy” of races and that the Europeans were at the top of the hierarchy. Imperialists used genetics as a justified explanation to why white people were more superior to other races. Darwin believed that animal species was adapting and changing to environments in the process of evolution.
Marlow finds out how Kurtz had been instructed by the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs to write a seventeen pages report before his nerves “went wrong.” In one section, Kurtz had written “Exterminate all the brutes.” Confused by the contradicting images of Kurtz, Marlow thinks that ” His power to charm had influenced the natives, still Marlow is not sure if it was worth the helmsman’s death to reach
Africans were displayed as objects for buying and selling, which robbed them from their individuality and human dignity. Davidson states that the mutual respect that was once there between Africans and white people was forever changed. Boahen, in General History of Africa VII: Africa Under Colonial Domination 1880-1935, reports that there “…still stood an attitude of cultural and racial superiority, formed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and regularly given expression in descriptions of the African as childlike or ‘non-adult’. This latter attitude in turn gave birth to widespread belief that European domination had to last for a very long time”
Environmental diversity caused the Homo sapiens to be different from one another since they were on different parts of the world and adapting to different environmental factors. Chapter 2 Summary: 2. Chapter two begins with two descents of the Polynesian group, the Maori and Moirori. Both groups lived in different places, such as the Moirori lived in The Chathams and the Maori lived in New Zealand. The two tribes were two oppositely developed groups, for example the Maori were forceful and mean and killed, but the Moirori handled their problems peacefully.
Among anthropologists it has become increasingly clear that the concept of race having a biological basis is fundamentally flawed. There a number of flaws with this concept of race. One issue is that features attributed to race, such as skin color, very across the globe in a clinal fashion rather than in uniform groups. Another issue is that there is more in-group variation within races than there is variation between races. Finally, human variation is non-concordant.
However, something that needs to be considered when discussing the barbaric practices of European empires is that: not all European nations truly engaged with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Portuguese interaction with natives is different in the sense that until 1580 when Portugal became part of the Spanish monarchy, Portuguese interest did not dwell in the lucrative trans-Atlantic slave trade. Rather, Portugal focused on overseas trade. Essentially revolutionizing agriculture in West Africa with the introduction of new crops from The Americas and the East (particularly areas around the Indian Ocean and Asia). Yet, Portugal may not have truly engaged in the atrocity of the slave trade, like other European nations, the Portuguese did abuse their superior military power to keep a monopoly on West African trade.
Into the Darkness: How and why is a social group presented in a particular way? Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness takes a multi-faceted approach to the issues that surrounded 19th century colonization and imperialism in Africa. Marlow’s journey into the heart of Africa serves to highlight the hypocrisy of this endeavor, and how this deceit followed the rhetoric utilized by the colonizers in order to justify their colonization of Africa and the treatment of the natives. As the novel progresses, Africa becomes more of a backdrop for Conrad to truly expose the depravity of European intervention in Africa. Through Marlow’s narrative, varying connotations of words and his own main character’s reactions,as well as copious amounts of descriptive imagery, Conrad casts Europeans in a negative light in order to criticize imperialism and colonists.
Human beings are some of the most complex living things on earth. So advanced that without some of the natural survival traits such as, the speed of a cheetah or the strength of a bear, we can still remain on the top of the food chain. This is quite remarkable. In this paper I will cover what I feel are 3 necessary distinctions which make humans uniquely different from all other living things on earth. These include, our unique biology, our superior mental capacity, and most definitely our cultural needs which all humans are known to require to one extent or another.
In the article “Darwin and the recent African origin of modern humans”, Richard Klein dives into our understanding of the origin of modern humans and how it too, has evolved through time. Klein offers examples and rationale behind the thought process of Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxely and other specialist of modern human’s history. Through this process we are given better understanding of who modern humans evolved from and where we are from. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was a revolutionary theory during his time and still is in our world today. It challenged people to look closer at the world as whole.
At last, when they remove Mr. Kurtz from the Congo, he cannot handle it and sickness overcomes him. Marlow ties his identity so closely to Mr. Kurtz that when Mr. Kurtz dies, “they very nearly buried” Marlow as well (87). By seeing the monster that Mr. Kurtz becomes, Marlow eventually sees his own dark potential. The jungle could just as easily corrupt him and cause his