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  • Hi I'm John Green and this is Crash Course European History.

  • So we've made it to the nineteenth century, and as European societies are trying to build

  • cohesive political structures known as nations, many are also expanding or initiating overseas

  • empires.

  • And so while more European nations were grounded in the rule of law and constitutional guarantees,

  • including property rights, life was very different in the empires governed by those nations,

  • where there were few if any rights.

  • While many nation-builders and citizens supported rights and the rule of law as a bedrock of

  • their nations, expansion entailed taking away the rights of others.

  • And understanding how this contradiction functioned, and who it benefited, is key to understanding

  • not just 19th century colonialism, but also the contradictions we still live with today.

  • [Intro] So, when we last looked at expansion, the

  • British were moving forcefully into India, in part to compensate for losing monopoly

  • rights over trade with North America, while the Spanish and French were losing their grip

  • in the Western Hemisphere.

  • But by the mid-19th century, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific islands were now the focus

  • of imperial activity, much of it to gain trading advantages and acquire more raw materials

  • like palm oil for industry.

  • And much firmer political control of territories was established, as in India, North Africa,

  • and Australia.

  • In the nineteenth century, the Chinese continued to attract European trade because of their

  • excellent products, especially tea and silk.

  • The English were leaders in industrialization, but they mostly made low quality products

  • that pretty much nobody wanted, including the Chinese.

  • But the British needed something to sell in exchange for tea and silk, and they ended

  • up focusing on drug smuggling.

  • When the Chinese government began to crack down on the opium smugglersmany of whose

  • descendants are today some of the most respected and wealthy families in Britainthe smugglers

  • convinced the British government to initiate the Opium Wars of 1839-1842 and 1856-1860.

  • British success in these wars forced China to open new ports to trade.

  • And while China had banned opium in 1799, the British used the idea offreedom of

  • tradeto keep opium sales going and increasingly imposed their political and economic will

  • on Chinese rulers.

  • Regions in Southeast Asia and the Pacific were also targets for forced trade and takeovers

  • of land.

  • The French set up rubber and other plantations in Indochina, the British took vast quantities

  • of lumber from Burma, and the Dutch set up a variety of plantations in Indonesia, no

  • longer confining their interests simply to trading posts.

  • Pacific islands also became way-stations for ships to resupply and obtain other raw materials.

  • The French, British, and Belgians headed for the interior of Africa, now that they had

  • quinine with which to treat malaria infections.

  • While the Portuguese maintained a toehold on a part of Southwestern Africa, the French

  • took over much of West and North Africa and the British took areas in the south and east.

  • Belgian King Leopold assaulted the Congo for its rubber (and yes, we are using that verb

  • intentionally), while Otto von Bismarck, generally not a fan of expansion outside of Europe,

  • allowed German businessmen and adventurers to head for regions in Asia and southeastern

  • and southwestern Africa.

  • He also allowed them to launch ventures in the Middle East, especially the Ottoman Empire.

  • But the largest and most continuous enterprise was the one the British built in India and

  • Central Asia.

  • They sought manufactured goods and raw materials, but they were also motivated by simple plunder.

  • The British invested little in ruling India, instead using different princes' well-trained

  • soldiers for conquering new areas and policing.

  • Governance of the colony involved some 4,000 British officials and tens of thousands of

  • local civil service workers who did the main work.

  • And as in the past, European invaders relied on local people to serve as informants, and

  • guides, and go-betweens and negotiators.

  • They were some of the humantools of empire.”

  • And whileexplorersand colonial generals were portrayed in European newspapers and

  • magazines as standard bearers of heroic masculinity, they required vast entourages of local people

  • to survive.

  • This was especially true in Africa where from village to village go-betweens and guides

  • had to lead and negotiate the supposedlyloneadventurer's food, and safe passage, and

  • health care needs.

  • It is well-documented that many of these romanticized heroes became addicted to drugs and alcohol

  • because of the stresses but also because of the boredom of the slow movement of hundreds

  • of animals and carriers of supplies and weapons.

  • Let's go to the Thought Bubble.

  • 1.

  • Other tools of empire were industrial, like steamships built to navigate rivers

  • 2. and weaponry that local people lacked (at least initially).

  • 3.

  • Europeans often sold inferior or outdated weapons to the people they wanted to conquer,

  • 4. who were quick to duplicate the better models that fell into their hands.

  • 5.

  • Railroads also became tools of empire in that they were set up not to benefit local people

  • 6.

  • but to strip them of their goods and get those goods to ports as quickly as possible.

  • 7.

  • Infrastructure was built to disadvantage not advantage colonized peoples.

  • 8.

  • A final and crucial tool of empire was the aforementioned quinine,

  • 9. which was made from the bark of the cinchona tree found primarily in South America.

  • 10.

  • Jesuit priests were introduced to the drug by indigenous people in South America,

  • 11.

  • but initially the bark had to be procured and ground up,

  • 12. which made quinine difficult to produce in large quantities.

  • 13.

  • But after the 1820s, French scientists devised procedures to extract quinine from the bark,

  • 14. and then in the 1850s, the Dutch finally obtained the closely guarded cinchona seeds,

  • 15. which South Americans were embargoing,

  • 16. and the Dutch set up successful plantations in Indonesia.

  • 17.

  • The medicalization and plantation production of cinchona meant that quinine was widely

  • available to Europeans,

  • 18. which in turn allowed for the invasion of Africa's interior, where malaria was

  • common.

  • Thanks Thought Bubble.

  • Oh my gosh, the center of the world just opened!

  • Our two main bits are right next to each other!

  • So this is a train.

  • I'm not sure if its a real train, it might just be a model train, I'm not a scientist.

  • All I know is that railroads were incredibly important in the 19th century, and remain

  • so.

  • And if you look at where nations built railroads inside their nations, and where they built

  • railroads inside their colonies, you'll immediately understand the difference between

  • living in a nation and living in a colony.

  • In Britain, for instance, the railroads primarily connect cities to each other, so people and

  • goods can be connected and distributed.

  • But if you look at where Britain built railroads in, for instance Sierra Leone in the early

  • 20th century, you'll see that those railroads are designed almost entirely to get goods

  • from the interior of the country to a port. and that brings us to resource extraction.

  • The discovery of diamond and gold mines in South Africa from the 1860s into the 1880s

  • provided another impetus to colonization and contests over territory.

  • To get Africans to leave their homes and work in the mines, the British demanded that taxation

  • be paid in currency instead of in produce or other goods.

  • So to acquire funds, Africans had to leave their farms for the mines, where work was

  • treacherous and often fatal.

  • South African lands were also simply stolen to drive people into the mines.

  • Was there resistance to the violence, theft, and exploitation of imperialism?

  • Yes.

  • Colonized people rebelled in a variety of ways.

  • In 1857, local people in India including Indian soldiers and even the widow of a local ruler,

  • Rani Lakshmi Bai, Queen of Jhansi, launched a rebellion against expanding British rule

  • and its seizure of property.

  • Her wealth had been stolen, and she had been removed from power.

  • We all know,” read a circular letter that year, “that if [the English] stay in

  • Hindustan [India] they will kill everyone and spoil our faith.

  • . . In this scenario we ask you what you are doing to defend your faith and our lives.

  • . . . And this has been published in order to save the religion and faith and the lives

  • of all you Hindus and Muslims.”

  • As they crushed the rebellion, the British justified the ensuing slaughter as needed

  • to punish the supposed rapes that vicious Indians had inflicted onwhitewomen.

  • But later investigations proved that no such rapes had occurred.

  • The English additionally branded the Rani a prostitute.

  • She died in battle during the uprising, one of more than 5,000 Indians killed on June

  • 17, 1857.

  • Resistance to empire took many forms.

  • In the Belgian Congo, for instance, where local people were horrifically abused by the

  • colonial authorities, officials realized that the fertility level was dropping.

  • Across the colonized world drop in births like this, seen by historians as a form of

  • intentionalstrike,” and they've been happening for a long time.

  • For example, in the Caribbean, women used the peacock flower to abort fetuses; enslaved

  • women elsewhere used rue, willow, ergot, and other plants so that additional children would

  • not be born into slavery.

  • Such was the horror of colonial oppression that many people did not want a new generation

  • to be born into the world.

  • That said, some local people living under colonial conditions prospered not just as

  • soldiers and civil servants but as business and professional people.

  • They were labor contractors, and merchants, and large property owners.

  • The Tagores of Bengal owned agricultural estates but as the English advanced, they invested

  • their growing funds in establishing silk and other mills while also serving as high level

  • agents for British companies in India.

  • Rabindranath Tagore of that family won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913—the first

  • non-European to do so.

  • Empire builders justified their conquests by describing themselves as fully entitled

  • to take the wealth, land, and know-how of distant peoples and even to enslave them.

  • Initially they argued that local people, whom they often calledsavagesneeded to

  • be turned into Christians for their salvation.

  • In this explanation, imperialism became a holy endeavor, as it had been for the Spanish

  • and Portuguese more than three centuries earlier.

  • But after the mid-nineteenth century publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and

  • The Descent of Man, empire was viewed as imperative in order to save civilization from violent

  • brutes.

  • Now, I know what you're thinking.

  • “I've studied European history a bit, and its pretty violent.”

  • We agree, obviously, but people tell themselves stories in order to justify the oppression

  • of others.

  • And indeed, to justify wherever they find themselves in life.

  • In this telling, humans had evolved from lower forms of existence, and Darwin argued that

  • human development reached a pinnacle in white men.

  • So according to him, all people of other races were less-evolved and less accomplished.

  • Social Darwinistspeople who took Darwin's scientific studies and made them the basis

  • of expansionist and domestic politicsbelieved that white people needed to be engaged in

  • conquest to preserve their superior lives.

  • So the justification for, say, stealing palm oil or diamonds from colonized regions was

  • that it helped keep white people superior, and those were the people who really mattered.

  • I know that it's tempting, especially for people who benefitted from colonialism to

  • say that this is all in the past, but the wealth extracted from colonized regions had

  • a lasting effect on both the colonizer and the colonized.

  • And ideas about race that were contructed to justify colonialism are still deeply ingrained

  • in lived human experience around the world.

  • Imperialists eventually tried to calm what came to be called theScramble for Africa

  • with the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, which ruled that European nations with outposts

  • on African coasts could claim the corresponding interior region.

  • There were also conditions, for example, against selling firearms to Africans.

  • But the main result of all of this was to intensify imperial competition.

  • The British and French almost came to blows at Fashoda in Sudan in 1898; the Germans threatened

  • French holdings in North Africa early in the twentieth century.

  • And eventually these growing international tensions within Europe would lead to World

  • War, which we'll hear more about that in a few more weeks.

  • But for now, I want to ask you to shift perspectives and consider the experience of those who were

  • most negatively affected in this imperialism.

  • How that imperialism is still shaping life today.

  • Thanks for watching, I'll see you next time.

Hi I'm John Green and this is Crash Course European History.

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B2 中高級

擴張與抵抗。歐洲歷史速成班#28 (Expansion and Resistance: Crash Course European History #28)

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    林宜悉 發佈於 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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