If you could prevent global colonization, would you have stopped it from happening (domination of other races and the globe)?

[Anonymous]

Basically, you would prevent USA, Candada, New Zealand and etc from being colonized. Also, you would prevent the African slave trade meaning those slaves that were captured by other Africans will now be killed before being able to pass off thier off spring. Sadly, they were better off being slaves than remaining as captured slaves waiting to be sold. You would also prevent the catastrophic event that took place when Europeans first landed in America which didn't end so well with the native Americans.

So, is the USA worth having? The most powerful country in the world. The country where the biggest civil rights movements in the world have taken place. The country where everyone is free and is considered equal today.
I think all of the evils of the past is worth what we will become.

Yes

No

[nightdrot]

Voted "no." While colonization did have its' more unpleasant dimensions, it also had the effect of spreading the principles of freedom and equality - and before that science and philosophy. Recall that colonization did not begin in the 1500s with Prince Henry the Navigator, but rather steps further back in time.

The Chinese, the Mongols, Alexander the Great, the ancient Egyptians, etc. The list is long and not all of what happened took place with intentionally colonial ambitions in mind. Yet, the effect was to spread a deeper understand of man by taking the individual and his local tribe and putting it into a deeper context - moral, philosophical and scientific. The colonists influencing, and being influenced by, what they found.

For example, the expansion of Rome into ancient Greece exposed the crude militaristic early Romans to the Golden Age of Athens and Sparta. Net result, the spread of Hellenic ideas across the globe. With it, the ideas of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and a hundred others were opened to the world.

Even the imperialism of the 18th and 19th centuries had a beneficial effect. As noted in the follow-up to the question, the United States was the product of the colonialism and the spread of the ideas of the Protestant Reformation and the Scottish Enlightenment. History to be changed forever by the experience.

Indeed, even in places like Africa where imperialism was seen as oppressive, it only came to be seen as such because it exposed the inhabitants to ideas of freedom and equality where they had not previously been known. In this, the British Empire, which gets a bad press, was the harbinger of modernity and a positive force.

Again, there was also the science of the early Muslim empires that brought modern medicine to the West. So even here, the imperialism that is not always recognized as imperialism by contemporary scholars had beneficial effects.

The list goes on. The bottom line being that imperialism - global colonization - got a bad name in an ironic way because of its own success. To be fair, it was not always just and not always true to the ideals which rode on it in a sort of intellectual "piggyback."

However, without it, the world would have been a far poorer place. More isolated and more given to an isolationism that comes naturally to the human animal and yet, when it endures, condemns man to an insular and stagnant life of the mind.

[jshm2]

That's rather stupid of you as it would mean going back in time.

Also, "colonialism" is what we call it now. Back then it was a "foreign adventure".

[TerminallyChill]

Obviously white people are going to say no. Global colonization is the father of modern Western society.