To explore the relationship between environment and colonialism one must argue that the insights are important for understanding contemporary imperialism. By focusing on key themes such as business and trade, technology and infrastructure, government and policy and knowledge and expertise will shows that the study of colonialism is important for a least four contemporary explanations: Environmental problems such as climate change, rain-forest loss, collapsing fisheries and water scarcity represent some of the most serious challenges facing society and it seems likely that many of these societies will get worse in the future.
Imperialism, according to Edward Wadie Said (1994), refers to the “practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory‟. Super-power today, is focused in the relationship between core and periphery and associated asymmetries of power among countries. For hundreds of years a varied range of commodities were transported from the colonies to Europe where they became consumer goods. One of the negative effects is that by deference to the neo-colonial masters of ruling elites, the needs of the population are often ignored, leaving issues of living conditions like education, development, and poverty unresolved.
In the nascent United States, only a few years prior to the rebellion against Britain, a staggering 44% of all the wealth being generated in the New England colonies was accumulated by just 1% of the property-owing population. It is difficult to understand without the racial context how a largely impoverished population of white indentured servants could find common cause with the relatively small plantation-owning class.
The American “Revolutionary” War was fought for the benefit of wealthy proprietors, landowners and plantation masters who were the ruling elites who had displaced the formal colonial masters. The promise of sovereignty was actually the establishment of a regime of lower class whites who were indoctrinated to believed that revolutionary freedom would preserve white supremacy for all eternity with the token promise of social upward mobility. This was used as the enticement for making lower classes fight in order to replace colonials with an elite settlers which only resulted in an exchange of tyrannical rulers. The so-called “revolution” was never intended to establish a democracy for anyone other than the minority ruling elite and as it continues to be apparent today with an electoral process which it is controlled by those with the most money to spend to our very present day elections.
Expansion of markets is a necessary ingredient for the essential dynamics of capitalism to exist: overproduction and competition among producers drives wages down, in a cycle that leads to a crisis of under-consumption and under performing national economic. The only way to prevent economic collapse is to find new markets to absorb excess consumer goods.
Victor Hugo, first published Les Misérables in 1862, which is considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century. His reflection on the sufferers and the deprived that started in 1815 climaxed in the 1832 June Rebellion in Paris. Hugo’s novel follows the lives and interactions of several characters, in particular, the struggles with this period of ex-convict Jean Valjean and his experience of redemption.
Neo-colonialism or neo-imperialism is the practice of using capitalism, globalization and cultural imperialism to influence a developing country in lieu of direct military control (imperialism) or indirect political control (hegemony). These issues are discussed in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre (1964) and Noam Chomsky (1979).
The dependency theory is a theoretical description of economic neocolonialism. It proposes that the global economic system comprises wealthy countries at the center, and poor countries at the periphery. Economic neocolonialism extracts the human and natural resources of a poor country to flow to the economies of the wealthy countries. It claims that the poverty of the peripheral countries is the result of how they are integrated in the global economic system. Dependency theory derives from the Marxist analysis of economic inequalities within the world's system of economies, thus, under-development of the periphery is a direct result of development in the center.
Today, the spectacular economic rise of China has inflicted enormous costs to the environment which will only be aggravated when other countries join the race to development with a tremendous collateral damage to the planet.
Here is a reference for further reading on the subject.
Sustainability Research Institute (SRI), School of Earth and Environment,
The University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, United Kingdom
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