Where was that? When was it? Whom was it for? How long did it last? Is it over? Why?
These are some questions I hope to shed some light on. Bear with me, not an easy task to do in several paragraphs.
Where was that land? It was in Europe, and in the New World and in the other European colonial empires in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
When was it? It really began in earnest in the 15th Century. Most of it happened well before the American Rebellion.
In fact, North American colonial survival, and eventual prosperity, was only made possible by European great power colonialism and imperialism, not the American colonists' eventual rebellion, democratic republic, and liberty and equality rhetoric.
In fact, North American colonial survival, and eventual prosperity, was only made possible by European great power colonialism and imperialism, not the American colonists' eventual rebellion, democratic republic, and liberty and equality rhetoric.
Whom was it for? It was for European imperial and colonial adventurers and their companions, supporters, and monarchs. It also benefitted enormously all classes in colonial and imperial Europe who were able to benefit from it according to their station. For many of them, regardless of their station, either as conquerors, colonizers, or the innumerable voluntary or involuntary immigrants, it involved tremendous risks, including war, disease, frustration, hardship, and death; as well as survival, prosperity, riches, status, and opportunity, for those who pulled through it. A high proportion of European colonists died, as well as an enormous proportion of native people mostly from European diseases. American colonists who persevered had opportunities, especially in commerce, notably smuggling, plantations in the mid Atlantic and South using slavery, and land speculation everywhere, undreamed of back in the Old World, for common people of their station.
How long did it last? It lasted from the 15th Century until the 20th.
Is it over? Yes, at least for the West, although we are seeing neocolonialism by such nations as China in various places.
Why? Civilizational decline of the West, marked notably by the end of Western colonialism.
Sir Michael Howard, Lessons Of History, "1945--End of an Era?":
"Only one thing could have prolonged the existence of the European Empires---the continuing approval and support of the United States. It was the denial of that support that spelled the end of the old European Empires. The citizens of the United States had not joined in the Second World War to prop up a system of imperial domination against which they had been the first people to revolt. And it has been with genuine bewilderment that they find themselves today so generally reviled as its inheritor....."
John H Elliott, Regius Professor of History at Oxford in the 90s, succeeding Sir Michael Howard in that chair, wrote a useful but voluminous book, Empires of the Atlantic World. He doesn't get into my thesis about civilizational decline, but covers the empires, in The Americas, quite well.
Sir Michael Howard, Lessons Of History, "1945--End of an Era?":
"Only one thing could have prolonged the existence of the European Empires---the continuing approval and support of the United States. It was the denial of that support that spelled the end of the old European Empires. The citizens of the United States had not joined in the Second World War to prop up a system of imperial domination against which they had been the first people to revolt. And it has been with genuine bewilderment that they find themselves today so generally reviled as its inheritor....."
John H Elliott, Regius Professor of History at Oxford in the 90s, succeeding Sir Michael Howard in that chair, wrote a useful but voluminous book, Empires of the Atlantic World. He doesn't get into my thesis about civilizational decline, but covers the empires, in The Americas, quite well.
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