History making of global world

Making of a Global World

Late Nineteenth Century and Colonialism

While the expansion of trade improved the quality of life of many Europeans; it had negative implications for people of the colonized countries.

When you will carefully observe the modern map of Africa, it would appear that most of the boundaries are straight lines. It appears as if someone had deliberately made those straight lines. In 1885, the big European powers met in Berlin and demarcated the African continent for respective powers. That is how boundaries of most of the African countries appear as straight lines.

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Rinderpest or Cattle Plague

Rinderpest is a disease which affects cattle. The example of rinderpest in Africa shows that even a cattle disease can widely alter the power equations in a geographical area.

Africa was the land of vast resources of land and minerals. Europeans had come to Africa to make fortune out of mining and plantations. But they faced a huge scarcity of labour. There was another problem and that was that the local people were not willing to work in spite of being offered wages. In fact, Africa was a sparsely populated continent and people’s needs could be easily met with the available resources. There simply was no need to work for wages.

The Europeans applied various ways to force the people to work. Some of them are as follows:

1. Heavy taxes were imposed which could only be paid by working on plantations and in mines.
2. Inheritance laws were changed and only one member of the family was allowed to inherit land. This forced others into the labour market.
3. Mineworkers were confined to the campus and were not allowed to move freely.

Arrival of Rinderpest: Rinderpest arrived in Africa in the late 1880s. It came with the horses which were imported from British Asia. Those horses came as reinforcements for Italian soldiers who were invading Eritrea in East Africa. Rinderpest spread in the African continent like the forest fire. It reached to western coast of Africa by 1892 and within five years after that, it reached to southernmost tip of the continent. Rinderpest wiped off 90% of the cattle population of Africa during this period.

Loss of cattle meant loss of livelihood for the Africans. They had no choice but to work as labourers in plantations and mines. Thus, a cattle disease enabled the Europeans to colonise Africa