In the 19th Century – read about it here – the new get-rich-quick entrepreneurs (the nouveau riche as they were insultingly called by the older families of the gentry) dovetailed nicely into the age old tradition of the powerful and wealthy sending people out to war to kill and be killed for their (mostly) get-even-richer purposes.
Assisted by armies of the ruling classes back in Europe (or, indeed, setting up private armies, such as the British East India Tea Company) they plundered and pillaged foreign lands to accumulate wealth and power that would have been impossible had they traded in a non-exploitative manner.
In European expansionist policies our superiority and arrogance knew no bounds. To give a few examples, an Englishman (Cecil Rhodes – remember him – I mentioned in the Sub-Chapter on Academia that a scholarship in Oxford University is named after him) had, in an act of unbelievable arrogance, a huge tract of land in Africa (the size of France and Spain combined) called after him; (Rhodesia). In another example the Belgian King Leopold decided to call the capital city in the Belgian Congo after himself (Leopoldville, nowadays known as Kinshasa). There is substantial evidence to show that both men were responsible for exploitation and impoverishment, (and death), of millions of native peoples as they pursued their imperialist ambitions.
And – a lot more recently, I was watching an old newsreel where Harold Wilson, Prime Minister of the UK in the 1960’s, (who was actually a left-leaning politician), spoke about the UK granting Kenya independence – as if he was doing the Kenyans a favour – not realising that all peoples have an inviolable right to choose to be independent. His choice of words said it all!
Talking about words and language (and, I promise, this is the last example) the beautiful and evocative name of a giant waterfall in present day Zimbabwe; Mosi-oa-Tunya, translated as The Smoke That Thunders, was changed to the meaningless Victoria Falls after a woman who happened to be the English queen at that time.
As stated in a previous post, in the nineteenth century in Europe, the level of education of the general population was starting to rise. As more people were able to read and write, and ideas (many of which originated in the principles that had led to the American [1] and French Revolutions also referred to in that post) were spreading around Europe, domination by the ruling classes became a little more challenging, and the old assertions that kings, queens or emperors were Gods, or Gods’ representatives, were beginning to wear a bit thin.
So the royal families and the vested interests that surrounded them (noblemen, top civil servants, churchmen – but, increasingly, and far more than in previous centuries, the very wealthy business ‘get-rich-quick’ people) – had to find other, newer ways to impose their power and control to preserve their privileged status, and face down these newly educated people who began, slowly but surely, to see through the falsehoods of the old order and began to think that it was fair and reasonable that human beings had rights.
One of the most effective ways of doing this was, of course, to control education – this I will explore in the next post.
[1]. The USA was perceived to be a place where merit, hard work and intelligence had higher status than rank and birth. Such ideas coming from the New World would have been quite threatening to the established order of most European countries which at the time were colonial powers that visited terrible cruelties on their colonies. Promoters of this new self-made man, merit, equality were, however, blind to the fact that the New World Europeans were doing the exact same both to African slaves and also the native peoples throughout the entire American continent.