British Imperialism In The Seventeenth Century

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After the main steps taken in the sixteenth century with several discoveries in distant lands; the seventeenth century was, undoubtedly, the most determining period for Western and particularly,
British imperialism. Therefore, the significance of the seventeenth century in terms of its providing a convenient basis for the establishment of a more self-aware and even more systematised British Empire requires no affirmation. In other words, the idea of a civilizing mission, the moral superiority of the white race, mercantilism and the use of martial force to triumph over new lands and to offer safety for the territories already occupied, were all fullydefined in the seventeenth century. According to P. J. Marshall (1998), during the period between …show more content…
The English, the French, Europeans and Americans came in their tons of millions to discover the ‘savage’ for the first time in zoos or
‘ethnographic’ and colonial fairs. These exhibitions of the exotic (the future
‘native’) laid the foundations on which, over an almost sixty-year period, was spun the West’s progressive transitions from a ‘scientific’ racism to a colonial and ‘mass’ racism’ affecting millions of ‘visitors’ from Paris to Hamburg, London to New York, Moscow to Barcelona (Tucker, 2002,
19).
Such ethnographic zoos were often attributed to unilinealism, a version of Social Darwinism
(Poliakov, 1974, 340). Social Darwinism, basically speaking, was composed of many competing theories by various sociologists and anthropologists, who believed that Western culture was the contemporary apex of social evolution. Famous thinkers of the age such as Thomas
104 M. Önder GÖNCÜOĞLU
Malthus (1766-1834), Francis Galton (1822-1911), Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917), Lewis
Henry Morgan (1818-1881), and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) supported the idea that Western culture was the contemporary pinnacle of social evolution (341). As is now well known, the concepts of “survival of the fittest” and “natural selection” explain the two major …show more content…
According to them, nations and races were engaged in a struggle for survival in which only the fittest would survive. Being one of those
Social Darwinists, and also a naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace in 1864 put forth his own theory regarding the European superiority in the following words:
The intellectual and moral, as well as the physical qualities of the
European are superior; the same power and capacity which have made him rise in a few centuries from the condition of a wandering savage … to his present state of cultural advance … enable him when in contact with savage man to conquer in the struggle for existence and to increase at his expense (Perry, 2008, 623).
It can be deduced from Wallace’s declaration that Social Darwinism provided a moral justification for the domination and exploitation of man by man, thereby regarding domination and exploitation as the natural right of the superior race. These Social Darwinists employed a war of physical, economic, cultural, and psychological blockage against a cross section of
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