Chapter 18

New economic needs found solutions abroad this created the need for extensive new materials and agricultural products, this includes: bananas from Central America, rubber from Brazil, meat from Brazil, cocoa and palm oil from West Africa, gold and diamonds from South Africa. By 1840, Britain was exporting 60% of its cotton-cloth production, sending millions of yards to Europe. Between 1910 and Britain was sending about half of its savings overseas as foreign investment. Europeans had defined others largely in religious terms, now they adopted the idea and techniques of more advanced societies. This produced wealth and now used both to produce unsurpassed military power. European eyes to the status of tribes led by chiefs as a means of emphasizing their primitive qualities. Still the apparatus of science to support their racial preferences and prejudices, which measure the size of the skull, white skull larger; therefore more advances and intelligent. Race in this view, determined human intelligence, moral development and destiny.

Between 1750 and 1914 was a second and quite distinct round of conquests: Asia and Africa. Construction of these new empires in the Afro-Asian world, involved military force. There were countless wars of conquest of colonial European states. India and Indonesia, grew out of earlier interactions with European trading firms. British East India Company took advantage and facilitated penetration for them. Dutch acquisition of Indonesia was also as traders and alliances. Slowly without a plan, soon they had conquered the islands.

Colonial rule affected the lives of its subject people in many ways, but the most pronounced change was their ways of working. Colonial state with its power to pay tax, to seize land for European enterprises, to force labor, to build railroads, ports and roads - played an important role in these transformations. African societies got into the world economy with the demand of gold, diamonds, copper, rubber, coffee, cocoa and cotton. Plantation workers, domestic servants, crop farmers, miners underwent profound changes. Unpaid labor on public projects, such as a building railroads, constructing government buildings. All blacks were legally obligated for stature labor of 12 days a year until 1946. One of the cruelties of forced labor, in Congo, governed by King Leopold II of Belgium, forced villagers to collect rubber and starve them to death. If a certain amount was not collected then arms, ears or other body parts would be cut. Commerce in rubber and ivory made possible by the massive use of forced labor in the Congo and Cameroon. This caused the AIDS epidemic jump from the chimpanzees to humans, sexual interaction spread this.

Women were almost everywhere active farmers with responsibility for plating, weeding, and harvesting. Women were expected to feed their own families and were usually allocated their own fields with that purpose. It is estimated that women's working hours increased from 46 hours per week to 70 hours by 1934. Women also had to supply food to men in the cities to compensate for very low urban wages. Married couples in South Africa rarely lived together in 1930, only a couple months out of the year.

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