Colonialism and Postcolonialism
Colonialism, understood provisionally as the European annexation and administration of lands and populations in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, has been intertwined with science, technology, and ethics since the Renaissance. Certainly one prelude to colonial expansion was the European acquisition of military and navigational technologies superior to those found in other continents. But the colonial experience also had a formative impact on the nascent European science, because it permitted the region's scholars to come into contact with new environments and data and provided access to alternative systems of knowledge developed by other cultures. In fact, the requirement of controlling and cataloging colonial populations and resources led to the creation of new disciplines in the social sciences, such as ethnography, linguistics, and archaeology. Moreover, this impact has continued to the early twenty-first century, as a new scientific discipline, ecology, has found inspiration in the practices of non-western precolonial cultures and on the nineteenth century British and French "colonial conservationism" that attempted to deal with the degradation caused by the exploitation of recently acquired environments was "able to foresee, with remarkable precision, the apparently unmanageable environmental problems of today"(Grove 1995, p. 12).
Indeed, colonialism had an indirect, though profound, impact on European culture.
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