Table of contents 1 Colonialism: chock or meeting of cultures 1.1 History 1.2 Colonialism and art: 1.3 Economy and colonization: 1.4 Colonization nowadays: 1.5 Colonization and Religion: 1.6 Politic in colonization:

Colonialism: chock or meeting of cultures

In each epoch, since man exists, his discoveries, his expansion and his
domination motivated him and made him progress…
Since prehistory, thought and visualization permitted man to beat stronger
animals than him for his own survival, passing by antiquity to Middle Ages,
colonization and conquest of new horizons has motive man because of political
and economical interests.
Conquests have caused dissipation of settled people’s richness and a part of
their culture, but were also at the origin of many benefactions such as
establishment of education networks, medicals or transportation.
Despite the bad sides of colonisation, it’s true that colonisation helped man to
evolve to a modern style.

History

Colonization is the act of establishing a colonies. The idea of colonization
hand in with the idea of superiority of the colonizer’s country to the colonized
people.
Let’s have a sight to the colonization of Africa by the Europeans from a
historical point of view.
Before 1880, Europeans had only coastal implantation in Africa. Nevertheless,
from 1870 to 1880, exploration is in progress and several expeditions have
discovered interesting richnesses. These rake up Europeans’ ambitions and
longing. The colonisation of Congo is one of the reasons of the conflict between
Leopold II and other nations. On 1884, Berlin’s conference shares
Africa between Europeans by artificial frontier founded on the principle of
territorial adjustment. But they divided African’s ethnic groups and kingdoms.
Congo, which qualified of «Belgian Congo», was given to Leopold II. The king
rapidly set in landlord of the country, he established a government of terror to
take all the richness of the land.
The sureness of western people to be advanced on the colonized was the
source of several leeway such as the establishment of a “race scale” in which
the colonist is upper than black people and even human zoos were build, in
which colonized showed their ways of life behind rungs.
In parallel, we must mention that colonization permitted expension in many
sectors of the land, such as communication and education.
Congo was a typical example of colonization.

Colonialism and art:

It may be interesting to speak about colonialism from the point of view of
feeding or art.
First we’ll analyze the influence of colonialism on feeding. We’ve already
observed, for example, the difficulty of implantation of potatoes in French
culture, before Parmentier, due to the vainglory of Europeans who weren’t
inclined to change their habit, because they were certain of the superiority of
their way of life.
We can now analyze the influence of colonialism on western art. Several
artists such as Pablo Picasso turned towards African Culture. A large range of
canvas proved that for some artists, the meeting between two worlds caused a
great change, but these artists were often misjudged.
From a musical point of view, we can’t affirm that Africa’s colonization is
responsible of a real change in Europe. That is no long time that we hear
speaking about African music of percussion in our countries.
European reluctance to change and to accept different cultures induces a
meeting of cultures instead of a shock.
From colonized’s point of view, things were different. Occidental’s mentality
discerned his own culture as superior, wanted to impose it to the
autochthons.The cases of Africa and America are typical examples of the fact
that European’s vainglory changes the experience of colonization on a shock
instead of a meeting. The same vainglory was primarily the meeting of cultures
in Europe.

Economy and colonization:

Before colonial epoch, economy in Africa was a local economy which wasn’t
very developed compared to European economy which was tending to
industrialization.

 	But colonial epoch changed the situation. An English jurist, Merignhac even 
said:” colonizing is taking contact with new countries to profit of  their resources 
enhance those in national interest, and in the same time bringing  to primitive 
local people who are deprived of the advantages of intellectual, social, scientific, 
moral, artistic, literary, commercial and industrial cultures which are apanage of 
advanced breed. Colonization is therefore an establishment founded in a new 
land by an advanced breed to realize both goals we’ve just shown.” The confess 
goal of colonization was to appropriate resources from the colonized land and to 
enhance local culture by the contribution of the arrogant European culture. 

Historical examples don’t miss, but one certain thing is that the Westerner’s
arrival forced colonized people to proceed to a brutal change of their ways of
exchange and they ran from a local economy to a dictatorial capitalist economy
whose goal was first the valorization of metropolis’ capitals. This state of facts
was to the origin of slavery to the common sense in a first time as well as
economical slavery for ex-metropolis during decolonization’s time which is the
result of a need of a strong national building, adhesion of these nations at all the
international organizations and the devlopment of bilateral relationships induced
by the Cold War.
Thus, colonialism was an economical shock where economical autonomous
people became totally dependent of economical powers.

Colonization nowadays:

The reason that encourages man to colonize countries is his imperialism, his
will of spreading his territory, benifiting of new richness and increasing his
power. Even if now, colonization has lost his common style, it takes now the
sens of profit.
The process of this new colonization is simple. It consists in using pretexts,
justified or not, to control a country by military forces, in the journalistic goal of
world’s security (without saying the object of this security). Afterwards, freedom
is given back to the country and a new “autonomous” government that must be
economically benefical to the neo-colonizer that is in the contemporary context,
the U.S.A.
This kind of conquest isn’t directly orchestrated by the people but by
economical lobies.
One consequence of this neo-colonization is that the whole production of the
colonized land is insert on the world trade market. This event allows a real
meeting of cultures. But this meeting is headed by the principle of rentability that
distorts the meeting and changes it in shock. But this can be restrained by
regulating agents and strategies to reimpose politic power that represents
people instead of the economical power.
There are two ways for these strategies: The independence of economy and
state, as in America, or the control of economy by the state, as in Europe.

==The engineer’s point of view=:=

Till now, we tried to show that colonization was first a shock that can be changed to
a real meeting. To reach that, we must impose a context and limits.

 It’s important to let  talk  the different actors of this meeting. 

By analogy, engineers are mostly induced to lead teams. This is similar to a little
colonization. In this case,both, shock and meeting can appear. It depends on
how the engineer run his team or his vainglory.

Colonization and Religion:

Politic power has always thought that it must rest on spirituality. The same
way of thought is present on colonial’s history.
In religious’ colonialism evolution, we can see that a numerous situations had
common trajectories. It first involves a period in which the settler imposes new
rules to colonized people. It’s the shock.
Secondly, there was a mutual assimilation step with sharing of various values,
but it was progressive, because of the work of ethnologues and some good
people on the place.
Finally there is a reconstruction on new basis, Bible and ancestral culture.

Politic in colonization:

This section will especially treat the evolution of politic culture in colonized
countries.
In colonial epoch, colonization had for mediatic wager the elevation of foreign
culture, but according to Claude Levi Strauss, cultures aren’t unequals, they are
only different. These dissimilarities are the result of a long and complex
evolution. Politic cultures have a similar evolution.
During colonization, occidentals became dictator of colonized lands, in the
goal of territory extension and the exploitation of natural ressources of theses
regions. This situation lasts seventy years before the decolonization, that
occurred when there weren’t enough interests on place.
After, « democratic » governments were established in each decolonized
country, to permit the westerners to control these lands from a far.
Despite the will of establishing independent democracy, autochtons down on
them that they are economically dependent on world because of bad decisions
that are result of a lack of normal politic evolution, because of colonization.
To conclude, we can say that colonization was and is still a shock from
colonized’s point of view. From settler’s point of view, we can’t say that
colonization was a shock as well as a meeting because of the definition of this
word.