Answer to Question #235464 in Political Science for Momo

Question

Explain the key elements of colonialism:

1.Religion (5)
2.Politics (5)
3.Economic (5)
4. Social (5)

Answer 1

1.     Christian religious groups were important in the early years of what would become the United States, and most tried to compel strict religious compliance through colonial governments and local town ordinances. The majority of them attempted to impose stringent religious adherence. Everyone was required to attend a house of worship and pay taxes to support the wages of pastors. Dissenters who tried to practice or proselytize a different type of Christianity or a non-Christian faith were often persecuted in eight of the thirteen British colonies that had official, or "established," churches. Although the majority of colonists identified as Christians, they did not live in a religiously united culture. Instead, many Christian groups typically believed that their own practices and faiths contained unique virtues that needed to be protected against those who disagreed, resulting in the necessity for rule and control. Catholic and Protestant countries in Europe frequently persecuted or outlawed each other's religions, and British colonies frequently imposed restrictions on Catholics. The Protestant Anglican church in Great Britain had split into fierce disputes between conservative Anglicans and reformist Puritans, contributing to a civil war in England in the 1600s. In the British colonies, differences among Puritan and Anglican remained.

2.     Colonial administrations in the United States were a community-based business. For example, elected authorities, particularly state legislatures and county governments, had a direct impact on the growth of a wide range of public and private enterprises. Land grants, trade subsidies, and taxation were all handled by these assemblies. They were also in charge of overseeing roads, taverns, schools, and poor relief, making them crucial to the growth of public and private enterprises in a certain region. In the colonies, there was a high level of participation in local courts. Anglo-American males went miles to serve as witnesses and jurors when the county court was in session. Americans sue each other at a high rate, with local judges and juries making binding judgements instead of a great ruler (as in Britain). This aided the quick rise of the legal profession, and by the 1770s, lawyers' active involvement in politics had become a hallmark of the American political system.

3.     The industrial nations' colonial and imperialist expansion from 1870 to 1914 was driven by economic factors (raw materials, new markets to sell and buy, valve for population pressure in the metropolis). The enormous economic inequality we see now is the path-dependent result of a number of historical processes, one of the most prominent of which has been European colonialism. This column, which was adapted from a recent Vox eBook, looks at how colonization impacted current inequality in a variety of ways.

4.     Massive social and environmental changes wrought by novel land control systems, such as coercive cash-cropping schemes and widespread destruction of forests and grasslands, as well as the forcible creation of new production and labor systems to meet the commodifying needs of Western capitalist economies, were the most notable of these.