#16 Understanding Colonialism: Death and Impoverishment Part I

Colonisation led to impoverishment on a scale that has never been measured as such measurements are hard to create with any degree of accuracy. In the following three blogs, I examine the most intense two forms of impoverishment: holocausts and famine. The processes of impoverishment varied widely. In the continent of Africa, the colonising nations enslaved tens of millions of men and women. In the Americas, the indigenous people were almost but not quite eradicated. In India and China, the richest and most powerful parts of the world in 1500, the mechanisms of impoverishment were more complicated.