Society + Economics
The agricultural production of crops for sale in the market rather than for consumption by the farmers themselves; operated at the level of both individual farmers and large-scale plantations.
What is cash crop production?
The process by which European countries partitioned the continent of Africa among themselves in the period 1875-1900.
What is the Scramble for Africa?
A new kind of racism that emerged in the nineteenth century that increasingly used the prestige and apparatus of science to support European racial prejudices and preferences.
What is Scientific Racism?
A process that occurred in non-Muslim Africa, where many who converted to Christianity sought to incorporate older traditions, values, and practices into their understanding of Christianity.
What is the Africanization of Christianity?
A European understanding of empire that emphasized Europeans' duty to "inferior races" by bringing Christianity, good government, education, etc. to colonized peoples while suppressing "native customs."
What is the Civilizing Mission?
A new sense of clearly defined ethnic identities that emerged in twentieth-century Africa, often initiated by Europeans intent on showing the primitive nature of their colonial subjects, but widely adopted by Africans themselves as a way of responding to the upheavals of modern life.
What is the Idea of a "tribe?"
A system of forced labor where peasants were required to cultivate at least 20 percent of their land in cash crops for sale at low and fixed prices to government contractors, who then earned enormous profits from further sale of the crops.
What is the Cultivation System?
A new way of thinking about belonging that emerged by the end of the nineteenth century among well-educated Africans, influenced by the common experience of colonial oppression and European racism and was an effort to revive the cultural self-confidence of their people.
What is African Identity?
An outlook that suggested that European dominance inevitably led to the displacement or destruction of backward peoples or "unfit" races; this view made imperialism, war, and aggression seem both natural and progressive, based on recent discoveries about the natural world.
What is Social Darwinism?
A private colony ruled personally by Leopold II, king of Belgium; it was the site of widespread forced labor and killing to ensure the collection of wild rubber; by 1908 these abuses led to reforms that transferred control to the Belgian government.
What is the Congo Free State?