Introduction
European colonialism could be referred to as the policy or practice that was used to acquire either complete or partial political control over other societies and territories hence ending up establishing a given colony which the colonizers either occupied it with settlers or exploited it economically or even performed both. Literature in research is much congruent with the fact that most of the current conditions and situations of postcolonial nations trace their originality from the colonial actions as well as policies. Such policies could include cultural norms, economic development, colonizers' identity as well as the nature of investments which could indicate the direct and indirect consequences of colonialism upon the postcolonial territories or states. Although colonialism was designed to benefit the colonizers and disadvantage the colonized in most of the cases, the colonies also got different benefits which were mostly economic such as expansion of economies due to heightened demand on the colonial goods and products, increased production due to adoption of new technology and new methods as well as improvement in the quality of life for the occupants of the colonies. The European colonies were part of the English imperial system with laws that reflected on an economic policy called mercantilism which held that colonies were to exist for the benefit of the mother country (King, 2015). Through an economic and a political impetus of colonial agriculture, trade and industry etc, colonies have sailed through different timelines until now when the century is witnessing technological advancement on top gear. This paper, therefore, describes some aspects of the economic and social life in the European colonies through an analysis of some written biographies and books and visual sources in the form of films.
Analysis of Selected Colonial Biographies
In this section, I describe six selected biographies from three different European colonies of Spanish America, Portuguese America (Brazil) as well as the North America where each colony is represented by two biographies of some historical characters who are not necessarily famous but whose lives give us some insights into the reality of colonial life.
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(i). Colony of Spanish America
In the colony of Spanish America, we have Isabel Moctezuma and Miguel Hernandez. Isabel Moctezuma lived in the timelines of 1510-1550 as the daughter of Moctezuma II who was an Aztec emperor of the Aztec empire. Isabel was a female heir of the Aztec empire in Mexico succeeding Moctezuma II who had been defeated and detained by the Spanish colonizers. She fought and freed slaves with great displeasure in the Spanish imposition of limits in the ownership and treatment of slaves and had greatly helped in the realization of the Mestizo society in New Spain. She endured hard economic times after her husband was diseased with a low social status until she was taken by Hernan Cortes as a consort princess when her sons founded a line of Spanish nobility (Tarte, 2019). On the other hand, Miguel Harnandez was a male Spanish poet a dramatist who lived in the timelines of 1910-1942. In his poetic profession, Miguel combined traditional Lyric forms and the creativity and subjectivity of the 20 th century (Miguel, n.d). As a communist, Hernandez fought the civil war of 1936-39 and condemned to life imprisonment where he died in prison. His themes were sorrowful love of war, social injustice and death. Most of his works sounded sorrowful such as the ‘Never-ending lightning’ and ‘the man who lurks’ shows desolation and horror of prison and war. His social and post-marital status also reflects to have had taken a new negative tone and colors due to his continued suffering in prison.
(ii). Colony of Portuguese America -Brazil
In the second set of biographies, we look at some human faces from the European colony of Portuguese America, that is, Brazil. The selected two biographies are Catarina de Monte Sinay and Antonio de Gouveia was a nun of the black veil who died as a very wealthy woman. Her economic rise was building fame through thee practice of loaning and collecting money with interest as well as engaging in other businesses. She lived in the timelines of 1680-1758 having being raised from a wealthy family to be a nun as well as an entrepreneur as well as managing household slaves while the men undertook the business of the usual sort. Catarina had undertaken different business endeavors such as renting houses and selling sweets and built a big working capital (Catarina, 2011). On the other hand, Antonio de Gouveia was a male who existed in the timelines of 1575 and 1628 and born in Beja Portugal. His profession was serving as an ambassador and as a Portuguese missionary envoy. De Gouveia first visited Persia in 1602 on the order of the archbishop of Goa, who had convinced the Portuguese viceroy of Goa to dispatch an Augustinian mission to deliver a letter from King Philip III (Fouto, 2016).
(iii). Colony of North America
Thirdly we have the North American colony which is mainly English and French. Here we look at Lachlan McGillivray and Daniel Boone. Lachlan McGillivray was a trader and diplomat among the Upper Creek Indians in Georgia and Alabama. Lachlan McGillivray played an important role in British-Indian relations on the southern colonial frontier. Born in Inverness, Scotland, McGillivray immigrated to Georgia in 1735 and established relations with the Creeks through his family as a trading company. He soon mastered the Creek language and by 1741 was interpreting for British diplomatic agents. He successfully gained Creek alliances for the British against both the Spanish in Florida and the French in Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. McGillivray received a license to trade among the Creeks in 1744, which led to his successful career as a trader among the Creek villages throughout the region. He also ser5ved as an ambassador of the South Carolina commons house where he helped to weaken French ties while strengthening the British ties (Cashin, 2000). Daniel Boone, on the other hand, was an early American frontiersman who gained fame for his hunting and trailblazing expeditions through the Cumberland Gap, a natural pass through the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky. Boone achieved folk hero status during his lifetime, but much of his celebrated image is a mixture of fact, exaggerations and outright fabrications. He existed in the Timelines of 1734-1820 (Daniel, 2017).
Analysis of Selected Films
This section describes with reference to two selected films, that is, “Engineering an Empire: The Aztecs” and the “Buried Mirror”. The films are analyzed from the point of describing the important characteristics of daily life, economy and political life as presented and how the colonies differed from each other as well as the roles played by the native peoples in the imperial colonial societies.
(i). Engineering an Empire: The Aztecs
In a summary form, the Aztec empire is a story film which is wrapped in legend and
Myth. The Aztecs were led by Tenochiltatlan and the building began with the killing of princes of a local chief who was sacrificed to honor the god of fertility. The Aztecs were then evacuated to Texcoco which is an island. With many beliefs such as that the city of god was the birthplace of the sun and it resembled the cosmos. The construction of the city was upon pylons which were sunk into the swampy island with causeways laid across rows of pylons and filled with stones until the rocks crested the lake by several feet. The Aztecs gained control over Central Mexico after the assassination of their leader by the Tepanecs which was a dispute over access to a freshwater spring and the construction of an aqueduct. Aztecs were led to victory by Nezyacoyoatl who took off the heart of the king. Aqueducts were used to feed the cities and the king’s palace with baths, fountains, and gardens, utilizing two tubes- one to transport water and one is for maintenance. By 1495 the Aztec empire had bout 15million people. Moctezuma I, sought out the council of Nezyacoyoatl to builds a massive dyke to hold back floodwaters from Lake Texcoco which happened. The Aztec had a delivery system that could carry a message 200 miles in a day faster than the modern postal services being able to locate a learner many miles away. The Templo Mayor was a tall 15-storeyed building with two small temples on top to honor the gods of rain and war. A sacrifice could be conducted through decapitation and throwing off the body downstairs. Moctezuma being a former high priest saw a comet in the sky and interpreted it to be a bad omen which was on arrival. Later on, Moctezuma II dies when he was stoned and tossed from the palace walls (Smith 8& Sergheraert, 2012). During the battle of Tenochtitlan: Cortez blockades the city with warships and cuts off the aqueducts where all Naval vessels were carried across the mountains and assembled. Later Cortez is able to build a new capital on the city. 90% of the Aztec populations die from Spanish diseases and due to combat with Spanish.
Now, the Aztecs didn’t begin as a powerful people, however. The Nahuatl speaking peoples began as poor hunter-gatherers in northern Mexico, in a place known to them as Aztlan. Sometime around A.D. 1111, they left Aztlan, told by their war god Huitzilopochtli that they would have to find a new home (Overview of the Aztec Empire, 2018). The god would send them a sign when they reached their new homeland. They had marriage alliances with ruling families in other city-states and thus they Aztecs began to build their political base. They became fierce warriors and skillful diplomats. Throughout the late 1300s and early 1400s, the Aztecs began to grow in political power (Overview of the Aztec Empire, 2018). In 1428, the Aztec ruler Itzcoatl formed alliances with the nearby cities of Tlacopan and Texcoco, creating the Triple Alliance that ruled until the coming of the Spanish in 1519.
Figure: Overview of the Aztec Empire
The Aztec Empire became powerful, wealthy and rich in culture, architecture and the arts. The Spanish entered the scene in 1519 when Hernan Cortes landed an exploratory vessel on the coast. Cortes was first welcomed by Montezuma II, but Cortes soon took the emperor and his advisors hostage. Though the Aztecs managed to throw the conquistadors out of Tenochtitlan, the Spanish regrouped and made alliances with the Aztec’s greatest enemy, the Tlaxcalans (Overview of the Aztec Empire, 2018). They returned in 1521 and conquered Tenochtitlan, razing the city to the ground and destroying the Aztec empire in the process. It is very evident that the skill of the Aztecs and the great power and wealth they had amassed in Mexico and other places, they were more powerful than the Europeans (Overview of the Aztec Empire, 2018).
(ii). Buried Mirror Film Analysis
The film is authored and presented by Carlos Fuentes, a Mexican author, who looks for his forebears in the mix of people that created Latin America: Spanish, Arab, Jewish, Indian, and African. He asks what is unique in their culture that is the cause for celebration in the 500th anniversary year of Columbus (The Christian Science Monitor, 1992).
The Burried Mirror is a five-part joint U.S-Spanish production. The Buried Mirror by Carlos Fuentes is a film that offers a powerful introduction to the history of the Spanish empire as well as the establishment of Spanish colonies in the New World (The Christian Science Monitor, 1992).
. Yet, despite the fact that the series attempts to survey the major landmarks in Spanish and Latin American history from the conquest to the independence movements, it is not primarily concerned with a political narrative (The Christian Science Monitor, 1992).
A half-millennium after the first contact with America, just how Spanish still is the Spanish Americans, he asks, and what lessons from the past and for the future might they learn today from the mother country? For reasons far too complicated for Fuentes to survey adequately, Latin America's politics and economics have floundered, he claims because they have ignored the region's essence. "Capitalism and socialism," he writes, "have both failed in Latin America because of our inability to distinguish and strengthen our own tradition, which is authentically Iberian and not derivati vely Anglo-American or Marxist (The Christian Science Monitor, 1992).
Fuentes elaborates on several historical themes to stitch his broad narrative together. He gives a prominent role to the growth of cities - growing out of Spain's Phoenician trading ports - and how the idea of free citizenship nurtured democracy and advanced learning throughout this hemisphere (Review of the Buried Mirror, n.d). He proudly lists the founding dates of Spanish America's provincial towns, mischievously noting that Santo Domingo's university was chartered a full century before Harvard University, where he has long taught (Inner-European Colonialism, n.d).
The manner in which European colonialism proceeded differed in different colonies. To some nations, it was more of a trading system method. For instance, the Spanish invasion in Mexico was some form of a friendly way and for that matter, thee Aztecs invited them to do businesses. In other colonies such as North America, colonialism developed in a totally different way. European started to move their families into the continent and continued making their lives there (Christopoulos, 2018). Their culture and language have been influencing America even until now.
In conclusion, the purpose of colonization was to serve as a source of inexpensive labor and natural resources. The outcome of these colonies was never intended for culture development. This led to large trade enterprises and economical benefits for the European colonial powers
References
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