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The Enlightenment : The Impact Of The Enlightenment In America

Decent Essays

One of the biggest influences of the European settlers was their ideology that they brought with them to new lands. The Enlightenment is defined purely in intellectual terms as the spreading of faith in reason and universal rights and laws, but the era encompassed broader developments such as the increased literacy and critical thinking, and less religious persecution. “The more they learned, the more European intellectuals became convinced not only that their culture was superior. . . they had discovered a set of universal laws that applied to everyone, everywhere around the world.” (Pollard, pg. 510). They believed that they should lead the other countries, ignoring the fact that other civilizations may have had their own beliefs and …show more content…

If the Europeans were so morally superior, how could slavery, civil rights violations, and social welfare issues, ever be justified? The way in which African slaves and Native Americans were treated by the Europeans are examples of the ethnocentrism. This belief of superiority is one's ethnic group can never be justified, but I believe it's mainly developed from racial and religious differences. Imperialism can be described as the exercise of power by a state beyond its borders including the imperialism of free trade practiced by Great Britain in the early nineteenth century, and the power that large corporations and industrial nations held in the early twenty-first century. Colonialism—the creation of a state of a means of administrative control over peoples who are defined as distinct. Colonialism is also a specific form of imperialism. Imperialism, in which other lands were taken over unfairly, was practiced in Europe starting in the sixteenth century. Lands were overtaken in Africa, and both the Americas and Africa where it was believed the indigenous people were felt to be primitive societies, with uneducated and uncivilized people. The Europeans did not understand these cultures, including their religious beliefs or social customs and they, believed that they needed to change their community to become more like the far superior European culture. The

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