The Opium Wars

The opium wars were disputed wars between Great Britain and China because of the trade of a drug called Opium. Opium was used as a ingredient of pain killers (ex:morphine, heroin) in China. The Opium drug was later used inside tobacco to smoke it. This was causing lots of health issues to Chinese people due to the smoking of Opium. Due to that response, China wanted to stop the trading of Opium from the British by sending them a letter to the queen. The queen bothered not to respond to the letter leaving China no choice but to keep the British ships from shipping any Opium into their country. This has initiated one of the two Opium Wars; the war to get rid of the opium trade from the British. The second of the Opium Wars had to do with the unfair trading occurring with china from the British. Both Opium wars had to do with the disputed trading that was going on between Britain and China. Unfortunately Britain won both wars because the British had technological advantages the Chinese did not had. Some examples of these technological advantages that the British had, but the Chinese didn't was the big steam powered ships the British had along with their advance weapons such as their machine guns.

"The White Man's Burden"

"The White Man's Burden" means that the the white man has certain duties to do in life. Relating to the poem, the white man's duty is to convert the Philippines into a civilized democratic place to live which was a difficult task for the white man. I do agree with some of the analysis of "The White Man's Burden", especially the point where the analysis explains white men being racist to people from the Philippines. An example of this racism from the white men has to do with the Philippines culture which was considered as uncivilized to the white men. Considering the the poem was written in 1899 about US imperialism in the Philippines, the United States is still imperialistic today, this time is in Iraq. But it is not the same imperialism that was described in "The White Man's Burden". The US wanted Iraq to become a democratic government, so they went to war to stop the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Now since the US is staying at Iraq, they will not leave until the Iraqi people can handle their new democratic government. This has nothing to do with the U.S. changing the Iraqi culture at any time, and it will never occur unless the U.S. government wants power.

"The Scramble for Africa"

The term "The Scramble for Africa" talks about European powers going to Africa and conquer any land that they find useful for their country back in Europe. The main European nations that went to colonize parts of Africa were: England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Belgium. The main reason why they even went to Africa, was for the natural resources crawling all over Africa such as gold, ivory, etc. the need for labor, and the emerge of new markets. The Europeans had technological advantages that allowed them to conquer Africa. This effected the African people in a way that lead them to take revenge on the Europeans and take back their old land back to African control like it should be.

Film Lesson: Mountains of the Moon

In the film "Mountains of the Moon", it showed scences of how hard europeans experienced when exploring Africa. They had to face the roaring sun of deserts, the hard paasage way of rocks. Even bugs crawling around their camp site. Not only that, europeans also faced attacking tribes that intruded their territory and attacked to scare them away.

In another scence, John Speek told Richard Berton that he finally found the source of the Nile River even though he did not believe him. That source was later called Lake Victoria. The thing that is strange about the name of the source of the Nile River is that is named by a British Queen. I think that the source shoud have the African name of it because they were the first people to discover that source. It is either that, or it should be named by the european explorers that founded it. The point is that the Queen is taking most of the credit of the source by naming it after herself and that is just not fair.

In most of the scenes, Speek and Berton were seen defending themselves with guns. An technology that Africans never saw before and was fasinated of how it used. They could defeat a tribe by a trigger of a bullet. That tells me that the Europeans had enough power to conquer parts of Africa just by using guns as a primary weapon.