Chapter 20 Flashcards
Africanization of Christianity
Process that occurred in non-Muslim Africa, where millions who were converted to Christianity sought to maintain older traditions alongside new Christian ideas; many converts continued using protective charms and medicines and consulting local medicine men, and many continued to believe in their old gods and spirits
apartheid
Afrikaans term literally meaning “aparthood”; the system that developed in South Africa of strictly limiting the social and political integration of whites and blacks.
Blyden, Edward
Prominent West African scholar and political leader (1832–1912) who argued that each civilization, including that of Africa, has its own unique contribution to make to the world.
cash-crop agriculture
Agricultural production, often on a large scale, of crops for sale in the market, rather than for consumption by the farmers themselves.
colonial racism
A pattern of European racism in their Asian and African colonies that created a great racial divide between Europeans and the natives, and limited native access to education and the civil service, based especially on pseudo-scientific notions of naturally superior and inferior races
colonial tribalism
A European tendency, especially in African colonies, to identify and sometimes invent distinct “tribes” that had often not existed before, reinforcing European notions that African societies were primitive.
Congo Free State/Leopold II
Leopold II was king of Belgium from 1865 to 1909; his rule as private owner of the Congo Free State during much of that time is typically held up as the worst abuse of Europe’s second wave of colonization, resulting as it did in millions of deaths.
cultivation system
System of forced labor used in the Netherlands East Indies in the nineteenth century; peasants were required to cultivate at least 20 percent of their land in cash crops, such as sugar or coffee, for sale at low and fixed prices to government contractors, who then earned enormous profits from further sale of the crops.
Indian Rebellion, 1857–1858
Massive uprising of much of India against British rule; also called the Indian Mutiny or the Sepoy Mutiny from the fact that the rebellion first broke out among Indian troops in British employ.
informal empires
Term commonly used to describe areas such as Latin America and China that were dominated by Western powers in the nineteenth century but that retained their own governments and a measure of independence.
invention of tradition
In many colonial states, a process of forging new ways of belonging and self-identification that defined and to some extent mythologized the region’s past, especially to create broader terms of belonging than had existed before.
scramble for Africa
Name used for the process of the European countries’ partition of the continent of Africa between themselves in the period 1875–1900
Vivekananda, Swami
Leading religious figure of nineteenth-century India (1863–1902); advocate of a revived Hinduism and its mission to reach out to the spiritually impoverished West.
Western-educated elite
The main beneficiaries in Asian and African lands colonized by Western powers; schooled in the imperial power’s language and practices, they moved into their country’s professional classes but ultimately led anticolonial movements as they grew discouraged by their inability to win equal status to the colonizers.
