Eurocentrism

Today we investigated the idea of "Eurocentrism" - the sense of superiority that European peoples had during colonialism. We used Kipling's Poem "The White Man's Burden" to better understand this attitude. Essentially, Kipling was saying that it is up to the European's to "civilize" the indigenous peoples of the colonies and this process would not be an easy one. As this course covers multiple perspectives, we also looked the RESPONSES to Kipling's poems. These responses provided the perspectives of the indigenous peoples - "let loose your chains", "solving burden using bullets, blood and death" were some of the phrases found in the responses.

It is important that we understand the historical attitudes that drive the actions that we are about to study. The moral of the story today was that Mercantilism + Eurocentrism = Disaster for indigenous peoples.