Globalization/Colonization, by Khala Flanagan

From the textbook:

The historical process of colonization transformed the world, creating a process of globalization. But the world is not a global village. It’s one of privilege and exclusion, rapid change, and shocking inequality.
The end of colonial rule brought challenges – of poverty, the presence of multination corporations, urbanization, population growth, immigration and emigration, ecological disaster, war, and instability – to newly independent nations. Under colonialism, economic plans focused on making colonies productive for their owners.
Colonialism differs in important ways from the earlier expansion of European power. Whereas much of the initial phase of European expansion was carried out by private companies and often took the form of raid and pillage, colonialism involved the active possession of foreign territory by European governments. Once colonies were seized, they had to be administered and they had to be made profitable. Finding ways to extract taxes and create the conditions in which corporations could make money often meant the systematic undermining of indigenous ways of life.
The European expansion and the era of colonization were historic processes that changed the world from a collection of relatively independent economics and societies to a complex world system.

Basically, what this means is that even though colonization opened up new worlds and promoted healthy expansion, it did so at the cost of other cultures’ ruin and demise. For example, the culture of the Native Americans slowly died out when the whites arrived in the New World, and Africans were enslaved to make Great Britain one of the most powerful empires in the world.
Now, in our current age of unimaginably fast globalization, people are connected everywhere across the world in “active possession” just like colonization did back the early centuries… it’s just in a different form. Tourism is a perfect example: you have people from wealthy countries travel to undeveloped places in the non-western world to taste the “exotic” cultures and traditions of different people… but, sadly, these are just illusions in our modernizing, global world. Traditional cultures are more or less just constructed for tourists and profit. Tourism marks the 3rd largest form of trade in the world, and many nations are financially stable because of it. Still, colonization remains present in its 21st century version: students study abroad, people buy villas and secondary homes overseas, modern means of transportation are built in the most rural areas, and many communities still try to cling onto their traditional ways amidst the “easy access” and lighting speed of modern technological change.