French Revolution Imperialism

The French Revolution sought to end the reign of the Estates. The Estates were a set of three classes. Within the first estate was the high clergy, which was equivalent to 1% of the population. The Second Estate held the Nobles, 2% of the population. The Third estate was composed of everyone else, including merchants and farmers, so close to 97% of the population. This system only favored the First and Second Estate. When it came to voting, each Estate only had one vote, and the First and Second constantly had similar views. The Third Estate grew frustrated with this repression. The Third Estate, which contained the common people, removed their selves from meetings between all the Estates and refused to participate. Out of the Third Estate …show more content…
It starts in Europe because there was a need to gain more resources to heighten their dominance. There was also a political need because Italy and Germany became countries, which destabilized the power in Europe. More so, there is a desire to outpace other countries within Europe. Britain and France wanted to be better than Italy and Germany, and vise versa. There were cultural aspects to imperialism too. It stems from countries and people wanted to improve others. Social Darwinism stressed that countries and people are more dominant than others. This can be observed within the fact that there was a push to spread European culture. The “White Mans Burden” is a poem that was written at the time. It describes how America colonized the Philippine Islands. The Europeans and Americans tried to make people and places more developed. This poem was used to justify imperialism as a noble enterprise of civilization. There is controversy around because it promotes that the Western world (the white man) is the most superior and that industrialization is the way to civilize the Third World. In terms of native populations, the poem shows that the white man had a moral obligation to rule the non-whites. The Europeans and Americans encourage their economic, cultural, and social progress through colonialism. They press their culture and morals on the natives. Colonialism helps explain how they exploited the native populations. Local industries were suppressed, and the colonies would supply the commodities that were cheap. Also, industries could not compete with colonial power, so the colonies had to buy manufactured goods from major places. The idea here was to impoverish the colonies so they had to rely on the major