{"id":2161,"date":"2020-09-12T21:47:18","date_gmt":"2020-09-12T21:47:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/?p=2161"},"modified":"2025-12-15T08:25:59","modified_gmt":"2025-12-15T08:25:59","slug":"ethnocentrism-in-the-age-of-imperialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/ethnocentrism-in-the-age-of-imperialism\/","title":{"rendered":"Ethnocentrism in the Age of Imperialism: A Detailed Summary"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ethnocentrism in the Age of Imperialism<\/a> played an important role in European colonization of regions, such as: Africa<\/a>, India<\/a>, Australia and the Americas. Ethnocentrism is the idea of judging other ethnicities or cultures based upon your own ethnicity or culture.\u00a0 While this comparison doesn\u2019t necessarily need to be negative in nature, \u2018ethnocentrism\u2019 is often associated with aspects of racism and prejudice.\u00a0 For example, when people are being ethnocentric, they are sometimes expressing the view that another ethnicity or culture is inferior.\u00a0 As such, the concept of ethnocentrism is often associated with historical events, which best exemplify this, including the Age of Imperialism.\u200b\u200b<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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ETHNOCENTRISM OVERVIEW<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

As stated above, ethnocentrism is the idea of judging other ethnicities and cultures based upon your own ethnicity or culture.  In general, ethnocentrism as a term is part of the study of anthropology and other social sciences.  In these fields, ethnocentrism is considered to be a form of judging others as inferior or worse.  This then tends to result in feelings of prejudice, which is when one group of people considers another group to be lesser.  As such, historians consider ethnocentrism to be a learned view, in that it is something that people are taught as they grow up.  As well, ethnocentrism is an important tool in terms of understanding someone\u2019s worldview.  For example, ethnocentrism is an important part of major historical events such as the Age of Imperialism.  During this time, certain groups judged others they viewed as inferior.\u200b<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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ETHNOCENTISM IN THE AGE OF IMPERIALISM (EUROCENTRISM)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Further to the idea of ethnocentrism is the term \u2018eurocentrism\u2019.\u00a0 Eurocentrism is a more modern term and is generally used by historians in reference to European colonialism in the Age of Imperialism.\u00a0 During this timeframe, which occurred throughout the 19th century and early 20th century, the major European nations expanded their empires throughout regions such as Africa and Asia.\u00a0 The European nations (Britain, Belgium, France, Germany, Portugal and Spain) viewed the indigenous people that they encountered as inferior to Europeans and treated them in terrible ways.\u00a0 For instance, Eurocentric views resulted in the enslavement of millions of Africans in the African Slave Trade<\/a>.\u00a0 European slave traders didn\u2019t view the Africans as people and instead saw them as a commodity \u2013 something to be bought and sold.\u200b<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Atlantic
‘Slavers Revenging their Losses’ by unknown artist. (1866) Shows enslaved Africans in chains being marched to the East coast of Africa by Arab slavers. The enslaved people would then be transported to the New World as part of the Atlantic Slave Trade.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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European imperialism throughout Africa was centered on the concept of ethnocentrism (or eurocentrism).\u00a0 In fact, historians consider European ethnocentrism in the 19th century to be one of the main causes of the Scramble for Africa<\/a>.\u00a0 The \u2018Scramble for Africa\u2019 is the term that historians use to refer to the expansion of European empires into Africa.\u00a0 It is referred to as a \u2018scramble\u2019 due to the way in which the European nations raced to capture territory to expand to their empires.\u00a0 The Scramble for Africa is considered to have occurred from approximately 1870 until the outbreak of World War I<\/a> in 1914.\u200b<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Europeans travelled the globe and colonized different regions, they came into contact with all sorts of different indigenous people.\u00a0 As such, European beliefs about their own supposed racial superiority helped inform their interactions with the people they encountered, including native Africans.\u00a0 Their Eurocentric beliefs were justified by European governments due to a concept called Social Darwinism<\/a>.\u00a0 In short, Social Darwinism is the idea that some ethnic groups or races are superior to others and therefore more \u2018fit\u2019 to rule over those that are less \u2018fit\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charles Darwin was the renowned British scientist who is credited with developing the theory of evolution in his famous book \u2018Origin of Species\u2019.  While Darwin was referring to biological studies of species, others used his ideas and applied them to human beings.  Therefore, supporters of Social Darwinism attempted to use the ideas of Charles Darwin to scientifically justify or prove ethnocentric beliefs.  Social Darwinism was particularly popular in the early 1870s, when Europeans were carrying out their massive imperialistic campaigns as part of the Age of Imperialism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The beliefs of ethnocentrism and Social Darwinism can be seen in a famous poem by Rudyard Kipling called \u2018The White Man\u2019s Burden\u2019.  In the poem, Kipling calls on Europe to \u2018send forth the best ye breed\u2019 to \u2018take up the white man\u2019s burden\u2019.  In general, Kipling is promoting the idea that people of European descent are biologically more superior to other people from around the world, and the \u2018burden\u2019 of the white man is to \u2018fix\u2019 the uncivilized indigenous peoples.  As a result, the beliefs of ethnocentrism and eurocentrism led to the events of the Scramble for Africa in 1870 because the views of superiority on the part of the Europeans empowered them to dominate the people they encountered.\u200b<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"White<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ethnocentrism in the Age of Imperialism refers to aspects of racism and prejudice from the time of European Imperialism in different regions around the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4889,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":16,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[75,15,23],"class_list":["post-2161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-age-of-imperialism","tag-age-of-imperialism","tag-history","tag-imperialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2161"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4890,"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2161\/revisions\/4890"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}