Yesterday, or the day before, I ran across a factoid but did not make proper note of on my way past it, and now wish I had. Here it is, as best as I can recall it: between 1815 and 1914, approximately 85% of the world was colonized.
Now, that can't be true, can it? Maybe it was that 85% of the world was a colony or part of an empire, or either part of a colony or a colonizer.
At any rate, what's been picking at me about it is that the US actually had very few colonies. Puerto Rico, and the Philippines is about all -- there were and are some little islands like Guam, Virgin Islands, and Hawai'i.
The big colonial nations were Great Britain, Spain, France, Portugal, the Netherlands. Germany and Belgium had a few.
It seems to me that anti-Western sentiment is against the United States, not because of anti-colonialism, but because we are adamantly capitalistic, and the global elite, of both former colonies and former colonizers, is socialistic. How does that get transformed into anti-colonialism? |
