Bonus Blog #2

Imperialism has been a dominating force through out history. It began thousands of years ago with powerful forces such as the Roman and Ottoman Empire and has continued into more modern times with the British and American Empires. Over the past few classes, I have come to believe that Imperialism is a process where a dominant world power tries to expand their dominance of another country so they can profit from the smaller ones land, labor, raw materials, and whatever else they have. I always new that America had Imperialistic tendencies, but I never thought that we actually placed an imperialist style of government on other nations. Out of all the readings, I found the ones on the take over of Hawaii very informative and interesting. I had heard about American take over of Hawaii briefly in the past, but I had never grasped the magnitude of the event itself. With America's imperialistic motives, they decided to annex a country, that was thriving on its own, and temporarily exile a Queen, who was doing only good things for the well being of the nation. The first example I thought of, when we started this set of readings, was the similarities between the Hawaiian capture and the take over by Christopher Columbus. Christopher Columbus believed that the ways of the Native Americans were not sufficient, to his European standards, so he decided to change them without their consent. The American government did the same thing to Hawaii; the nation was not considered "technologically advanced" by our standards, but they were still a small, but thriving, nation. The notion of imperialism has been around for thousands of year, beginning with the Romans, and going until today. Even though this is not a fair way of governing and expanding power, it is one that will, regardless, continue to exist.