Poverty Because Of Colonization

Poverty has always existed, our world suffers because of it and there are several reasons for poverty, and one cause of it is colonization. In colonization there are two countries, one country that is very advanced in technology and have a lot of money (colonizing country) and the colonized country that usually is poor and its political system is unstable. The main purpose of colonizing a country is gaining resources, money, and territory of the colonized country, almost every country that has been colonized, it remains in poverty because the political system that the colonizing country left is a mess specially in Africa and Central America, and several of the countries that have been independent, still depend on the colonizing countries industries and economy because they cannot sustain by themselves. An example of this are the countries of Africa, several the countries in Africa are now independent but they do not have a stable economy and depend on other countries to subsist. It is a fact that colonization roots are a cause of poverty, some of the causes are the appropriation of the land, stealing of high valuable resources, and countries that had slaves still live with that legacy. A cause of how the world works nowadays is the roots of colonization.

Poverty emerged in colonized countries because of the appropriation of the land. As Schalkenbach (2009) says “It is no accident that the countries that controlled foreign territories are generally rich and the countries that lost their autonomy under colonialism are generally poor.” An example of this is Zimbabwe, which is a region with low rainfall and poor soil fertility, in 1923, when the British went to colonize Zimbabwe one of the actions they did, was to appropriate the land and exploit all the resources as possible, in this case, the British alienated the native people from much of the land, rural blacks were limited to communal areas, meanwhile the British owned the commercial lands, forest lands and national parks. As Hill (2013) says: “Inequitable land distribution forced people in communal areas to subsist through overexploitation of resources, leading to resource degradation and ultimately enormous insecurity as livelihoods became threatened”. Therefore, Zimbabwe native people lived in very poor conditions thanks to colonization because they did not have good part of land and they needed to overexploit the few natural resources they had. 90 years later, Zimbabwe finally was independent but nowadays the repartitions of the lands is still a problem. The World Bank and other organizations are trying to rehabilitate the economy of Zimbabwe and to clean up the natural environment, but today is still a problem. The colonizing country kept all the fertil lands and used it to grow their own economy leaving Zimbabwe in a economic crisis. This type of things are inhuman, society has been changing throught the years, but as explained, humanity is still very envy and is every day worse.

Colonized countries that practiced slavery are very common to remain in poverty. An example would be most of the African countries; Africa nowadays is in a poverty crisis since it was colonized. “Countries that experienced colonization and slavery often had trouble getting rid of the inherited institutions and discrimination” (Poverties, 2011). Slavery is a huge cause of poverty nowadays because in the past, when a country decided to go and claim a territory, all the men who were colonized, were slaves. Since then, families find very difficult to build up assets values, it takes generations and generations to grow economically. All the people who lived in the country that was being colonized loosed their houses and all their properties, now the only thing they could do was to serve to the colonizing countries as slaves, and they didn´t gain any profit of it. The only thing they gained was food, but just a little food, some slaves died because of hunger. Then, when they finally could be independent, the political system was a mess; this is because when the educated and technological country (colonizing country) leaves the colonized country, the only people left are the slaves that do not know anything about politics and how to make their own country better in economy, education, etc., so now they were in a crisis and that´s why a lot of countries still live in poverty.

With slavery, colonizers abused of the free labor force, when a country colonized another country, they exploited all the workers for the benefit of the colonizing country, the labor force was totally free, but not only the labor force was free, also all the materials and prime materials. What the colonizers did, was to gain all the profit they could gain and they didn´t care about how the colonized country will be in a future. Colonization existed just for one reason, which was to make the colonizers and their own country richer, and left the colonized country with no resources so they can´t stand by themselves. As Rank (2009) says, “colonialists used the colonies to provide raw materials and other resources for their own economic growth and development”. Colonizers didn´t have to pay a single cent with their money to make infrastructure in other countries, and also they didn´t pay to the slaves. An example of how the colonizers exploited the free labor is the making of the rail system, it was made by the slaves and with

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