g., General Motors; Toyota; Coca Cola; IBM; Nestle, etc., build plants in Mexico and Latin America, where indigenous labor is cheaper than American labor. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of poor Mexican citizens living in poverty struggle to sneak across the borders of the United States, into California, Arizona, Texas, or New Mexico, in hope of finding better lives by working for American dollars, instead of Mexican pesos.
All in all, European colonialism, an outgrowth and direct result of acquisitive worldwide European exploration and expansion, from the time of the Spanish conquistadores through the Enlightenment Period; through the Industrial Revolution and beyond, has done more harm than good within both Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. For the most part, within these regions, colonialism (and/or its long-lasting after-effects) brought disease; poverty, and much cultural coercion to those areas. Natural resources were stolen; human resources were abused or killed, often...
The heydays of both Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America took place before European colonialism, or for that matter colonialism of any kind. Neither area of the world, moreover, has been at all well-off since. As Bradshaw states at the beginning of his Chapter 3, of Contemporary World Regional Geography (2003) "Europe is a hearth for many contemporary global ideas and practices." Clearly, some of these, such as democracy, have made the world of the 21st century a better place. Other European ideas and practices, however, colonialism in particular have based on the examples of Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, made the world much worse.
Works Cited
Bradshaw, Michael et al. Contemporary World Regional Geography: Global
Connections, Local Voices. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003.
Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Norton, 1999.
