Essays Sample on Colonialism

People will do anything for resources, which includes money, land, and laborers. A long time ago, even before most of the colonists arrived in America to make home, the English viewed themselves over the Native Indians that populated America for many, many years. The colonists deemed the Natives “savages”and “beasts' ' because when they were jealous and could no longer get enough food to eat, they relied on the Natives and violence. They burned their fields and villages as well as shooting the Native children, in order to provide themselves with corn, deerskin, and other natural resources stolen from the Natives. Finally, the Natives attempted to stop the colonizers from destroying their property, and the colonists took this as a threat. They proceeded to brutally slaughter all the Natives, eventually, resulting in one of the highest genocides to date. By degrading the Natives white people were able to self justify their actions and ideas of  Natives being “inhuman” and “cruel beasts or savages,” also justifying that whatever they did was right, and not pausing to think who was the real “savage.”This being some of the world’s earliest actions of racism.  Then, in Virginia, more settlers arrived into the starving colonies, and people needed desperately to grow food apart from corn. The colonists learned how to grow tobacco from the Natives, but it wasn’t good enough to sell for a profit as they needed more people to do the work. They couldn’t make the Indians do work, because they were too tough and hard to make submissive. The colonists became mad and jealous because the Natives had a more fruitful life. At their final straw, the colonizers brought Africans from their home, and made them slaves to the aggrieved colonists, who were ready to take out their anger. The colonists then proceeded to mistreat their black slaves for the next 350 years, and their white slaves and servants a little less. Throughout the time of slavery there were many therioes that rose up to gloss over what hardships the white people had put the Africans through. Still more theories about why the black people were considered lower class than whites because they were unclean and associated with the devil. 

The Slave trading business in colonial times was booming. Not only did it bring profit for the farmers growing tobacco, it also saved them much work and time, so it was a very hard thing to get rid of. The slaves came to America on ships, and travelling from so far to America was difficult and pricey, so naturally, thousands of the Africans died on slave ships because of unhygienic conditions, disease, starvation and even lack of air as each person had less than a coffin’s worth of space chained to one another by both hand and feet. Others still, decided to jump overboard or refused to eat in order to end their terrible suffering on the slave ships and avoided life as a slave. Records show that a huge 10% of people died, and many others died due to mistreatment in their time of enslavement. In fact, slavery in colonial times cause the deaths of 2-3 million Africans. As the demand for cheap labor increased, the Africans were taken from their homes in bigger numbers and treated with more brutality, when their predecessors were considered free. When the 1600s came around slave trade became even more important to colonial culture, driven by its ideas of limitless profit and the idea that balck people were all slaves to white people, but the only difference is that the white people didn’t see the black people as truly human. Some whites saw blacks not as slaves, but as servants although this wasn’t much different when compared to the privilege of the white slaves and indentured servants. For example, in 1640, six white servants and one black started to run away. They were caught. “The black man, named Emanuel in the court record, received 30 blows with a whip. He was also branded on one cheek and sentenced to work in shackles for a year or longer. The whites received lighter sentences. (Zinn, 33)” The difference of treatment speaks for itself about how biased towards whites the government was, especially after Bacon’s Rebellion. Nathaniel Bacon was a man with land, and he led his rebellion of the poor hungry people of the lower classes against the Indians and the rich and land owning leaders. Bring together everyone in the lower classes like the white frontiers men and both white and black servants as well as slaves. Everyone was unhappy with the stretch from the poor to rich classes, so in order to.