Charles Darwin, Social Darwinism, and Imperialism Essay

Charles Darwin developed a theory of biological evolution that stated all species evolved from other species through natural selection. Herbert Spencer followed up with this theory by coining the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ as a way to describe natural selection. This theory grew among scientist, but the Fundamentalist Christians opposed Darwinism because it goes against their core beliefs. Some used it as a way to justify classifying some people as second-rate and how they treated those people. Darwinism also played a major role in America’s immigration policy and furthermore is one of the main reason for the start of World War I.

Before 1600, many countries were looking to colonize the New World and one of those countries was obviously Great Britain. In an informative research paper called “The First Colonies North of Mexico”, it states, “Richard Hakluyt, a Protestant minister and geographer, wrote books urging colonization to accomplish five goals: (1) extend Protestantism, (2) expand trade, (3) increase England’s markets, (4) reduce unemployment, and (5) provide bases in order to attack Spanish ships in case of war.”(paragraph four) England’s first attempts of establishing colonies failed for multiple reasons, but

During the 17th and 18th century, English residents felt that England was over-crowded and intolerable. They wanted to lessen these problems that rose up because of the large population increase and to establish more religious freedom (Horn). The English believed that the best way to go about this was to colonize the New World. Subsequently, many colonies began to develop, and of these colonies, Massachusetts Bay and Virginia were the most well-known. The early settlements of Massachusetts and Virginia were both established by similar groups of people at the same time; furthermore, their contrasting beginnings as a colony, views on religion, and method of economic stability all contributed to our American heritage today.

1. The main contours of English Colonization in the 17th century were Protestant motives to strike Catholicism, along with solving England’s social crisis. With the rumors of the Spanish Empire’s atrocities reaching England, one motive to colonize the America’s was to strike the Catholics, and save the natives from captivity (Foner 51). This shows an interesting aspect of the English Colonization: the English allowed their people to go colonize just to strike the opposing religious country. Along with this, England sending emigrants over solved their social crisis. Because of England’s growing population and economy, the amount of peasants in cities grew. This is because of landlords using land for sheep, which kicked out peasants from their land (Foner 51-52). England hoped that some people of the lower classes would then go to America: to be out of the big cities where important people were, while still helping England in it’s economy.

Not everyone in England was facing a harsh persecution; many travelers came to the New World with high hopes of money, which led to numerous conflicts. It was a land for the rich to get richer. Most of the settlers bound for Virginia and the Southern colonies had a "get rich or die trying" type of attitude. The only thing tearing them from home was a flimsy promise of gold that may or may not be there. The motive of such people is so radically different. There were no pacts of agreement, no common laws that kept them in a community once landing. This led the men to never develop any sense of belonging with their fellow men, causing a distinct survival society by 1700. Every man was for himself. It was a bitter game displaying the survival of the richest.

Bacon’s Manifesto exemplifies the attitude of many of the settlers. In the document he states, “Let us observe the sudden rise of [the prior colonist’s] estates… compared with the quality in which they first entered this country” (document 8). The motive for expansion estate and liberation from economic oppression drove settlement into the New World. The sudden economic liberation then led way to entitlement, as was demonstrated within the Manifesto. Ship’s manifests from Great Britain show the vast majority of settlers to be younger men, unconstrained by a family unit (document 3). This demography further fed into the mentality of ‘strike rich quick’ that drove western expansion and the creation of large plantations (document 12). Governor Berkley cited the expansiveness of the Chesapeake Bay region in an address to the British monarch. He identified the “many rivers” and “all our frontiers” as being too expansive to adequately defend (document 7). The extent of expansion created a more socially isolated a distant culture, in bleak contrast to the atmosphere of brotherly love held by the puritans. Economic incentives was the defining factor in the development of the Chesapeake Bay region, and as a result western expansion was incentivized creating less social

England has conquered many territories and established colonies throughout history. In this English form of colonization, it is clear that there is an obvious mission to intrude into native customs and force their own. They utilize the purest form of imperialism- to strip others of their customs and replace it with ones own in order to expand glory and gain for a nation. The English colonists seeked to expand and establish English ideas into foreign cultures. In the case with the Native Americans, the English did not see the Native Indians as equals in anyway possible. They did not acknowledge their religion, particularly because it was not Christian based, nor their law system, since it was not related to church based laws. Wherever

During the eighteenth century the British colonies began to enjoy the benefits of colonial life. The barrier created from the distance between their mother country allowed them greater freedom to govern themselves as they saw fit. As their need for agricultural labour increased, they welcomed and even forced different ethnic groups to help populate the colonies. Advancement in trade and agriculture encouraged the colonist to partake in leisure activities and even engage in superfluous spending. Colonist became more active politically as more gained the freedom to vote. These three factors simultaneously helped British colonist gain a new sense of pride and would be the determinate factors that encouraged colonist to seek complete independence

Throughout the 17th and 18th century, England was troubled with foreign and domestic problems forcing those who emigrated to unite under some common ground of survival. Native Americans and other foreign countries remained a constant threat to the colonists. If the settlers wanted to make it out away from their mother country, they would need to come together to survive the harsh problems the new world would give to them. However, as the 18th century started, the importance of unity shifted from survival to establishing a strong sense of community and fairness.

In these years, when Darwin's Origin of Species, popularized by Herbert Spencer as "the survival of the fittest, " and applied to races as well as species in a vulgarized form, Social Darwinism, the coming Christian triumph was presented as an Anglo-Saxon Protestant one.

At the beginning of the 1800s, scientists knew of some kinds of fossils, and were very aware of homologous and vestigial structures. Many scientists suspected that some kind of evolution had given rise to living things around them. However, they had no theory to explain how evolution might have occurred. Two scientists led the way in the search for a mechanism of evolution. The first was Jean Lamarck. The second was one of the greatest figures in biology, Charles Darwin.

The concept of Social Darwinism was a widely accepted theory in the nineteenth-century. Various intellectual, and political figures from each side of the political spectrum grasped the theory and interpreted it in various ways. In this paper, we will discuss three different nineteenth-century thinkers and their conception of Social Darwinism. The conservative, Heinrich von Treitschke, and liberal Herbert Spencer both gave arguments on the usefulness of competition between people on a global scale. The anarchist, Peter Kropotkin, refuted the belief of constant competition among members of the same species and emphasized mutual aid.

Charles Darwin began his scientific breakthroughs and upcoming theories when he began an expedition trip to the Galapagos Islands of South America. While studying there, he discovered that each island had its own type of plant and animal species. Although these plants and animals were similar in appearance, they had other characteristics that made them differ from one another and seem to not appear as similar. Darwin questioned why these plants and animals were on these islands and why they are different in ways.

British scientists, intrigued by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, were swept by the idea that humans could be described on a purely scientific basis. They studied the facial structures of several peoples, including the African and the Irish. Often these people possessed features that they did not have: a protruding jawbone, for example. Darwin had popularized an idea that a protruding jaw was a feature similar to primates’. By extension, these races of people were assumed to be underdeveloped: morally, intellectually, and socially. A circumstance that furthered this problem was the way that young Britons were taught about other cultures. Teachers upheld and even furthered the stereotypes by teaching from textbooks that imparted to the children British superiority. For example, an excerpt from the 1844 Wesleyan Juvenile Offering: “Our young readers have doubtless been led to believe that they are much more clever than the little Negroes of Africa and the West Indies and the inference tended to be drawn is, that therefore it is to very little purpose to collect and give, in order that those may be taught who are so dull and slow to learn” (Evans Paragraph 19). These children grew up to believe these things, and, in turn, passed them on to their own offspring.

Humans have been forming societies since the dawn of man itself. These societies first began as small packs of pre-humans who would hunt and forage together, and as human intellect became greater and more prevalent, so did their groupings. Society, from the point of view of human innovation, is one of man’s most diverse and varied inventions, with no two tribes being exactly the same, however, that is not to say that there are absolutely no over branching similarities among the subdivisions of humanity. One such idea among all human societies is that of culture, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines Culture as the social behaviors, beliefs, material traits of a society, racial or religious group ("Culture"). One crucial question asked by anthropologists regarding the nature of human culture is whether or not biological evolution influences the cultures of the world. How would influential minds in the area of evolution like Darwin or Lamarck view this kind of question, and more importantly if deemed true, does it lend credibility to the theory of Social Darwinism?