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Summary : Sm And Imperialism

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sm and imperialism are two topics that have been seen as an inseparable pairing in history and economics. Even today, both of their legacies live on– they are what brought east Asia and Europe closer together (eventually, after their policies greatly damaged– and in some places erased– the existing ideas in these areas) and are the entire reason a majority of the United States population are of European or African descent– rather than indigenous americans– or that Iberian languages are spoken in Central and South America rather than the native languages there. Common thought today almost unanimously agrees that without European and Afro-American influences, the Americas would be a very different place. It is also commonly thought today that imperialism– being both similar and coming after in terms of time– is a direct offshoot of mercantilist policy. While it is true that without the first the latter would be very different, the fallacy that it is the direct descendant is completely untrue. While mercantilism fueled the fires for the imperialist ideas of Europe, it was not the deciding factor– many other factors completely unrelated from mercantilism helped create imperialist thought. Mercantilism can be found as early as the crusades, when republics like Venice and Genoa traded between Europe and the Levant– not only bringing in valuable goods, making them powerful trading states in of themselves, but also seeding the ideas that would become mercantile concepts; the

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