Ways of the World Chapter 20

The section that grabbed my attention most was Cooperation and Rebellion. When discussing colonial times and the actions of exploration and conquest, it is common to discuss rebellion. The rebellion usually occurs from the people of the colonies that are natives to the land and being conquered by other larger nations. They rebel because they disagree with the ideas or religion of the Europeans. They may also rebel in order to drive the Europeans out of their native lands so that they can preserve their histories and traditions that the Europeans are trying to strip from them. What grabbed me about this section was the discussion of cooperation of the native people and the Europeans. In some cases the natives chose to cooperate with the European colonists in order to gain an advantage. It was necessary for the colonials to rely on the natives in order to make distant rule more effective. In these cases the natives of status and influence usually were able to retain their power while gaining even more wealth for their efforts. The natives that cooperated were able to gain a strong western-European education that allowed them to sometimes leave the native lands and go off and gain a further education on the "mainland". These natives would return home as lawyers, doctors, and even engineers or journalists, which enabled an overall higher level of sophisitication amongst the natives.
This is what I found most interesting. Both options, rebellion or cooperation had its pros and cons among them. In the case of rebellion, the pros were that they stood for what they believed in and what they felt was right, and in some cases they were successful. The cons of rebellion is that many natives were saughtered and in the end they seemed to lose every freedom possible. The pros to cooperation was that the people contained some freedoms and were given the opportunity to receive and education. The cons of cooperation were that the people lost their traditions and beliefs and were forced to conform to the ways of the europeans, losing everything they believed in. Niether is better than the other, and both have positive and negative outcomes.