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And on another topic completely
So, recently I read about two people.
The first is Mary Kingsley, author of Travels in West Africa. Mary Kingsley is remarkable among European explorers in that she believed, and argued passionately, that the idea that black people were inferior to white people was flat wrong.
She was not some radical progressive, by the way - she was entirely against the women's suffrage movement. She was extremely conservative. She just wasn't a racist, and was a distinct anti-colonialist.
Another person who hated colonialism was the utterly brilliant Alexander von Humboldt. von Humboldt's travels to colonial territory were in South America, where he covered amazing amounts of ground and did phenomenal research, more-or-less single-handedly inventing the concept of ecology - the idea of the interconnectedness of ecosystems.
During his lifetime he was hugely and tremendously famous. Sadly, later on everyone started paying too much attention to Darwin and not enough to von Humboldt.
Sadly doesn't really cover it enough, to be honest. Darwin's ideas (well, as much as they were his at all, but that's another matter) are all well and good, but have been used to justify some pretty horrible things, while not necessarily doing even a tenth as much good as it would have done the world at large, in a very literal sense, had people paid more attention to ecology and the environment from the 19th century onwards.
Alas, Darwinism can be used to justify colonial pillage of anyone you can outgun, while von Humboldt's notions require you to be respectful of nature and the environment and to be careful about messing with the food chain and the delicate balance of ecosystems, and that's much less fun.
The first is Mary Kingsley, author of Travels in West Africa. Mary Kingsley is remarkable among European explorers in that she believed, and argued passionately, that the idea that black people were inferior to white people was flat wrong.
She was not some radical progressive, by the way - she was entirely against the women's suffrage movement. She was extremely conservative. She just wasn't a racist, and was a distinct anti-colonialist.
Another person who hated colonialism was the utterly brilliant Alexander von Humboldt. von Humboldt's travels to colonial territory were in South America, where he covered amazing amounts of ground and did phenomenal research, more-or-less single-handedly inventing the concept of ecology - the idea of the interconnectedness of ecosystems.
During his lifetime he was hugely and tremendously famous. Sadly, later on everyone started paying too much attention to Darwin and not enough to von Humboldt.
Sadly doesn't really cover it enough, to be honest. Darwin's ideas (well, as much as they were his at all, but that's another matter) are all well and good, but have been used to justify some pretty horrible things, while not necessarily doing even a tenth as much good as it would have done the world at large, in a very literal sense, had people paid more attention to ecology and the environment from the 19th century onwards.
Alas, Darwinism can be used to justify colonial pillage of anyone you can outgun, while von Humboldt's notions require you to be respectful of nature and the environment and to be careful about messing with the food chain and the delicate balance of ecosystems, and that's much less fun.