European Expansion Moves to the New World

Thus in the beginning all the World was America. Interestingly, the development of Lockes ideas of property and money came at a time when Europeans expansion into the New World was just beginning to take hold (source). The very definition of economic imperialism is that countries expand their territories to collect resources in order to garner economic profit. The more robust economies tend to become the most powerful nations, and so the control of resources is sought out in order to monopolize both wealth and power in the world (Lovelace, 2014). Nations that are at odds with this general philosophy are threatened with aggressive assimilation tactics that in the end tend to further reinforce the dominance of the imperialist nation. From here, it became necessary to justify one's claim to land. In this essay I will describe the economic ideologies which prompted European expansion into North American, and then describe the specific ways that it has influenced indigenous peoples dispossession.

The first step to marginalizing a group of people is to describe and emphasize differences between the groups. Nigel Tomas He mentions that Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan had argued that a ruthless struggle for existence, in which every man was afraid of the other, was the basis, or “state of nature” out of which civilized humans emerged. This thinking was also adopted by John Locke, and was used to reinforce the differences between “savages” and civilized Europeans. Locke's theory of property in the Two Treatises of Government, provided the groundwork for the development of modern colonial policy. A liberal thinker, he believed that all men who participate in honest labour (ie. Participating in an agrarian economy) should have autonom...

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...e were introduced to guns that could allow a more efficient hunt until the entire buffalo population collapsed.

From the viewpoint of capitalism the value of land and its resources was much more important than the value of native labour. To eliminate the problem of native-use rights outlined in the Royal Proclamation, native people had to be detached from their land in order to become disposessed and so make resources available to capital (173). This was necessary in order to improve the wealth of society over the wealth of the individual. They moved to disposses out of the interst in capital in profit, and getting ahead in the world, in a colony where land was the principal resource, depdended on the acquisition of land. Dispossessed peoples are forced to turn to the labour market in order to survive, creating a cheap pool of labour for industries to exploit.