Freedom: The Struggle For Freedom In Modern Society

Freedom is one of, if not the most, important aspects of modern society. All of human history can be seen, through primary sources, as a struggle for power, and said struggle results in the freedoms of certain peoples or populations being completely eradicated for hundreds of years. These populations are fighting for, and in some cases gaining, their rights. The freedoms available to people across the world are constantly changing, as can be seen during the enlightenment, imperialism, and even today, where freedom of scattered around the world with no real consensus.
During the Enlightenment, philosophers explored the idea of man’s natural rights that would eventually lead to social and political revolutions. Europe, after being plagued with

Prompted by industrialism, Imperialism became common practice of larger countries as a way to gain material, new markets, and cheap labor with minimal cost to themselves. Economic superpowers, such as Great Britain France, took advantage of smaller countries and used them for monetary gain. India, a colony of Great Britain, was used to grow cotton and produce opium. Rudyard Kipling, a white man living in India at the time, captured what it was like to be a colonized country in his poem The White Man’s Burden. Kipling illustrates the power industrialised countries held over the rest of the world, writing, “To serve your captives’ need.” (4) In other words, the people living on colonies were essentially “captives,” living under the political rule of Great Britain or France. These imperializers worked to “seek another’s profit,” (Rudyard 15) they chose to colonize these week countries for pure economic gain that did not belong to them. Social interactions between larger countries and the countries they colonized where ones of strict rule that attempted to stomp out native religion and culture in favor of Western ideals. While the effects of imperialism on the larger industrialised countries was to a certain extent, positive, the effects on the colonized country and people were devastating. Imperialism set the world back on freedom by hundreds of