Throughout history, European colonization had undeniably cavernous contributions that have led positive and negative effects in the nations they have colonized particularly the New World. Europe happened to be the most influential and dominant nations in the world, they explored to expand their wealth and achieve supremacy that brought them economic and political success. The New World had been colonized by England for centuries, enviously similar to other Europeans countries searching for silver, gold and eventually for cultivation and exchange of crop products transported to Europe.
The Native Americans suffered severe cruelty that lost millions of lives struggling for freedom as these strangers deceivingly broke their indigenous culture and ruthlessly exploited their resources. In addition, Europeans took advantage of the naive Africans that were forcefully taken from their homeland to become slaves in America in exchanged of goods and firearms. However, despite the agony they have experienced, European colonization also created beneficial consequences that had marked significant influences not only in the New World but also in our present day.
Americans inherited the knowledge and management skills of the business cycle mainly trading with foreign land. Europeans demanded planting crops like sugar, cotton, coffee and tobacco that provided them great profit thus, Native Americans pioneered production of plantation crops notably the succession of tobacco in Jamestown, Virginia introduced by an Englishman, John Rolfe. Inevitably, another aspect of European invasion was the adoption of their culture and traditions such as their religion, languages, arts, literature and music.
Each European nation has distinct culture transplanted to the people they colonized that formed “cultural identify of America consequent to the birth of the South or Latin Americans and sometimes the entire American continent including the Caribbean” (Mignolo, 2003).
References
Mignolo, Walter (2003). The Darker Side of the Renaissance : Literacy, Territoriality & Colonization. Ann Arbor, Michigan : University of Michigan Press. European Colonization Essay. Scribd. Retrieved May 12, 2009 from http://www. scribd. com/doc/604659/European-Colonization-Essay