Evaluation Of The Benefits Of The Technological Progress Of Europe For The World

The technological progress of Europe had an immense impact on the world today. New knowledge has allowed people to create new things and many inventions were made possible by technology. The technological progress of Europe was beneficial to a great extent due to the improvement in communication and medicine, however genocide was detrimental to technological progress. Beneficial can clarify as improvements for the colonies. The technological progress of Europe was beneficial on account of the progress in communication. The idea of long-distance communication started in the 17 and 18 centuries. This soon became a reality, “By 1895 his work had enabled him to send a wireless signal about a mile and a half. [. . . ] By 1901, Marconi successfully sent a wireless message across the Atlantic Ocean. [. . . ] For example, the Marconi Telegraph Company had the communications contract with White Star Lines and was responsible for sending the SOS call that alerted other ships that the Titanic had struck an iceberg”.

As described, Guglielmo Marconi was successful in making a wireless communication form. He was able to use his invention to send out alerts to other ships quickly when the Titanic collided with an iceberg. His invention was very useful in times of need. Also, hundreds of letters were sent and received each day so it was a slow process. This was an improvement for the colonies because they were now able to communicate with people from long distances. Before this, the people could only communicate with letters that took months to reach the final destination. Furthermore, communication was scarce when it came to the time it took, “For most of the nineteenth century, correspondence sent to and from the Residency was copied by hand into correspondence copy books, by a team of clerks and munshis. Their work was facilitated by a constant supply of blotting paper, quills, black ink power, shining sand and Indian rubbers”. Books and anything that would be printed today had a great deal of work put into them because it had to be done individually. Although they had a considerable amount of work put into them they were slow in the making. Telephones were such a big change and more efficient that they changed people's lives. Communication before the telephone was very slow and ineffective so when telephones were introduced it was such an improvement to the colonies. In addition, communication flourished in the 1800s, “People could learn about events in towns and cities from all over by subscribing to papers from other places. [. . . ] Of course, one of the biggest technological breakthroughs of all time may be the telephone, which became a prime method of communication between individuals starting 1876”. Communication had an immense impact on people's lives because long distance communicating was now open to the public. Communication was useful proven that telephones were one of the biggest technological breakthroughs. People were now able to learn about new places, talk to people from long distances, and the telephone was much more efficient. Communication was a big improvement to the colonies because the telephone was quicker to tell someone something rather than sending a letter to someone which could take months for the person to retrieve.

The progress in communication contributed to the beneficial technological progress in Europe as well as the development in medicine. Life expectancy has multiplied rapidly since the Enlightenment. Medicine can help life expectancy, for instance, “To see how life expectancy has improved without taking child mortality into account we therefore have to look at the prospects of a child who just survived their 5th birthday: in 1841 a 5-year old could expect to live 55 years. Today a 5-year old can expect to live 82 years. An increase of 27 years”. Medicine has improved exceedingly since the 1800s. Medical service and modern medicine has been improving to a great extent. Over the years when medicine was improving they were able to add 27 years to a person's life. Medicine improves the colonies because due to this the population can increase again and the medicine helps the health of many people. In addition, serious diseases that once killed thousands each year have been almost removed all over the world because of the use of vaccinations, “Before antibiotics, 90% of children with bacterial meningitis died. Among those children who lived, most had severe and lasting disabilities, from deafness to mental retardation. Strep throat was at times a fatal disease, and ear infections sometimes spread from the ear to the brain, causing severe problems. Other serious infections, from tuberculosis to pneumonia to whooping cough, were caused by aggressive bacteria that reproduced with extraordinary speed and led to serious illness and sometimes death”. Before antibiotics most children could not escape illness. 90% of the children with meningitis died. Getting a disease was high but dying from a disease was higher. Medicine was without a doubt a tremendous improvements for the colonies because they helped save people from death so their population grew. The population growing was a positive because they had more workers.

The progress in the technological progress in Europe was beneficial due to the progress in communication and development in medicine but it was also detrimental because of genocide. There was mass murder all the time during colonization, “He turned his 'Congo Free State' into a massive labour camp, made a fortune for himself from the harvest of its wild rubber, and contributed in a large way to the death of perhaps 10 million innocent people”. The Belgians and Leopold II contributed to 10 million deaths so they can be wealthy. They used the labor of all of the scared workers to sell the manufactured goods. The congo killed and injured so many africans that the population started to decrease. This was the opposite of improvement for the colonies because innocent people were being killed so the other workers will use that as motivation to work harder and faster. A lot of innocent people were being killed,

“The day after, right after the sun rose up on the hill, an important group of soldiers got into the village. They rushed into the houses and threw everybody out by force. Three or four of them got into our house and seized me as well as my husband Oleka and my sister Katinga. They tied us together with ropes by the neck in order to prevent us to escape and dragged us on the road. Everybody was crying because we all knew we were taken to be slaves. We were beaten by the soldiers with iron sticks and their rifles and forced to walk until Kibalanga’s camp, where he ordered to shackle women separately, by groups of ten by rope, and men the same way. When we were all gathered – and we figured out then that there were a lot of people from other villages and from Waniendo – the soldiers brought us baskets filled with food to carry, inside certain of which there was human smoked flesh. ”

This is an example of a African families normal life during imperialism. The belgians mistreated and beat the Africans constantly. The belgians threw innocent people out of their houses and wrapped them on ropes. Genocide was detrimental and undoubtedly not an improvement for the colonies.