Before The Age of the Donald - by Dave Jaffe : Part Nineteen

          Before the Age of the Donald - Part Nineteen


         More than 500 years before the Donald became the 45th president of the United States, the world started to take its present shape. John Judis is an American political analyst. He sees the world as a heirarchy. The U.S., he says, sits at the top of the world as the globe's most powerful nation and all the other countries lie below it.
     Judis is right, at least at this date of late 2016. In the last 500 years the nations at the top have changed places. "In 1492," went an old rhyme, "Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Christopher Columbus helped start what's called 'The Age of Discovery'. Yet it should more truthfully called 'The Age of the White Man's Imperialism'. Soon after Columbus and his ships landed on an island in the Caribbean, Spain  sat at the top of the global heap. Yet then Holland pushed Spain aside and took over the top spot.
      After that France then led the pack. In the 19th century it was Great Britain's turn to edge out the others. "Rule Britannia," British youngsters used to sing when I was a child. "Britannia rules the waves." But by then in 1950 the United States had strode forward to rule the roost and the waves. Its position at the top seemed secure especially when its main rival, the communist-ruled Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
    "We won the Cold War with the Soviet Union," one American told me. "Now we're number one in the world." Yet maybe the U.S. won't be number one for long. Now China has emerged as the second most powerful nation on earth.  Will this be good or bad for the world's people? If the past is any guide, it may be no worse or better than when other countries headed the pack.
    Let's take a quick look back at things other countries did when they were number one or two or three on the list of top dogs. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Spanish conquistadores sailed all over the globe, colonizing one group of peoples after another. Hernan Cortes landed in present day Mexico and killed thousands of Aztec tribes people. Then he and others turned Mexico into a colony of Spain. A few years later Pizarro conquered Peru for Spain while slaughtering thousands of Inca indigenous people.
     Then Portugal took a huge slice of what is now South America and turned that land into a colony. To-day this former colony is called Brazil.  Spain ended up ruling the rest of South and Central America. Dutch privateers and merchants seized thousands of islands in the Pacific Ocean. To-day those islands are called Indonesia. Holland also became rich from trade which included trading many slaves from Africa. The Dutch weren't the only ones doing this. Business people from Britain, France, Spain and other European countries made fortunes in trading slaves.
     This was truly the Age of European imperialism.