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SteampunkDesperado t1_j0o0itj wrote

You've hit the proverbial nail on the head. Certain intellectuals single out Europe because they hate Western Civilization, but Imperialism has been around since the dawn of civilization. If you restrict the definition to "spreading one's culture" as the previous commenter said, the archetypes would be China, Islam, Russia, Spain, and the USA. The 19th Century European colonial empires were mostly in the Roman mode, grabbing territory for resources and profit. If the colonized adopted French or English as their official languages, it wasn't from being "oppressed" but because it was a neutral alternative to the various local languages.

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AnaphoricReference t1_j0uqj02 wrote

The irony is that the notion of "Age of Imperialism" is part of a very Eurocentric storyline. It is when a handful of Western European countries started behaving like traditional land-grabbing empires of old for a brief period.

It is a fitting storyline for a British or French school system, explaining their history in broad strokes from their own perspective, but one would expect haters of Western Civilization to be less uncritically Eurocentric if they actually aimed for a more balanced understanding of world history.

Europeans did not invent "Imperialism" in any meaningful sense. They just repurposed a Latin word that sort of described an important dynamic in a historical period of their own country well.

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Dazzling-Plastic-465 t1_j0p3ebr wrote

Agree but I think China, Christianity and Islam are the prime examples. USA use culture as trading goods mostly which certainly has worked in terms of spread but then Swahili should be included as well, no?

Any definition of imperialism that miss the Mongols is silly in my mind. Percentage of humanity is related to someone who lived 800 years ago but this is somehow not worth mentioning.

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