Bellringer: 09/14/09

1. Bellringer: 09/14/09 • To what extent do you think that your environment – neighborhood / family circumstances – determines or impacts your opportunities and success in the world?

2. Identity chart

3. “You can’t hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree.” – Malcolm X

4. Homework • Interview parents or guardian about whether they think a high quality job, the ability to live in a neighborhood that one chooses, affects the outcome of how a family’s child develops. Create your own 6 questions, record your answers – come prepared to share tomorrow.

5. Many scholars argue that one of the first great world civilizations, Egypt (inside of Africa), received its culture from Ethiopia, named after ‘land of the blacks.’ • The ancient Nubians were also neighbors and sometimes rivals to the Egyptians Nubia’s history stretches back to about 3900 B.C. A Nubian King Piye invaded and conquered Egypt around 740 B.C. establishing himself as the 25th Dynasty of Egypt, thereby adopting many Egyptian practices such as building pyramids and burial traditions.

6. In Europe giving a divine character to property was an Aryan custom, and in Rome, Greece, and India it led to the isolation from society of an entire group of people who had no family, no home, and no right of ownership. • In Greco Roman antiquity a foreigner was considered enemy number one, without rights, who could be easily killed and whose eyes made objects impure. He was punished with death if he touched a tomb or entered a sacred place.

7. It has been customary to consider slavery a specifically African phenomenon – but white men were in habit of reducing their own fellows to slavery. The serf of the Middle Ages was in terrible shape. • After contact with Africa in the 16th century, Europe progressively lost the custom of internal slavery and with superiority in arms - took advantage and substituted Black slaves. After contact with Europe Africa’s slavery problem suddenly got much worse

8. In 1530 in England under Henry VIII a vagrant picked up for the second time was whipped and had half an ear cut off: taken for a third time, he was “to be executed as a hardened criminal and enemy of the common weal.” Seventy two thousand vagrants were thus executed during that reign. • In the time of Edward VI (1547); “if anyone refused to work, he shall be condemned as a slave to the person who denounced him as an idler. The owner of such a slave might whip him, chain him, and brand him on the cheek and forehead with a letter S ( for Slave), if he disappeared for two weeks. If he ran away a third time he was executed.

9. African slaves not deported in general enjoyed living conditions incomparably better than those of white slaves in Europe. An ordinary slave of the Askia Daud, native of Kanta, took a pilgrimage to Mecca without his master’s knowledge – on his return his master tried to punish him, but the king pardoned him along with a hundred members of the tribe.

10. So How did Europeans Conquer technologically superior and economically advanced nations? Mercantilism: This theory or idea that colonies, or the establishment of satellite communities in far off lands, would give the home country raw materials that they could use to create products and sell back to colonies and other countries at a profit. Using this approach they always stayed on top.

11. Example of Mercantilism

12. In the late 1400s the Portuguese couldn’t dominate trade in Western Africa because many Africans didn’t want anything the Portuguese had to trade. However, they did have guns and ships and could force the Africans to trade and enrich their colonies. • That is why many African nations today still speak Portuguese as their official language like Angola, Mozambique, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Sao Tome, Cape Verde Islands

13. Age of Exploitation, I mean Exploration • In the Americas, Spain and Portugal competed to establish colonies and steal the riches of the indigenous. • 1492 Columbus took gold and enslaved Indians in __________

14. 1517 Pizarro did the same to the Inca in ____

15. 1521 & Cortes did the same to the ______ in _______.

16. The Portuguese Cabral – went around the cape of Africa, into India for spices in 1501

17. GNP & GNP per capita • We want to figure out if all this global highway robbery conducted by the likes of Spain, Portugal and later France, England, Germany and the Netherlands has resulted in different outcomes for countries throughout the world. • Therefore a couple of concepts are especially important. • GNP and GNP per capita.

18. Gross National Product is the total value added from domestic and foreign sources claimed by residents of a country. In other words it is GDP (Gross Domestic Product, the value of goods and services produced within a country) plus net income received by residents from non-resident sources. GNP/capita is the total divided by the number of people in the country. In other words, GNP/capita is a measure of national income per person.