In the summer of 1816, just a year after Napoleon's decisive defeat at the Battle of Waterloo and the "second chance" for the recently reascended Bourbon monarchy, the "low moment in French history" that was the Bourbon restoration was marred by the crash of a French naval frigate, the Medusa, carrying the newly-appointed governor of Senegal (Athanassoglou-Kallmyer 811). "France had only just reacquired its West African territories in the treaty that finally ended the Napoleonic Wars," and so the rapid installation of a new governor was paramount in demonstrating the new regime's control over its empire (Brandt 171)
In the summer of 1816, just a year after Napoleon's decisive defeat at the Battle of Waterloo and the "second chance" for the recently reascended Bourbon monarchy, the "low moment in French history" that was the Bourbon restoration was marred by the crash of a French naval frigate, the Medusa, carrying the newly-appointed governor of Senegal (Athanassoglou-Kallmyer 811). "France had only just reacquired its West African territories in the treaty that finally ended the Napoleonic Wars," and so the rapid installation of a new governor was paramount in demonstrating the new regime's control over its empire (Brandt 171)
Gericault's desire was undoubtedly to sell the painting either to a private buyer or the government, but "the size of the painting made it impossible to sell to private buyers and its subject matter had no appeal to a conservative royalist government," so it went into storage in his studio (Isham 168). However, this did not mean that his hope that the painting would be "a catalyst for political reform" failed to come true; rather, he simply died before seeing the true fruits of his work, when, just over a decade later, the Bourbon monarchy was once again overthrown (Galenson 103)
Thus, while Charles' ascendancy may represent the generalize ascendancy of the Other, one cannot get around the fact that it also represents a direct rebuke to the colonialist tendency, and even more specifically, a rebuke to Julien Schmaltz, who abandoned Charles and the other to die so that he might take up his post as the avatar of French colonialism. This is why one cannot view Charles' ascension to the top of the raft as entirely hopeful, the "radically democratic vision of a collective body that rises from its martyrdom to support society's most marginalized constituent, the black man, at its apex" (Grigsby 168)
When looking at the first few years of the Bourbon restoration, one can see the beginnings of this almost inevitable decline even as the restored monarchy attempted to portray itself with the same pomp and glory that had marked Napoleon's imperial reign and the old monarchy which had preceded him. The Bourbon restoration began with an inauspicious start, when, "after enduring but little over ten months the restored Monarchy had collapsed like a pack of cards," as Napoleon returned from exile and Louis XVIII was forced to flee (Hall 70)
One of the dead men is only visible from the waist up, representing one of those "unhappy wretches, having their lower extremities entangled in the openings between the pieces of the raft," while the other's body is almost entirely visible, naked and splayed (Savigny & Correard 181). The more visible of the two seems to be cradled by an older man, and indeed, various critics have "taken [this] to be a father grieving the death of his son" (Harris 602)
The Raft of the Medusa was his first major work, and was exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1819 as part of a massive installation sponsored by Louis XVIII; "his choice was careful and methodical: this was a subject matter he considered suitable for an ambitious painting with which he could win the Prix de Rome" (Deligiori 613). Gericault's desire was undoubtedly to sell the painting either to a private buyer or the government, but "the size of the painting made it impossible to sell to private buyers and its subject matter had no appeal to a conservative royalist government," so it went into storage in his studio (Isham 168)
It would not be until two years later, when the published account of two of the survivors inspired a young painter to immortalize the events, would the full impact of the raft of the Medusa be felt. The painter, Theodore Gericault, imbued his image with political imagery, and the Raft of the Medusa may be interpreted as a direct critique of the bungling, haphazard governance of the Bourbon regime, a critique that predicts the crumbling of imperial power over the course of the Bourbon restoration and the "bloody class war" that would ultimately result in a second revolution (Ledbury 608)
As will be seen, these two men represented on a micro-scale the indifference, incompetence, and cronyism that would come to characterize the Bourbon regime and ultimately lead to the final downfall of the monarchy in 1830. For all intents and purposes, Chaumareys should not have been captaining the Medusa at all; "determined to exclude naval officers who had served under Napoleon, [French Minister of the Marine] Dubouchage made his selection on the basis of de Chaumareys' aristocratic pedigree and pro-Bourbon sympathies, and not on his merits as a sea captain," which were likely negligible considering that "at the time the Medusa set sail in June 1816, de Chaumareys had not served on board a French ship for twenty years" (Riding 38)
Later, Governor Schmaltz would attempt to explain the abandonment of the raft by saying that: Some men were on the front of the raft, at the place where the towrope was fixed, which they pulled so as to draw the boat nearer to them; they had already pulled several fathoms of it to them, but a wave coming, gave a violent shock; these men were obliged to let go: the boats proceeded more rapidly, till the rope was stretched; at the moment when the boats effected this tension the effort was such, that the rope broke. (Savigny & Correard 175-176)
In reality, the image is far more nuanced, and argues that any hope for the future must take into account the atrocities of the past, and perhaps even consume and subsume those atrocities in order to overcome them. For example, Jack Spector focuses on the image of Jean Charles, arguing that he "represents the repressed and socially passive Others who move to the top and reveal themselves as active members of the group" (Spector 33)
html)." SIMILARITIES The main similarity between globalization and colonialism is the fact that it is economically driven and nonmilitary by nature (Massey, 2004)
Violence was an extremely common, vicious, and long-running part of colonialism and its resonating forces in the country that is now South Africa, comprised of an area that combines the ancestral homelands of a number of different peoples and cultures (USDOS 2011). As Frantz Fanon asserts in his book the Wretched of the Earth (2004), violence can have a unifying effect on otherwise disparate groups of people, and this occurred in South Africa to some extent up until the middle of the twentieth century (Boddy-Evans 2011)
At the same time, the situation in South Africa was not as simple as a black-and-white issue. In many nations, the conflict that led from colonization to liberation was typified by a binary opposition between native and imperial forces, which automatically broke along racial lines as well (Pontecorvo 1966)
Finally, the 1990s saw the release of political prisoners including Nelson Mandela, a lifting of the ban on Afro-centric political parties, and in 1994 the election of Mandela as President and the establishment of a new constitution (USDOS 2011). US Policy Throughout the majority of South Africa's struggle for independence, the United States had relatively warm relationships with the white governments in existence there, first due to the country's place within the British Empire, and then as a Europeanized country and ally despite its location on the African continent (Urofsky 2011)
Gregory Gause writes that the security situations in certain Middle Eastern states have been quite shaky since the end of the colonial control that European powers held. That is because the European colonialists left behind "states with little or nor history" along with limited governing apparatus and few military capabilities (Gause, 1992, 441)
This paper will review and critique two countries in the Middle East that came under the colonial authority of European nations -- Iran and Egypt. The Literature on Impacts of European Colonial Activity: David Seddon describes colonialism as the "process and later the system" through which the powers in Europe "intervened in, occupied, settled and defined as 'colonies'" (Seddon, 2004)
In the 19th Century European states had already seized and controlled colonies in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere but the Middle East had "never been systematically colonized" with the possible exception of France in Algeria and Egypt. But as the oil industry was developed in the Middle East, due to the impetus of "capitalist investors, large companies and foreign governments," Middle Eastern rules were more and more aware "and disturbed by what appeared to be a new form of indirect imperialism" (Social Studies School Service, 2002)
Stockwell, writing in History Today. "Advocates of firm government at home and abroad were morally outraged" that the British didn't use full military force in the matter, and basically gave the canal to Nasser (Stockwell, 2006)
That "imperialism" was actually colonialization and the motive was to make "huge profits" from "guaranteed oil supplies" (Social Studies School Service). By the close of the 19th Century, England had "successfully colonized much of India," the French (led by Napoleon Bonaparte) colonized Egypt two years before the 19th Century (1798), and France invaded Algeria in 1830 and began its occupation of Tunisia in 1881 (Zayd, et al