Importance of Enlightenment to colonial history Essay

Importance of Enlightenment to colonial history - Essay Example Enlightenment principles contradicted colonial practices and were very instrumental in ending colonization. In the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, the legality of colonialism was a subject of argument among the British, French and German philosophers. Key enlightenment thinkers including Diderot, Kant and Smith challenged the notion that it was the responsibility of the Europeans to civilize the world and criticized the cruelty of colonialism. They further insisted that every person had the ability to reason and therefore capable of own government. As far as they were concerned, colonial supremacy was unethical because it entailed expropriation of belongings, forced labor and slavery all of which were against the principles of self governance. According to Diderot, a critic of European colonization, the idea that the colonized individuals gained as a result of civilization by the Europeans was absolutely mistaken and instead the uncivilized lot was the European colonists. He further opposed colonization by arguing that culture enhanced customs of respect and boosted morality in an individual. However, these norms have a propensity of being undermined when a person is far away from his nation of origin. Additionally, he supposed that in most cases, the colonial empires became the places of severe cruelty since the colonists were distant from the informal sanctions and legal institutions which made them not to exercise restraints, instead demonstrate man’s brutal nature at its worst. Some of the proponents of colonization in the seventeenth and sixteenth century, like the Spanish philosophers, wrongly justified colonization by arguing that it was a vital and necessary factor in the realization of the right to commerce. However, Diderot refuted this approach by stating that it was not right for the explorers and foreign traders to access already occupied lands. On the contrary, he noted that only the areas that had no human settlements were fit for