Title: ﻿The European conquest of the world - Global Learning
Headings: 
﻿The European conquest of the world
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Content: The strategy then became the denial of the importance of colonialism, presenting it as a phenomenon of the past and as not central to the development of the world-system. The colonial denial is supported in two ways: the fragmentation of the academic disciplines in higher education, preventing the emergence of a comprehensive understanding that discerns the role of colonialism in the economic development of Europe and that perceives the survival of colonial economic structures in the neocolonial world-system; and the development of a consumer society, distracting the people and undermining possibility for an informed popular understanding of human history and global dynamics. The colonial denial is central to the difference between European and Third World perspectives. Whereas Europe and the European settler societies deny the significance of colonialism, the colonized peoples of the world are not able to forget the colonial transformation, and they consider it their duty to remember. Whereas in Europe it is assumed that Western economic and technological advances are explained by cultural characteristics, the colonized understand colonialism and neocolonialism to be central to European development and Third World underdevelopment. Whereas public discourse in Europe rarely refers to colonialism and neocolonialism, public officials and political figures in the Third World regularly name colonialism as an important part of their present reality. The fundamental difference between European and Third World perspectives is their vastly different levels of consciousness of colonialism and of the colonial situation in which the vast majority of persons in the world live. The European colonial denial is a distortion.