Belgian Congo Imperialism

In some ways Imperialism made the life of the native people better by building and maintaining new infrastructure that the natives didn’t have before. With the new infrastructure the natives were able to lead longer and happier lives with more amenities provided by things like libraries and hospitals.In India the railroad system put in place by the British is still running and useful today as are many of the roads and hospitals. These services and India’s huge population has led to India being one of the premier economies in the world today. However in the Belgian Congo these improvements were more temporary with very few being serviceable today, and even the ones that are serviceable do not offer much of a service to the natives because of the enormous limits on where they can go and what they can do. This is
This made life worse because it starved the natives and the cash from the cash crops was not given to them so they couldn’t even buy other necessities. In India the local farmers were told they had to produce a certain amount of things like indigo or peanuts or they would be killed, so they planted the required amount of these crops. Then they tried to survive of the minimal wage given to them by the europeans and whatever other crops they grew in secret, sometimes it worked, a lot of times it didn’t. In the Belgian Congo there were many similar practices but the punishments were harsher, as said before, hands were cut off of people frequently to make the natives fear the Europeans. It had great success in making the native’s lives scarier harder and with more hunger, as they were not growing things for food they were growing things to pay as tribute to the Europeans. This shows that the europeans made life much harder and shorter for the natives by forcing them to starve and grow cash crops for them instead of growing what they needed to have