Compare And Contrast Columbus And Friedman

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There goes Christopher Columbus, sailing through the rough wind and waves. After days of travel, he finally sees the land himself. With this journey, he would have found the way to get to India by not traditional East route, but by a Westerly route. As he gets close to the shore, he would have thought in a way Thomas L. Friedman has thought in the recent age. “Was this the New World, the Old World, or the Next World?” (Friedman 663). Columbus was searching for India, and he reached America. Friedman found America while he was in India. One may have thought that the discoveries of Columbus and Friedman have similarity; the beginning and the ongoing proof of globalization. I see something more. I see not only the globalization but also the beginning…show more content…
In other words, colonization and imperialism actively existed on the surface in the history, and they still exist passively but deep inside of the cultures. Friedman explains his visiting India as searching for the sources of India’s riches. He says that he wanted to understand “why the Indians [he] met were taking [American people’s] work, why they had become such an important pool for the outsourcing of service” (Friedman 664). His words seem to be mere sentences that develop his ideas; however, those sentences rather reveal Friedman’s assumption that the United States has or had power over India. Friedman later says that Columbus was “happy to make the Indians he met his slaves, a pool of free manual labor” (Friedman 664). On the same note, Krishna offers a different view that: “with the very discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus in 1492 in whose wake emerged both genocide of the indigenous populations and the slavery of Africans brought to work in the New World” (Krishna 67). Friedman argued that Columbus has made the world smaller. He correlates slavery as a sort of globalization, but what more clearly visible is the imperialism; England’s power stretching out to destroy the Indian culture. What Friedman tells as a way to express the opening of globalization in fact is the period of “a Short History of the Destruction of the Indies” (Krishna 67) referring to

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