In the beginning...

So. Today we received our third modern assessment task. We still haven't at this point actually completed our second one, but this one is worth almost a third of my final mark. That is a lot.

I have been contemplating what I will do for this task for quite a while now (since year 9 actually, or when I first decided that I would do modern history), yet now that i'm here I haven't been less sure of what I will do. I feel like I want to do a concept or something at a level of high complexity, simply for the fact that I also love philosophy; they unfortunately do not have a class for that.

I have a few ideas, such as;
- totalitarianism
- terrorism
- militarism
- decolonisation
- anarchism
- and imperialism

Now obviously, there are many examples in which many of those concepts cross over. Recently, i've had my sights set on imperialism, and the social, political and economic impacts of imperialism. I thought that by assessing those three areas of impact it would be possible to determine whether imperialism is good, bad or both.

Clearly, to do such a large concept as imperialism, or any of the above ideas, I would have to narrow my research down to a certain area that has been affected by it, or through the comparison of case studies.

With imperialism I could do something like focus on a certain country's quest for imperialism; like spain or france. Or I could look at a specific continent, like africa. I mean Europe was all over Africa in the 1800's, just look at this map!

I do think that map was from 1914, but I don't think it was much different in the 1800's. Whilst africa would be interesting, I think Mr Bradbury said that we can only do the bottom half ish... because the top like Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Abyssinia are touched on in the hsc course. I will have to question Africa as a potential research topic for imperialism. 

As I mentioned above, focusing on spain would also be interesting. If I did Spain, I would focus on the nature of imperialism in the Americas, or namely latin and south America. They did do a lot of conquering there (and stealing gold). It would be interesting too, as we've learnt about the native societies there and then their quest for independence which we touched on in our previous topic of the cuban revolution, but never middle bit; the actual impact of the spanish settlers. 

Either way, it will be an interesting task to engage in, and I hope to soon narrow it down to at least a continent.