Colonialism and Conquest: An Examination of the Effects of Travel on Cultural Monuments
When we think of travel, the visions in our minds are typically of jet-setting across the globe, passports in hand and museum tickets purchased. The modern day idea of voyaging is not where humanity’s traveling started, though. For thousands of years, humans have been traversing the lands of Earth, discovering new cultures, languages, and environments along the way. The journey of homo sapiens took a turn for the worse, however, in the time of colonialism. Gone were the days of survival as explorers conquered the Western World, as history changed forevermore. It comes as no surprise that the effects of colonialism on the hundreds of cultures across the globe have been a hot topic over the last few decades; what is surprising, however, is that this issue has been widely discussed for centuries. In his pinnacle work, originally published in 1814, Baron de Vastey, a strict advocate for Haitian independence from the colonization of France, stated to colonists: “Take up your history book, read the story of your origins, observe the customs of your ancestors.” His goal was to make colonists see the degradation they had wrought on cultural monuments and systems around the world. Vastey’s sentiment is echoed in countless other narratives of colonial conquest and its effects on cultural structures. In her novel, Among the White Moon Faces, Malaysian author Shirley Geok-lin Lim acknowledges that “corruption is inherent in every culture, if we think of corruption as a will to break out… and thus to change.” This idea is simultaneously reflected in the recipient of the International Booker Prize, Chinua Achebe’s, novel There Was a Country, in which he writes: “A long-standing clash of Western and African civilizations had generated deep conversations and struggles between their respective languages, religions, and cultures.” But what does all of this scholarly text mean, exactly, in the context of colonialism, culture, and travel? Essentially, it means that “people from different parts of the world can respond
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to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.” While that sounds like a positive opportunity for growth, it isn’t always the case. While Achebe is correct in his statement that one can learn and grow from the experience of a “story,” or cultural phenomenon, that same person can regress and take advantage of the situation. Take the Parthenon for example. This ancient temple is the pinnacle of Greece’s history; a remnant of the Golden Age of Athens and the famed commission of Pericles in response to the politics of fifth century Greece, the Parthenon is one of the most well-known cultural monuments in modern day. However, does one truly know the complete history of the Parthenon? The building may have started out as a temple to Athena, but it has lived through many different lives in many different cultures. According to the British Museum, the Parthenon “has been a temple, a church, a mosque and is now an archaeological site.” Upon learning this fact, readers may question where the remnants of Christianity and Islam are in this Greek temple. The answer lies in the classic war over territory that is colonialism. According to PBS, after Greece fell to the Byzantine Empire in the sixth century, the Parthenon underwent key structural changes in order to be converted into a Christian church. Moreover, with the conquering by the Ottoman Empire in 1458, the building was transformed into a Muslim mosque, resulting in more artistic additions to the structure. These modifications to the ancient structure were not the end, however. The Parthenon underwent bombings, looting, and failed rebuildings in the next few centuries, leading to the important ethical question: when is inteference with ancient history and its cultural monuments an overstep? Some would return to the words of Lim, in which she states that “corruption is inherent in every culture,” and that changes, whether morally good or bad, will happen. Others, on the opposite side of the
