--- title: When civilizations meet: conquest, colonies and freedom, seen from both sides — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «When civilizations meet: conquest, colonies and freedom, seen from both sides», a lesson of the history course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Imagine a stranger walks into your house, plants a flag in the kitchen and announces he has --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/76-when-civilizations-meet-seen-from-both-sides/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/) / When civilizations meet: conquest, col… # When civilizations meet: conquest, colonies and freedom, seen from both sides Lesson 76 of the history course of Mova's primary school: 17 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/history/76-when-civilizations-meet-seen-from-both-sides/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/76-when-civilizations-meet-seen-from-both-sides/0/) — Imagine a stranger walks into your house, plants a flag in the kitchen and announces he has «discovered» it while your family is eating dinner; that is why many teachers now put a question mark after «Columbus discovered America»: millions of people already lived there, and for them 1492 was an arrival, then an invasion. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/76-when-civilizations-meet-seen-from-both-sides/1/) — In Europa Universalis you colonise «empty» provinces with a few natives in them, and a handful of conquistadors can take an empire; real conquests needed local allies who hated their old rulers, and diseases that the newcomers did not even understand. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/76-when-civilizations-meet-seen-from-both-sides/2/) — Empires look different from each side: one grandad remembers railways, another remembers famines, and historians still argue how to weigh the good and the harm; both stories can be partly true at once. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/76-when-civilizations-meet-seen-from-both-sides/3/) — The story also has peoples who fought back and won, like Ethiopia at Adwa and the Haitians who freed themselves, countries that kept free by clever deals, like Siam, and non-European empires too, like Japan in Korea. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/76-when-civilizations-meet-seen-from-both-sides/4/) — A fair historian listens for both sides, uses words carefully, and remembers that the people on the map were people, not numbers. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/76-when-civilizations-meet-seen-from-both-sides/5/) — People reached the Americas at least 15,000 years ago, and millions lived there in 1492 in cities, farms and villages; Norse sailors had reached Newfoundland around 1000, and Columbus began lasting contact between Europe and the Americas. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/76-when-civilizations-meet-seen-from-both-sides/6/) — Hernán Cortés had a few hundred Spanish soldiers but tens of thousands of Indigenous allies, such as the Tlaxcalans, who hated Aztec rule; smallpox struck the Aztec capital in 1520, and the allies later found themselves under Spanish rule. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/76-when-civilizations-meet-seen-from-both-sides/7/) — By 1914 almost all of Africa was ruled by European countries; Ethiopia defeated an Italian army at Adwa in 1896 and stayed independent, as did Liberia, though Italy occupied Ethiopia from 1936 to 1941. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/76-when-civilizations-meet-seen-from-both-sides/8/) — Britain ruled most of India from 1858 to 1947, after the East India Company; it built railways and courts, but took wealth, and several terrible famines happened, and historians still argue how to weigh the good and the harm. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/76-when-civilizations-meet-seen-from-both-sides/9/) — India won independence in 1947 after a long movement, with Gandhi leading non-violent protest, and was split into India and Pakistan, which forced millions of people to leave their homes. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/76-when-civilizations-meet-seen-from-both-sides/10/) — Between 1945 and 1975 dozens of colonies in Africa and Asia became independent; Ghana in 1957 is often called the first in sub-Saharan Africa to free itself from colonial rule, though Sudan, independent in 1956, is sometimes counted first. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/76-when-civilizations-meet-seen-from-both-sides/11/) — Japan avoided European rule and built its own empire, ruling Taiwan from 1895 and Korea from 1910 until 1945; in some years Koreans were pushed to use Japanese names and language. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/76-when-civilizations-meet-seen-from-both-sides/12/) — Siam, now Thailand, stayed independent between British and French colonies through skilled diplomacy, clever talks and deals with both, but gave up some lands to keep the rest. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/76-when-civilizations-meet-seen-from-both-sides/13/) — Enslaved people in Haiti rose up in 1791 and won independence in 1804, making the first Black republic; in 1825 France forced Haiti to pay a huge sum before France would accept it as a free country, and the debt took Haiti over a century to pay off. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/76-when-civilizations-meet-seen-from-both-sides/14/) — Cree syllabics were developed in the 1840s by the missionary James Evans with Cree speakers, and some Cree tell that the script came from a Cree man; missionaries brought schools and writing but often banned local customs and languages. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/76-when-civilizations-meet-seen-from-both-sides/15/) — After the conquest, Nahua writers working with the Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún recorded Aztec memories of the conquest in the Florentine Codex. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/76-when-civilizations-meet-seen-from-both-sides/16/) — British soldiers took the Benin Bronzes from the Kingdom of Benin, in today's Nigeria, in 1897; in 2022 Germany agreed to return over a thousand of them and began handing some back. - ← previous: [Ideas on the move: numbers, paper, letters, chess and news](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/75-ideas-on-the-move-numbers-paper-letters-chess-and-news/) - next →: [What was lost and what was gained: languages, foods, music and knowledge](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/77-what-was-lost-and-what-was-gained/) - ↑ back to [History](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/history/)