ABSTRACT
The enormous global impact and relative power of Europe and later the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is undeniable. Europeans increasingly penetrated various parts of the world, spreading European knowledge, introducing technologies, establishing European institutions, expanding trade relations, and increasing their knowledge of what had hitherto been unknown to them. The strengths and advantages of their technology and institutions made European political and military dominance over vast amounts of the globe possible. 1 Later, from the turn of the twentieth century onward, the United States would begin to assert its political and economic power in global affairs and make efforts to export its technologies, institutions, and policies. It is commonplace to discuss the path of non-Western societies as they fought for and gained independence from their imperialist overseers as a process whereby they sought to gain the same advanced ideas, institutions and technologies, and eventually to use them against the West. This is, of course, to a great extent true. Forms of knowledge imported from the imperialists could eventually be used against those commanding political power. Although recent scholarship has increasingly questioned whether the spread of these ideas, institutions, and technologies can be so easily separated from the history of imperialism, few would deny that many of these Western exports - technological advances,
spread of democracy, capitalist development - remain a hope embraced by many people.
