Points in a Learning Game

A twist in this learning contest is how teams can earn even more natural, military, sociocultural, or national will points to spend. Imperialism is a complex topic, and each country is an entire class of learners in competition with other classes. Classes can earn additional points in these four areas by doing research. They can earn natural resource points by generating content that reveals information about the nations that were colonized. For example, a fact sheet on The Gambia might be wo...

 Profiting on Asteroids

Some of the first questions which come up in any practical discussion of space colonization are questions of economics. Suppose we go out and settle on a convenient asteroid with our little spaceship, what do we do when we get there? How do we make a living? What can we expect to export in order to pay for necessary imports? If space colonization makes any sense at all, these questions must have sensible answers. Unfortunately, we cannot hope to answer questions of economics until the asteroi...

 The British Empire Circled the World

With the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 the British Empire won "the world's power structures championship" and became historically the first empire "upon which," it was said, "the sun never sets." This is because it was the first empire in history to embrace the entire spherical planet Earth's 71-per¬ cent maritime, 29-percent landed, wealth-producing activities. All previous empires—Genghis Khan's, Alexander the Great's, the Romans', et al.— were unified European, North African, and Asian-...

 Taxonomy as Colonial Imperialism

Coleridge pointed to this difference between an organising taxonomy and a dynamic scientific principle or law in essays in The Friend (1819). The psychology of collecting, ordering and naming specimens could also be seen as a form of mental colonising and empire-building. ‘Taxonomy after all, is a form of imperialism. During the nineteenth century, when British naval surveys were flooding London with specimens to be classified, inserting them in their proper niches in the Linnaean hierarchy...