O-27

Those who colonize are known as the “external force”, and this external force means that
they are the ones who are in control over those being colonized. A perfect example of this was
when the British invaded India. Even before the British came, Indians already had adopted the
caste system, which separates Indians/Hindus into four different social classes (Kerbo, 2010).
However, due to the colonization of the British, they were encouraged to marry Indian women
(Blunt, 1999). Because of this, the caste system proved to be insignificant, as interracial families
were becoming more evident. On the other hand, all of this went to a halt as the downfall of the
British empire came to be. Alongside this, Blunt also gives attention to middle-class women
called “incorporated wives” whom married to army officers and civil servants which resulted to
an imperialist mentality on a domestic scale (“Blunt”, 4). Blunt stated that this was necessary for
a colonizer to assert its dominance over the colonized, it must also start in the household level
wherein women had a key role of maintaining imperial power on a household scale and not just
see a woman in a home as nothing but a housewife who cannot do anything else except
household chores. Furthermore, middle-class British women were also given their roles when it
came to maintain an imperialistic mindset through household guides, cookery books, periodicals
and novels (“Blunt”, 6). This shows how the British were able to assert their superiority through
a private level.
In Micheal Dols’ journal article entitled “Plague in Early Islamic History” it shows how
the external force does not always have to be the colonizer. Here it shows how Muslims had to
deal with the rise of epidemics that were not only killing more and more of them, but also testing
their society’s religious beliefs. With this, it has provoked all medical and religion legal tenets
explanations to a Muslims idea of diseases. (“Dols”, 3) In addition to this it has directly affected
on of the three religio legal tenets (“Dols”, 8). The second religio-legal tenet interpretation of
plague is “a Muslim should neither enter nor flee a plague-stricken land”, and people were
starting to question whether to stick to what they believe in or save themselves from the
epidemic. Many went against the second religio-legal tenet and fled going from city to city to
escape the plagues, but little did they know they were the cause of the plague spreading even
more and ultimately, their death.
With the two examples above, it is given that the external forces that influence a society
may be perceived differently and may take different forms. Although, these external forces may
devastate already established civilizations, one must discern that power and/or authority already
existed upon the unsettlement of beliefs and conventional acts by well-established civilizations.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blunt, Alison. “Imperial Geographies of Home: British Domesticity in India, 1886-1925.”

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 24, no. 4, 1999, pp. 421–440.
JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/623233.

Dols, Michael W. “Plague in Early Islamic History.” Journal of the American Oriental Society,
vol. 94, no. 3, 1974, pp. 371–383. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/600071.

Deshpande, Manali S. HISTORY OF THE INDIAN CASTE SYSTEM AND ITS IMPACT ON
INDIA TODAY, 2010, pp. 1–35., digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/.