In this week of the course, you will be studying imperialism. In the second half of the nineteenth century, in addition to realizing the dreams of national sovereignty on the European continent, many European political figures and nations came to the conclusion that to be a great nation required an empire. Now there were a lot of reasons why politicians came to such conclusions, especially in light of the earlier disastrous experiences that England and France had had with their overseas empires, but one key reason for the imperialist urge was the misunderstanding and misapplication of Darwin's theory of natural selection to the political, or social, environment. Many politicians came to the simplified conclusion that nations were much like animals, engaged in a struggle to survive and, borrowing very loosely from Darwin, only the fittest would survive. The mark of being fit was interpreted as the mark of having an empire, and so in the latter part of the century there was a sudden rush to control those parts of the world that had, up to that time, escaped direct European control, most specifically Africa. There was a scramble to divide up the spoils of Africa, a rush made more urgent by the discovery of diamonds and gold in the southern part of the continent in the 1880s. By the turn of the twentieth century, only the states of Liberia and Ethiopia had retained any semblance of independence on the African continent, and the spread of European control and domination to other areas of the world, such as South Asia, was also well underway. Your assignment for this week is the one-page paper based on your reading of Chinua Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart. This is a remarkable novel that very dramatically illustrated the impact that Europeans had on African society in the nineteenth century. The specific question is: Citing specific evidence from Things Fall Apart, how did the appearance of the European alter Ibo society? Please remember that you are reading Achebe as a historian and not as a literary critic; you are looking for specific areas of impact, such as in legal or religious affairs. Please do not just provide a list of ten effects, but provide in-depth explanation/analysis of just a few of the most important effects. Before writing the paper, you should review the style rules for history papers in the course. Your paper should include an introduction, paragraphs (each of which deals with a specific point you are trying to make) and quoted evidence from the text to support your analysis.