Broadly speaking, those who write on global issues sometime focus on human skin colour. In dealing with colour, they divide the world population in four groups: White, Brown, Yellow and Black. White is the dominant race in Europe.
Britain, a white country, led the area and conquered a good part of the world in the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Its conquest of North America and Australia led to the migration of white people to these continents who defeated the native-coloured populations and established governing structures that dominated the native inhabitants. In North America β in particular what eventually emerged as the United States of America β the European migrants converted vast tracts of lands to agricultures, growing cash crops such as tobacco.
But the economy that was created needed labour to farm the land. The needed workers were brought in from Africa as slaves by buying people from native well-to-do landowners and shipping them to America. Enslavement of large number of people created tensions within the colonised areas.
In the United States, this led to a civil war between the states in the north that had few black people and the states in the south that had large slave populations. Under the leadership of President Abraham Lincoln, the north won the war and slavery was abolished. However, it took decades before the freed black people won civil rights that were close to those enjoyed by the white population.
Australia was another conquered area to which the white migrant population moved as migrants, displacing the coloured natives. The next big coloured population is made up of the blacks in the continent of Africa. Most countries in the area were under the control of white colonial powers from Europe.
Independence movements in some of the countries in the continent led to their freeing and becoming independent. Scores of African countries arrived on the global scene as self-governing nations. In between the white and black people are people of colour β brown and yellow.
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