Political Institutions and Democracy in the Dominican Republic. A Comparative Case-Study

White English colonists did not create a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy in Australia. Instead, they imported all of the elements from outside Australia: the livestock, all of the crops (except macadamia nuts), the metallurgical knowledge, the steam engines, the guns, the alphabet, the political institutions, even the germs. All these were the end products of 10,000 years of development in Eurasian environments. By an accident of geography, the colonists who landed at Sydney in 1788 inherited those elements. Europeans have never learned to survive in Australia or New Guinea without their inherited Eurasian technology. Robert Burke and William Wills were smart enough to write, but not smart enough to survive in Australian desert regions where Aborigines were living. The people who did create a society in Australia were Aboriginal Australians. Of course, the society that they created was not a literate, food-producing, industrial democracy. The reasons follow straightforwardly from features of the Australian environment. CHAPTER16 How china became chinese IMMIGRATION, AFFIRMATIVE ACTION, MULTILINGUALISM, ethnic diversity—my state of California was among the pioneers of these controversial policies and is now pioneering a backlash against them ...»