英语专业论文范文(2)
2.1 The Colonization of Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution
As the sun-never-setting empire, the British Empire started the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and the 19th centuries. The British Industrial Revolution, which has been understood to have invented an appliance of various machines in mass-production and the transformation of Britain from a rural and agricultural country into a mainly urban and manufacturing one, was benefited a great deal from large-scale colonization, including both foreign expansion and aggression. During that time, in order to meet the demands of efficient raw materials and cheap labor, the British Empire went through two processes: aggression against national states and annexation of isolated or sparsely-populated wild area. Countries like China and India belonged to the former one, while thinly-populated America and Oceania belonged to the latter one.
After the Industrial Revolution, Britain became the workshop of the world. In its heyday, the British Empire occupied almost one-fifth of the world’s total main land. Controlling an area as large as itself, Britain ruled over a population of 56 million. As it went on, it was no doubted that the English language was spread all over the English colonies, even the whole globe. Even now, so far as the extent to which a language is geographically dispersed is concerned, English deserves a title of the world’s most important language. It is being used in many countries as their native language, in some other countries, at the same time, as the second language. From a fact that about 80% of annual scientific research papers are published in English all over the world, and it became acknowledged that it is the result of historical colonization of the British Empire, the largest empire that history has ever witnessed. What’s more, some authors also said that Britain made English an international language during 19th century. This suggests that Britain indeed make great contribution to the globalization of English, although by an indecent way of developing colonization. In other words, reaching every corner of the world with the British colonizers is the English language.
