What is power?

Power is a way to control a group of people through ideas, force or religion. Throughout this year we have studied different ways in which power has been used to control or lead people to achieve a goal. This essay will focus on some of the key things related to power we studied this year.

We first came across this point with the idea of the industrial revolution, were we explored how farmers had little power since they had close to no money, this lead to many farmers moving into cities to work in the new factories there. This did lead to them earning more money and in terms gaining more power, but as the poor got richer so did the rich. Since the rich now had more money they also had more power and they took advantage of this by spending the least amount of money possible on their workers to maximize their income. The more power you had the more power you wanted and that lead to countries like Great Britain to start colonizing other weaker countries this lead to the start of Imperialism.

Nations had limited recourses which were crucial to manufacture goods, so countries decided to colonize poor countries and to take their resources. Once again power comes in to play as every powerful nation races to Africa to find their needed resources. Now many of the most powerful countries had colonies to provide them with good but as the rich got rich and more powerful the poor got poorer. As you can see power can destroy lives and it did so again and again with great wars.

World War I left England as the strongest nation and it greatly contributed the USA’s economy but it also left Germany poor and starving. Hitler wasn’t ready to let his country die out so he took power of Germany and soon attempted to take over the world. His great ideas and brute force made him powerful and also filled his enemies with fear. But as we all now with “great power comes great responsibility” and Hitler wasn’t ready for that and thus he failed to lead. The Russian revolution was also lead by power as the peasants were deprived of it. They’re only hope was to take down the tsar and start a new government.

As you can see not much good can come from one person having all the power.

After finishing Population Project I've learned new ways to manage time more efficiently this would be very useful in the future when other projects like this come up. Another useful skill I've developed throughout this project is how to expand on my research and ideas to bring up new questions and answers, this would be useful since it helps bring ideas to a new level. A final skill I developed was researching in general since the right information isn't always easy to find and when sometimes it just isn't available. Since I encountered this many times I was able to find alternatives and possible solutions like finding new types of sources like interviews or museums.