Heart of Darkness Introduction

In class today we talked about European Colonialism. I actually find this time period pretty interesting, so I am excited about reading this book. I learned the difference between colonialism, which is where the mother country actually has people settling there, and imperialism, which is where  the country just kind of takes over but doesn't have people living there. I also learned about Marxism and Leninism as economic theories as to why colonialism happened. These economic theories say that colonialism and imperialism happened because European countries wanted to export their economic problems to other countries. Companies would make their products, but after a while the market would become saturated because everyone would have the product. So it was good to colonize other places because companies would have a new market to sell too. Another thing that I learned is how recently colonialism ended. I figured that it was a long time ago, but really it just ended in the 1950s-1960s.
I also read the introduction to Heart of Darkness. Before I had read the introduction, I was not that excited to read the book. I didn't really know anything about what it would be about. After reading about Joseph Conrad and how Heart of Darkness came to be, I am a lot more interested. I found out that he was interested in Africa all his life. As a child he frequently studies maps of Africa and was constantly reading and listening to stories of Africa. But that changed in 1890 while he was a seaman. I didn't know that he had another job before he was a writer that didn't really have anything to do with writing. I thought that maybe he was a journalist or something and that's why he went to Africa. I thought that it was really cool that he realized what was going on was bad. He signed a long-term contract with the Belgian government to "Bring 'light' to the 'dark' continent," but he recognized that he wasn't actually doing this philanthropic thing and decided he didn't want to do it anymore. I think that, sadly, a lot of people wouldn't question the moral behind what they were being paid to do. They would be in it for the money and not care about the morality of it.