Dystopia
Regrettably it is at this point that we find a gradual switchover from Utopia to Dystopia - societies whose planning is far from ideal, and which all too often come to grief. As a concept, Dystopia emerges at the end of the long Eighteenth Century, possibly as a result of social upheaval and the long wars. it comes to the fore towards the end of the Nineteenth Century with gloomy forebodings as to the impact of industrialisation. Some go for a mechanical paradise. Others foresee a world order where things have got beyond repair - and that's not just the machines. Jack London in The Iron Heel (1908)sees the collapse of the American republic between 1912 and 1932 with the rise of 'The Oligarchy' (though he also thinks that international worker solidarity will avert a world war in 1913).
Dystopia is highly pessimistic in tone. It traces what happens when things go wrong, either in an ideal world which has gone into crisis or decline, or else is a portrayal of of a world where society has collapsed at some time in the past. It is form of writing with a moral - and a warning. The irony is that reality can be stranger than fiction.
The finale of The Mission is a case in point. The humanitarian goals of the Jesuit Fathers ironically contained the seeds of destruction for the Missions. The presence not only of rational Indians, but Christianised ones who were highly skilled proved to be too much of a temptation for the bandeirantes, slavers who came across from Brazil and enslaved them all.
The Missions, perhaps like Utopia itself, remain enshrined in the history of both the Catholic Church and the history of Latin America as a high point which, sadly, might well have proved to be a model for a stable and economically prosperous society.
ENGLISH LIT:
The evils of colonization in VICTORIAN LITERATURE:
What informed the Victorian literature were the issues