In the colonization of NA, how was it that the Europeans already had muskets while the Native Americans were still using traditional weapons? I doubt it’s because theres a lack of resources?
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Civilizations invent things independently. Even today they’re tribes that have no any ties to modern world and use traditional weapons. Also some inventions get lost and have to be reinvented – for example Romans used self supporting dome that had to be rediscovered in middle ages.
A lot of it is lack of resources in one sense, but more in pursuit of what technologies. For instead in the Americas they did have certain technologies in terms of vulcanizing rubber or they even had some metallurgy skills for platinum refining and stuff…but didn’t generally smelt iron or steel or anything.
Military advancement is driven by conflict, and there was less of it coupled with more space.
You basically build and research what you need, and in the absence of certain needs you’re not going to spontaneously invent a Gun or Cannon or anything.
Different terrain and more space and everything also controls a lot, and lack of population density.
Also just the fact most colonized places are islands or a big island continent.
Technology in Europe was combined with technology from Asia and Africa for like 10,000 years.
If you go to like 1300, Europe was about 1/50th as populated as Europe and like 1/150th as populated as Asia
It becomes similar to asking why didn’t an isolated 0.3% of the world’s population advance as fast as 95% of it working collectively?
There are basically four answers out there that get offered up for this question:
1. They aren’t more “advanced” in all ways. You’re really just talking about military technology (and not, say, whether their societies were more “free” than the Native American ones, or the rate of starvation, or whatever). Western European military technology was better in part because they were waging large-scale wars against each other for a few hundred years before they ended up North America, and as a result the societies that flourished were the ones who figured out better ways to kill each other.
2. It’s a quirk of the different environments; Eurasian societies had certain things (like access to certain types of animals that proved amenable to domestication, which led to them having more exposure to zoonotic diseases, which led to a lot of other things) that gave them a significant edge against those in the New World.
3. There isn’t a single useful answer here; it’s a quirk of history that these societies developed differently. It just turned out that Western Europe was in a position to be really good at conquering other types of societies in the 15th century or so. It is essentially a random thing.
4. The European people were just inherently better than those of the New World from a biological perspective, or because of their religion, or their culture, or whatever.
Looking at those, #4 is basically not taken seriously by anyone anymore, and the other explanations are usually offered up as alternatives to that one. #4 is the one that many colonizers offered up as _their_ explanation for why they were fit to take over other peoples. The best it gets us is the cultural self-justification for these actions — why many (but not all) Europeans didn’t feel guilty doing things that by their own moral standards were pretty heinous.
Lots of people find #2 appealing (basically the Jared Diamond thesis), but most historians and anthropologists do not, and they see it as just a repurposed version of #4, though that is not how Diamond saw it. Basically they see it as Diamond saying, “oh, it’s just because of the environment, not because the Western Europeans were murderous bastards.” And when you look at many of his examples and evidence they don’t really hold up all that well.
Most scholars I know of give a version of #1 (aka, “the question is built on invalid or unstated premises”) or #3 (aka, “it’s just sort of random”). #1 feels like a dodge, which it sort of is, and #4 feels kind of empty and untestable.
I find if you merge aspects of #1, #2, and #3 together, you get something that sort of feels to me like a plausible model. Different societies developed differently in different parts of the world in part because of the different environmental and resource circumstances they found themselves in (#3), but also for cultural and historical reasons that are essentially random (#4). The result of all of this is that around the 15th century, a few places in one region of the world were basically optimized to be colonizers, in the sense that they had developed pretty sophisticated ways of killing people from a distance, technology for traveling long distances, and had a mindset that led them to be drawn towards the idea that it would be a totally acceptable thing to find a bunch of people who were different than them (which at first they saw mostly as a matter of religion, later “race”) and turn their societies into factories for exporting stuff that the colonizers wanted. Lastly, we’d want to acknowledge (per #1) that just because the European societies were very good at taking over other nations (especially ones already decimated by disease, as was in the New World), that doesn’t mean they were more “advanced” in every way (in some ways they were remarkably “backward” compared to the societies they exterminated).
Now to give a more compelling account of all of the above you’d want to go into a lot more detail not just about the Europeans but also the colonized peoples and also the societies that were powerful but didn’t become colonizers (e.g., the “China question” — China had many of the technologies necessary to do this kind of colonization campaign, but didn’t do it — why?). And you’d trace the different quirks and directions and paths taken and not taken that led to the result.
The advantage of merging all three of those models is that you get quite a lot of flexibility, don’t have to believe any of this was “inevitable,” and don’t let anyone off the hook for doing genocidal things, but at the same time you acknowledge that while human culture is wonderfully flexible, it is probably rooted in some way to the conditions under which it develops (aka, the environment), although not necessarily in a strictly deterministic way (it is not as simple as saying, “if you have this kind of food, you end up with this kind of society”).
Anyway, there is no simple or single agreed-upon answer here. There is not even an agreement on how exactly the best way to frame the question is. But the above are my thoughts as someone who has read about this for some time. If you want to see two extreme versions of this answer, Jared Diamond’s _Guns, Germs, and Steel_ is the standard “environmental determinism” answer, whereas David Graeber and David Wengrow’s _The Dawn of Everything_ is an extreme “it’s all just culture and all kind of random” answer. I do not know of any work that synthesizes them exactly as I have above.
It’s because there is lack of desire to create certain technology or methods to formalize the learning of it in those societies/countries. Many societies didn’t prioritize developing technology, they prioritized other things – like religion and conformity to what is known. They didn’t prioritize exploration, they made those who even crossed outside the society as outcastes.
Primarily the Europeans changed this outlook after/during the Renaissance. Not that science and discoveries didn’t exist in other places, but they became the main thing, and more importantly were formalized. Formalizing them allowed entire generations to learn and expand them, so as a society the Europeans became more advanced.
When they came in contact with other societies in NA or SA they discovered a lot of resources that were rare in Europe are abundantly found outside and they also found so much land (whole continent). So, not being held to any particular moral perspective, they took them with ease, and occupied these regions.
Certain other places in Asia were not many years behind in technology and so even if they got colonized, they created countries, and formal methods of education and technology soon. And today it’s debatable if China for instance may even overtake all the western countries in the next half century.
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**- So it comes down to a few things:**
– Being creative and curious to see more and do more (differently) and innovatively.
– Cooperation with those who are more like you as compared to all the people in the world, instead of having tribal conflict. The west does this well — when it comes to Germany, US and Britain unite. When it comes to China all three unite. And Britain and US themselves have had wars. So the alliances are more in the situation and less based on emotional decisions of what happened in the past.
– Formal methods of education, writing, mathematical and scientific expression — this is the main thing that allows knowledge to be vastly spread across generations.
– Using knowledge to actively create technology. The idea of using steam for motion existed since a long time, but that doesn’t mean everyone made the effort to make a steam engine when people merely had the convenience of using horses.
– Putting merit on the mantle. When people from any background can be appreciated for the good work they do, there is far less resentment in a society and it becomes stronger from within. Many places in Asia (India primarily), have complicated social hierarchies that make them a ground for incompetent leaders taking positions and being respected. That’s why the paradox of Indians doing well in the US, but India itself is far behind when it comes to basic things.
The real answer would be the entire history of the world, but it boils down nearly solely to geography and timing.
Different regions in the world had not only different availability of resources, but a different social context. Agriculture was one big factor in getting larger populations going, but after that point you could think of it as sort of a competition (a horrifying, bloody one) where concentrations of civilizations evolved in favorable places and propelled each other along both by friendly (trade, sharing knowledge) and hostile (war requiring innovation) means. Civilizations more removed from one another did not have this selective pressure.
Still, the differences were not necessarily that vast. That’s where timing comes in. We could be talking about only decades of difference in development, but if those decades include ocean-going ships and firearms, the slightly slower civilization stands no chance against the aggressor. This happened at different scales multiple times, but when referring to modern colonies in the history that played out, Europe is that aggressor. But if Europe had been set back by some event — let’s say a plague that killed just a couple percent more people, or a more prolonged and costly war with one of the caliphates at some point — it could be that the Chinese or the Indians had been the ones to make the requisite advances quicker.
History is very much about right time, right place.
You’re reversing cause and effect. It’s the European nations that decided on a view of humanity and civilization where there was some sort of notion of universal progress, a race to a common goal, and that was (conveniently enough) measured in the area where they had the largest advantage – i.e. technology. So the Europeans were winning this competition that nobody else even knew they were in, and were thus were more ‘advanced’ civilization .
Those values are more Enlightenment-era though (18th-19th century) and came well after colonization started. At the time the justification was that we were superior because we were Christians and they were barbarian savages. (and throughout history ‘barbarians’ has always been defined more or less as meaning ‘not like us’)
None of this is to say technological progress isn’t a good thing. But it’s not any kind of objective measure of a society. 18th century Chinese and Japanese viewed Europeans as barbarians based on _their_ values, despite being aware of European technology.
As for how Europe got ahead technologically, that goes back to the Renaissance, the proliferation of books, the Scientific Revolution followed by the Industrial Revolution. There are many many books about this and there’s no ELI5 answer.
But perhaps the single most powerful ‘invention’ was the invention of this very notion of technological progress. Of utilizing knowledge and systematically improving technology and gaining economic benefit from it. Most technological progress for most of history was incremental (with sudden jumps like the invention of metal casting, iron working, glass working) and more down to random chance then systematic inquiry. Even the ancient Greeks, who held philosophy and natural philosophy (now known as science) in the highest regard, had little regard for the practical and empirical and did not achieve much in terms of technology. Most societies, for most of history, have lived similar lifestyles from generation to generation with only the occasional technological shift. It’s hardly a given that people see any point in trying to invent something. Again, even in European civilization that’s only been the case for a few hundred years.
Europeans got exposed to metallurgy from the middle east, were introduced to gun powder from China and learned large scale military tactics using both by practicing on their neighbors. Native Americans had never faced those 3 things. Europeans had 1000 years experience with them.
The first explosives came from Mongolia, I believe, so naturally that product gets traded and expanded and the knowledge shared. Eurasians and Africans hadn’t really explored NA/SA so the product hadn’t reached that far. And like others said, every culture evolves differently and adopts technologies from their own area first. I guess you could say since Europeans were the explorers, they got to learn from other cultures around the world first. It basically comes down to discovery, knowledge, and sharing.
Knowledge spread from one region to another in the old world. Europe got gunpowder from China for instance and Arabic number came from India.
The new world was isolated and everything that they knew had to be discovered by themselves. It was relatively fast for native Americans to be proficient in firearm once they knew about them.
The lack of domesticatable livestock held back new world cultures. Sheep, oxen, horses, donkeys, camels and such provided significant workforce and resources. Without these the European advances would have been much slower or stopped all together.
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