Asking this for my 5-year-old niece. I, myself am 21 years old, don’t know how exactly they did it and am exceptionally bad at Humanities.
I don’t quite understand how the Britishers convinced/bewitched/overruled the rulers of a nation. From what I understand, they struck deals and what-not. Can you please explain a **bird’s eye view** of the entire situation so that I can explain it to my niece?
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The Europeans conquered the Americas with disease. From the wealth they gained by occupying now mostly empty land (casualty rates from disease were anywhere between 90-99%), Europe had an explosion of technological growth. There are very good arguments that Enlightenment thinking also stems from Native American thinkers as well, but that’s a whole rabbit hole. It is important though because paired with The Scientific Method and wealth, Europe had an explosion in technology that allowed them to take over the world. It’s hard to fight dudes with machine guns when you’ve got bows and arrows, or old muskets.
The Spanish were unable to hold their massive empire together because the technological gap between Spain and the colonies wasn’t large, and as population grew back in the colonies, they were able to break away and eventually fight some awful wars amongst themselves. Britain had a very different colonial model early on, by allowing colonists to own property and be armed. They maintained their British culture in the Anglosphere but the Brits couldn’t colonize places like Africa and India the same way because they were already highly populated and they couldn’t tolerate the disease as well, South Africa being a notable exception.
Contrary to popular belief, a lot of the places Britain conquered actually were united, or at least had a history of being united. The Indian subcontinent and cultural sphere was not fully united but shared a common culture, and had been kinda wrecked by wars with the Mughals. Three European powers fought for dominance over India, which has never been particularly expansionist and did not have matching military tech. Africa was behind in tech by the mid 1800s, whereas they hadn’t been so much in the 1500-1600s. That’s part of why the colonization of Africa hadn’t happened until later, along with a lack of navigable rivers.
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