Why are majority Caucasian countries doing so well in almost all positive aspects of society compared to the rest of the world(barring the oil empire when it comes to wealth)?
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Loaded question… but I get the gist of what you’re asking. History is rarely clear to interpret. Here are some candidate answers to consider:
1. Imperialism and slavery – Western European powers grew by colonizing. This means they amassed resources – people, land, raw materials – in an asymmetrical relationship where those resources went to benefiting the colonizers. Imagine playing poker, but you get ten hands instead of one.
2. Renaissance and Enlightenment – cultural and scientific movements in Western Europe which encouraged and facilitated exchange of ideas and information. This spurned many new developments in arts, religion, commerce, and literature; and this led later to a sort of revolution in science and technology. Both the former and latter are great multipliers of a civilization’s clarity of thought and sense of value.
3. Industrial Revolution – the clarity of rational thought from the Enlightenment set the stage for the Industrial Revolution. Starting from Great Britain, this movement united science and technology and produced machines, processes, ways of harnessing natural power. We went from single-worker hand production to multi-worker factory production aided by machines, water and electrical power. This was a major explosion in the scale of human productivity.
4. Agriculture – up to the Bronze Age, this is probably the single most important driver of human civilization. The more food a civilization can sustain, the more people, which means more labor and more productivity. Few factors influence this – quality of arable land, agricultural technologies, and managerial systems. On the whole, Europe had a decent combination of all these factors.
Putting it together, my opinion is this is a plausible story: after the fall of the Romans, Europe was in a good place agriculturally – though not all periods were good periods, they had the systems to support a sizable population in bad times and fuel a growing population in good times. This is the same condition other major civilizations needed (eg Mesopotamia or contemporary Central China). Europe was also connected enough by roads (courtesy of the Romans) and waterways that allowed for a wide exchange of ideas leading up to Renaissance and Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was somewhat unique to Europe – we still today attribute modern scientific methods to this period of European history. At the same time, partially also because Europe was not a single united entity, there was plenty of wars and economic/other competition. This equipped Western Europe with the knowledge/ability to go forth and conquer for almost four hundred years leading up to modern times. This was both somewhat unique to Europe (in scale) and a major boost in the concentration of power. This then started and also fueled the subsequent Industrial Revolution, which required a different scale of certain types of materials, like iron, coal, rubber. Arguably the beneficiaries of the Industrial Revolution are exactly the ones you’re referring to in the question – it reshaped societies and was the original rubric of “developed vs developing” country. And today some of those same beneficiaries had a better hand going into the game of globalization; and the ones who didn’t get into that game still had a wealthy starting point.
I mentioned slavery earlier – how does it fit into the story? I will say the above story can be told without mention of slavery, but that’s not to say slavery wasn’t a major story in itself – for almost three hundred years this was a part of global commerce and labor. Europe was the show runners in the Atlantic slave trade — some of which resulted in European labor, a lot of which resulted in labor for the New World (the Americas). The relatively bigger benefit was from the commerce rather than from the labor. This benefit directly resulted in wealth. However the reason I didn’t include it in the above story is that on a relative scale this wasn’t the major factor in European wealth, compared to things like industrialization; it arguably is a much larger factor in American wealth, but that’s not the question discussed here. I brought it up because you might read this as a major factor in some other sources – not saying they’re wrong, just in my opinion not the major factor.
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