I always wondered why only European countries have conquered the world? And why were only Europeans were powerful in the 18-19-20th Century?
It will be helpful to solve my mystery…
In: 4
Quick answer : industrial revolution, mass production, different army tactics but above all, ruthlessness by the conquerors
The first major wave of colonization was in the Americas, and Europeans had several major advantages there:
* European metalwork was considerably more advanced than Native American metalwork, so it was often a battle of steel sword and plate armor and (primitive, but still) musket and cannon versus something like a [*macuahuitl*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macuahuitl), a wood club with obsidian spikes on it. “Spiked club versus cannon” is not a fair fight at all.
* European diseases happened to be more deadly to Native Americans than the other way around. In many cases, Native American populations had been almost entirely wiped out before Europeans ever arrived, and all they needed to do was conquer a devastated and much-smaller population.
* Europeans had horse cavalry; no riding animals were common in the Americas. (You might associate horses with Native Americans, but that came later, when they re-tamed feral horses descended from escaped Spanish horses. Those descendants – now known as Mustangs – are the only “wild” horses in the Americas and weren’t present prior to European contact.)
* More generally, Europe just had vastly superior technology. The Inca, for example, had operated the largest precolonial empire in South America with neither a full written language nor the wheel – you can imagine that those things gave invaders a considerable advantage.
The very first major contact – Cortes’ invasion of what is now Mexico – also benefited from a few other factors. Cortes allied with a number of other groups who hated the Aztecs, so he wasn’t only relying on his own men, and his appearance happened to align with local myth in a way that created religious overtones to his invasion for the Aztecs (overtones that were no doubt strengthened by the massive plagues that followed shortly after contact).
Once the Americas had been largely conquered, Europe had an enormous economic advantage that quickly translated into a technological one. The wealth of Europe, courtesy of its American colonies and the trade they permitted, fueled the Scientific and later Industrial Revolutions, which gave Europe a gigantic technological and industrial advantage over the rest of the world. (To see just how big this effect is: post-Meiji-Restoration Japan copied European industrialism and went from a backwater country to a major world power that could seriously threaten the West – and conquered nearly all of East Asia – in only a few decades.) That economic advantage allowed them to conquer, or at least subjugate, nearly the entire rest of the world until other parts of it caught up to European technology.
It’s worth noting that Europe hasn’t *always* had superior technology – China would be the closest country to claim that over the course of history as a whole – but getting to the Scientific Method and the associated innovations first kicked off a feedback loop of discovery that put them *way* ahead during that one specific and critical era of history.
What do you see when you compare countries all over the world in ancient times? List them and you will see how Europe had developed new agricultural technology which in turn improved our food since middle ages.
There wasn’t really any motive since they had everything they needed, mostly in India and China.
Tea, ceramics, spices opium, silk and lots more were all in high demand in Europe and all came from the East. The whole reason for European colonialism in the first place was to find a quicker way to Asia, which is how Columbus accidentally discovered the Americas.
Basically, it’s the culmination of a lot of geographic and historic lucky breaks.
We’ll start with geography and the dispersal of domesticable animals. All your staple farm animals: cows, chickens, pigs, horses, goats, sheep, etc. Are all native to mainland Asia and Europe. Beasts of burden are a major boon to the production of food, which can allow a population to grow very large.
There are natural barriers that cut off the domesticable animals from other civilizations at the time: in Africa you have the Saharan Desert and the Congo Rainforest. These expanses of difficult terrain made contact with southern Africa extremely difficult that Europeans wouldn’t get there until sailing technology had become fairly sophisticated. Same deal with the Americas. Along with domesticable animals being a source of food and labor, they are also a source of disease. Prolonged contact with these animals allowed disease to jump species, but also allowed for resistance to these diseases over time.
Now, historically the biggest powers of antiquity were Egypt, Persian, Chinese, Roman, and Macedonian. All were formidable in their own right politically, technologically, and militarily. But towards the middle ages, these empires had all had their power wane.
And then the Mongols came. I can’t stress enough how much the Mongols crippled Asian and middle eastern powers. Both were hotbeds of academic and scientific revolution: until some horse boys came and killed and destroyed most of them. The Mongols had their eyes set on Europe, but failed to conquer it. Now, while the Mongols were a major disruption to power in Asia, they also created vast transit networks. Basically, Europe got all the benefits of the Mongol empire without the same level of destruction. China or the Middle East could well have been the first to settle in the Americas had it not been for this massive disruption.
Because of this Mongolian transit network and not having to rebuild after total annihilation, Europe had access to technologies and goods derived from asia: gunpowder and spices being the biggies. Along with being surrounded by water, Europe put a lot of points into ships. Instead of traversing over land, ships gave easier access to the wealth of resources in Africa and Asia and eventually made their ways to the Americas. This is where the aforementioned carrying and resistance to those animal borne diseases come into play, and it ravaged native populations in the Americas, making conquest much easier.
In short. There’s nothing special about Europeans. They were just lucky. Any other peoples that had as much good fortune as them would have managed the same amount of dominance.
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