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
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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