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
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.
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