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Thread: Why Europeans conquered the world?

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    Cool Why Europeans conquered the world?

    JARED DIAMOND, a researcher at UCLA, has been doing fieldwork in New Guinea for over 25 years. New Guinea is home to some of the last hunter-gatherers in the world. A long time ago, one of his New Guinea friends asked Diamond why white people had so much and New Guineans had so little.
    That's an obvious question, but Jared was surprised to realize he didn't know the answer. In fact, he didn't know of anyone who knew the answer. When Europeans were busy conquering the Americas and Australia and New Zealand and parts of Asia and Africa, the obvious answer was that white people were superior. Either they were genetically superior, or their culture was superior. They were smarter or more capable. That explanation is clearly bad, but a good one has failed to take its place.
    Why did Europeans conquer the world? Why, when Europeans came into contact with other places in the world, did they almost always conquer?
    Jared Diamond had spent enough time with the New Guineans, living among them, to know that they were intelligent and resourceful people — in Diamond's opinion, more intelligent and resourceful than people living in modern societies, both because of natural selection (unintelligent and unresourceful people don't live long in the New Guinea wilds) and because the New Guinea environment is so difficult, and the death rate is so high, that they must smarten up as they grow up, or they don't make it to adulthood.
    But if they are so smart, why hadn't they invented guns? Why hadn't they forged steel? Why were they so outmatched when Europeans landed on their island?
    Diamond decided to find out why. And the way he started was a stroke of genius. He decided to go back to a time in history when all humans were equal. About 13,000 years ago all humans on the planet were hunter-gatherers. No group had much more than any other group. There were no civilizations, no cities, no rich people. They all had pretty much the same technology. Then what happened?
    The first thing that changed was the domestication of animals and plants. Agriculture. That is the beginning of global inequality because agriculture wasn't invented everywhere at the same time. Some places started earlier than others. The first place people started farming and tending animals was in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East near present-day Syria, Jordan, and Iraq. Agriculture was invented in other parts of the globe much later.
    The people on the Eurasian continent got a huge head start. They started farming 2000 years, 4000 years, and in some cases 6000 years earlier than other places!
    Now the question is again, why? Were people on other continents not as bright? Why didn't they start farming earlier? The answer is that in order for a people to settle down to agriculture, they need a complex combination of factors, and those factors happened to arise first in the Fertile Crescent, by the pure luck of geography. Those people happened to be living in the right place at the right time.

    what it takes to start agriculture
    Some groups of hunter-gatherers in New Guinea are semi-farmers. They cultivate banana trees. But the semi-farmers don't stay put. They haven't settled down and built cities. They don't live permanently in the area because their farming has never allowed them to. They have to keep moving. They come back a couple of times in the year, once to pull weeds, and once to actually harvest the bananas, but they have to keep moving in order to get enough to eat. Why?
    The reason is simple: You can't store bananas. To settle down permanently, finding a food source you can farm isn't enough. It has to be the right kind of food source. The food source has to be something you can store, and it has to contain some protein. Bananas have very little protein. People can't live on it. They have to eat other things.
    It turns out that in the Fertile Crescent, wheat grew wild. It lent itself to domestication in many ways, and because the growing season was so short in that area, the seeds were rather large and had evolved to remain dormant for a long time. In other words, here was a food you could store for a long time and it wouldn't rot. It also is pretty high in protein.
    Jared Diamond and many others have scoured the globe for other potential plants that could fulfill the same requirements. They are very rare.
    Not only that, but even a storable plant seed wasn't enough to switch from hunter-gatherers to farmers. They also needed an animal. They needed a good source of protein. People don't survive very well eating only grain, so wheat was not enough. And again, just by luck, in the Fertile Crescent, there was an animal that could be domesticated, and again, that wasn't true in most other parts of the world.
    Wherever farming has taken hold around the world, the farmers had at least one domesticated animal to provide protein, at least one storable source of carbohydrates, and a legume (peas, lentils, beans, etc.). Legumes are also storable. They dry hard and don't rot readily. And they are higher in protein than grains, so they can be used as a protein supplement if animal protein becomes scarce.
    With enough sustainable food like this, people could stop roaming, and form villages.
    There are very few places in the world where a domesticatable animal, plus a storable carbohydrate, plus a legume all exist in the same place. Can you see why it is not enough just to have one of these items? If all you had was one, it wouldn't be enough food to sustain you.
    There are places in the world where a grain grows. But farming didn't start and people didn't settle down because that isn't enough. To have a sustainable and complete agriculture, you need the combination, and it was rare. But it was available first in the Fertile Crescent, and it allowed people to settle down into villages.
    That was the beginning. It doesn't seem like much, but agriculture brought into existence a whole chain of effects that allowed farmers to advance their technology far beyond hunter-gatherers.

    the chain of effects
    Here's what happened: People settled down. They had a more reliable source of food throughout the year (because it was storable), so they had more kids. A hunter-gatherer woman only gives birth every five years or so because hunter-gatherers move around a lot and until a child can walk on his own at a pretty good pace, the mother cannot afford to have another child.
    But once people settle down into a village with a steady supply of food, they start having children at a rate close to one per year.
    So the population of farmers grew faster than hunter-gatherers, allowing the farmers to outnumber and defeat hunter-gatherers in war.
    Also, because settled farmers are settled, they can have more possessions, like tools and weapons. Hunter-gatherers had to carry their stuff with them, so they were limited in how many possessions they could accumulate. This has a long-term, limiting influence on the development of new technologies because often new inventions are built on previous inventions.
    As farming techniques improved, farmers had more food excess to store, so some people no longer had to do the work of producing food. Specialists could then develop. Tool makers. Weapons makers. And because they were specialized and spent more time on their craft, they invented more. Technology improved faster.
    So farmers had better weapons and greater numbers and could defeat hunter-gatherers even more effectively.
    Another very important factor is: The more people you have together, the more ideas they exchange. The process of innovation began to accelerate when people settled down into towns and cities.
    Hunter-gatherers hardly changed at all. They were relatively isolated, relatively small groups of people who didn't have the time or incentive to invent new technologies, and they couldn't carry much with them anyway, so their technologies remained relatively unchanged for thousands of years.

    the importance of latitude
    One important advantage the Eurasians had was a large piece of land stretching across the same latitude. Look at an atlas and find the Fertile Crescent. See how far land stretches in both directions on that latitude. It is enormous. So the combination of the domesticated plants and animals — the self-reliant, self-sustaining, and complete agricultural package — could (and did) spread east to Asia and west to Europe. To add to the advantage, that encouraged a constant interchange between these far-flung places, which also accelerated the pace of invention.
    In the Americas, Australia, and Africa, the spreading was much more limited along the same latitude.
    The reason latitude is important is that if you go east or west at the same latitude, you have similar lengths of day, somewhat similar climate and weather, which means plants and animals that survive well at one spot are more likely to survive well east or west of there, but not usually north or south of that spot.
    Added to that, there were significant barriers to traveling north and south in Africa and the Americas. Huge deserts and impenetrable forests prevented one area from having much contact with other areas. So, for example, in Mesoamerica, they had invented the wheel. Down in South America, they had domesticated llamas. The people in Mesoamerica never got the llamas and the South Americans never got the wheel. Had both civilizations lived on the same latitude, it is likely both would have used the wheel and the llama.
    So the width of the Eurasian continent is a huge factor in the acceleration of technology. But there was another factor that gave the Europeans a back-breaking advantage when they encountered Native Americans and Africans (and Hawaiians and Australian Aborigines, etc.). Whenever Europeans in the Age of Discovery encountered anyone from any other continent, they brought disease.

    why didn't diseases go both ways?
    Why is it that when Europeans landed on the shores of the Americas that the Native Americans were devastated by so many diseases brought by the Europeans? And why didn't the Native Americans have their own diseases to give to the white man? Why did Europeans have such a huge collection of deadly diseases that they had a resistance to, but the Native Americans didn't have very many diseases that Europeans had no resistance to?
    Interesting question, isn't it? The answer is that most of our diseases — smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, flu, etc. — originally came from the animals Europeans had domesticated.
    Here's how it works: First, an animal has a microbe that infects it, say cowpox (an actual case). Because humans are hanging around cows a lot, some of the microbes jump to the humans, but generally speaking, they can't survive. But a little random mutation here and there and all of a sudden smallpox comes into existence and wipes out huge portions of the European population. It mutated to become a human disease. This happened again and again. Plague after plague swept through Europe over the centuries, killing off everyone who didn't have some resistance to it.
    Native Americans hadn't domesticated very many animals. They didn't have cows, horses, pigs, chickens, goats, sheep, geese, oxen, donkeys, etc. But Europeans had all these any many more.
    That's why the disease exchange was so one-sided. Disease did far more to create an imbalance between Europeans and Native Americans than all the other factors put together.

    buy why not the Chinese?
    So far, this explains why people on the Eurasian continent dominated people on other continents. But the Eurasian continent is very wide. Why wasn't it the people from the Middle East or China who did the conquering? Why was it Europeans?
    The Middle East is too dry for intensive farming now. Most of the forests have been cut down and didn't grow back. The place is like a desert these days, which was not the case 13,000 years ago when agriculture was just getting started. So their ability to survive well, much less produce surplus food, diminished over time. At the time Europe began its Age of Discovery, around 1500 AD, the Middle East was agriculturally past its prime and not in a position to compete.
    China, on the other hand, could have been a potential rival for world exploration and dominance around 1500, but right about that time, the ruler of China decided to dismantle all the shipyards in China! No more exploration by sea, he said. One of the things that prevented China from being the people who conquered the other continents, in other words, was China's unity. A single ruler could decide the fortunes of the whole region. Not so in Europe.
    Europe has lots of natural barriers: It is divided by water and mountains and lots of jutting landmasses. So Europe has been continually divided into states. In the 1500's, those states were all competing with each other. Even if you had a ruler or two who didn't want to explore the world, you would have other rulers who would, and they would become rich and essentially force the other states to jump in or fall behind (or even be conquered).

    this is the answer to the question
    Our original question was, why did Europeans conquer the world? The answer is, because they happened to live on the Eurasian continent, so they were lucky enough to start agriculture earlier than any other place on earth. Just by luck, they were at the right latitude with the right combination of available animals and plants that could be domesticated. And with a head start of thousands of years, their technology was more advanced. And because of their close association with their domesticated animals, they carried many diseases to which they had resistance but people from other continents did not. Because of their head start, Europeans possessed guns, germs, and steel and they conquered the world with them.
    Much of the global inequality seen today comes from this original source.
    Source

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    So Europeans conquered the world "Just by luck".

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    they were lucky enough to start agriculture earlier than any other place on earth.
    I think the Egyptians started agriculture earlier, but the Europeans learned and improved. For example, the Celtics had wheelbarrows and mechanical reapers.

    Just by luck, they were at the right latitude with the right combination of available animals and plants that could be domesticated.
    They were not the first to domesticate animals either. A lot of the time they were trying to move further south for better weather.

    And with a head start of thousands of years, their technology was more advanced.
    See above.

    Because of their head start, Europeans possessed guns, germs, and steel and they conquered the world with them.
    Europeans learned how to make steel, then they improved it with alloys and tempering. They had to travel to China in order to obtain gun technology. Their advantage is they learn and innovate faster than their competitors.

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    Quote Originally Posted by GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS View Post
    So Europeans conquered the world "Just by luck".
    The evolution and advancement of all living things happened because of idealistic conditions. None of us are gods, conditions were merely favourable for our ancestors, and natural selection ensured that the best genes were passed on to the next generations.

    That does not take away the fact that Europeans have achieved a far higher cultural advancement than other races. The others will take thousands of years to catch up, if they do at all. Modern technology creates equalizers though. Genetic luck will not help Europeans for much longer, they will have to start thinking in preservationist patterns if they are to survive in the centuries to come. The odds are stacking against them fast.

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    Quote Originally Posted by GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS View Post
    So Europeans conquered the world "Just by luck".
    I found the first paragraph to be very revealing.

    "Either they were genetically superior, or their culture was superior. They were smarter or more capable. That explanation is clearly bad, but a good one has failed to take its place."

    Why is it "bad"? If anything, putting what Loki said aside, the Europeans have just simply had the tenacity to survive beyond that of merely surviving.

    God knows how many researches have been thrown at the world showing the gigantic differences between the races in physical and mental aspects, but yet the real answer is still yet to "take its place"?

    Call me racist, but I think the Europeans conquered the world by simply being the best there was.

    Last edited by Beorn; 12-26-2008 at 10:57 PM. Reason: .

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    I don't like Diamond's first book. I have in fact read the second book, as a class requirement and all. He has good ideas on civilization collapse.


    However his first book is a Marxist's wet dream. His work is nothing but pseduo science and completely ignores the past two centuries of work in the field. He is a proponent is the "taking the Negroid out of the Jungle and putting him in a white man's home" theory.

    Meaning he believed that our success was the result of being born on the European continent. He's a follower of the White Man's Burden. This was an idea that we could civilize the rest of the World, bring them up to our standards and make them productive and smart, human beings.


    Obviously it didn't work for the British Empire, nor will it work for the United States. Despite all the policies of affirmitive action, Blacks still haven't come close to catching up to their European, let alone Mexican counterparts.


    And I don't like his reasonings. He makes out Africa as being a sort of a hell hole. Nevermind that Europe had many of the same problems (Malaria also had been a HUGE problem in Europe, before we started draining the swamps in the Medieval Period) such as diseases, environment and so on.


    For example the semi-farmers. What the hell were our ancestors doing than? The so called ''Aryan Tribes'' had metal and cloth working, and were Nomadic hunters and collectors. This is no different than a bunch of Ape-Men in New Guinea planting bananas and running off to hunt animals. The exception being is that we were more evolved, and capable of advanced tool making.
    Last edited by TheGreatest; 12-27-2008 at 01:36 AM.

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    I second that. We conquered the world simply by being the best there was. People who say it was by pure luck we ended up on the "right" continent is simply wrong. European settlers could and did make a very decent living in Africa and other places where the natives who had centuries of local experience barely managed, even though sometimes cut off entirely from civilization and the security that brings. We simply have the tenacity to never give up.

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    In popular histrography: it was because the industrial revolution gave the Europeans the tools needed to conquer most parts of Africa and Asia.

    According to the marxists: European imperialism was inevitable caused because they needed new marktes.

    According to the environmentalist: it was because Eurasia has the largest ammount of edible grains and domesticable animals that gave Eurasia a head start of the rest of the world. Europe took a lead from the other highly devolped parts of Eurasia (India, the Ottoman Empire and China) because of the shape of Europe with much islands and penisculas which causecd the competitive nature of European politics and economics and gave them a decisive lead on the rest of the world.

    According to me: the industrial revolution gave men the tools, nationalism ans social-darwinsim gave men the arguments and economic compitition gave men the need to do so.

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    Protestants, they owercame the Christianity and became Jews

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    Euros are objectively superior to many other racial groups with the exception of a couple uncertain cases.
    BTW Chinese had a couple of millenia to explore and colonize Pacific Ocean and yet they have not achieved much in terms of maritime expansions.

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