fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2931 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2931 ⌋

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Not to mention all the slavery that went on in Africa and, unfortunately, was taken advantage of during the Europe/Africa/New World slave trade. :/

It's a real fact that white people have perpetuated the most recent and historically memorable acts of slavery (at least to the Western world) and it shouldn't be denied, because that would be denying the reality of current race relations. But it was also, in some ways, historical chance that even put them in that position. If any other group of people had happened to develop an empire like the Roman Empire that had such far-reaching effects, if any other group had happened to discover sea navigation and gunpowder first...history might look really different. The "enslaving and doing horrible things to other people" thing isn't a white person thing; it's a human thing - it's just that white people had the biggest opportunity to express it (and they delivered).

(Some people - probably nobody on F!S, but some people in some places - would claim Europeans discovered this shit first because they're smarter. I don't think that's true. The indigenous people of South America did some pretty memorable stuff technology-wise. So did the Chinese - inventors of paper, anyone? Other groups too, without a doubt. Maybe some of it had to do with placement of certain resources, or the emergence of certain cultural movements that lead to different researches.)

There's a huge amount of argument about the reasons why it happened that way, yeah.

One of the interesting things about it, to me, is how long it took for the European peoples to start pulling ahead, technology and power-wise, of the rest of the world. I mean, it's really quite recent in historical terms - it's not really until the 17th century that they start to pull ahead and not until the 18th and 19th centuries that they really start to develop the massive gap. For a lot of history including much of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Europe was in a lot of ways something of a backwater. It's fascinating that it was such a relatively recent and relatively quick change.

Personally I tend to think a lot of it had to do, ultimately, with random chance, and with political organization - the general decentralization of the continent, the number of defensible borders, the serious religious controversies that made it difficult to impose a specific worldview over a large group of people, the amount of competition between different states that fueled expansion and exploration and technological development, etc. And the good luck of having a lot of the potential competitors being politically weak or fractured.

Don't forget a lot of easy to domesticate animals. America only having lama's did them a lot of harm.

That's a very relevant argument when it comes to the Americas. But it still leaves the question of why Europe outraced Asia pretty well wide-open. Which I think is, in a lot of ways, more interesting, because if you look at it, for most of history, Asia had the most powerful and certainly the richest states.

Praise the black death and its devastating effects on the feudal system.

In very large part, certainly.

I also have to wonder how much effect the wars of religion and the manifold aspects of the Protestant Reformation had on this. Economically, intellectually, culturally, politically. In terms of the profound amount of disruption they caused across the whole of Europe. I mean, a hell of a lot of people died, and far more displaced. A lot of decentralization politically. Intellectually, a huge increase in the ability to question things and the number of different schools contending.

Europeans didn't discover gunpowder so much as adapt cannons for warfare on a massive scale.

...Europeans were not the first to discover sea navigation and gunpowder. o.O

[ SECRET POST #2931 ]

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