Sorry for number 3 I made a mistake and left out the reason for the why we look down upon the Middle Ages. The big reason is that modern Western civilization came out of the failings of 14th century Medieval Civilization. Medieval Civilization lasted longer than it probably should have and thus collapsed spectacularly in the 14th century. Thus, since modern Western Civilization was formed out of Medieval Civilization, we remember it at its most brutal and dysfunctional and forget all the successes it had in the previous 500 years. The best source for #3 is "The Age of Faith" by Will Durant
When you talked about Europeans in Africa, why didn’t you speak about the Atlantic slave trade or Leopoldian Congo, or the apartheid. I feel like those are significant points made for the argument of exploitation of Africa that you didn’t mention
I’ve been wondering I had an argument with this guy about the German Army of World War II and saying that not all or at least less than half or more than half of the Germans that fight during World War II were not harmed by Nazis or radical Nazis most are just fighting for their country I would say about 35% were really hard line Nazis and from what the sources I seen I leave that to be true but is that just a misconception on my part
He explicitly did mention the slave trade and South Africa tho... And specifically clarified he was talking about the direct colonial period. As for the Congo. Though Belgium didn't help any it was just as murder heavy before and after.
Have you ever heard of struggle between Holy Roman Emperors and Popes? It lasted several centuries, and got to a point where one Emperor was exluded from the church.
I love how we moderns look down on tenement housing, poor farms and mental hospitals, while we are surrounded by thousands of people living in tents or just shelter less on the sidewalks.
Depending on how to define "direct,, I wouldn't argue for any form of English at all. I see his statement interpreted as regarding politeness and yeah okay Americans and Australians sure are rude but when giving criticism in a work environment America is much less direct compared to Germany. At least before everything was globalized. A few years ago Germans were still much more direct in terms of criticism and orders to an extent far greater than in any Anglo culture.
@@authenticbitterleben7434 probably true, you can see that on the chart with American English vs. French. The French are _not_ shy about giving negative feedback and being confrontational, lol. German culture/language is probably different than French, but they might be more similar to each other than either is to American English in that way.
@@RickJaeger I disagree. This is a cultural difference. You perceive the French as not shy. The French (and many others) perceive the Americans as rude. The difference is the French being polite and indirect while criticizing; the Americans shed politeness off and are brutally direct. The French also take a very generalist view, of reason A against reason B; the Americans take a view of "My American way or the highway", which is very confrontational. Isn't it curious that American presidents routinely say or mean "You're either with us or against us" (Bush, 2001, First Invasion of Irak) and put themselves in the same footing as dictators from China, North Korea, and Turkey, to name a few?
As far as the fetishization of the "noble savage" goes, Thomas Sowell writes of this as a recurring theme throughout (at least) Western history, as many Roman writers would glorify the Germanic tribes as well for rejecting corrupt urbanity and living in nature.
But there was a reason to glorify the Germans. They were not in fact savages. Note they used metal weapons and tools. As the uploader points out, Rome essentially was a state where the rural areas were taxed to support an urban civilization. (Hmmmmm.....sounds familiar...)
@@Fridaey13txhOktober They repeatedly lost, but due to shitty emperors got to keep their land. Large parts of Germany and Hungary were subjugated by Marcus Aurelius, but when he died Commodus just abandoned the conquests. Same with Germanicus's conquests being left behind by Tiberius and so on and so forth
7:12 I'm a culinary student, and I notice this about every time a professor talks about the past. A lot of assuming, without research or context. A common one is "the Egyptians accidentaly discovered beer, and had no idea how yeast worked" (seeing as beer is older than agriculture, it was already old news by the time of the pyramids), or even "they ate only meat, and only occasionally would feed on other things" (the societies that are literary called hunter-gatherers), or the opposite: "the Aztecs were incredible due to their highly vegetarian diet" (ignoring the fact that they had no choice, and even raised small dogs for protein).
@@fainitesbarley2245 people from incan empire, used to eat those cuyes, alpacas and llamas, but non different from other places: Wealthy people ate a lot and more variety more than the usual normal low class people.
Regarding the Aztecs, The bodies of the sacrificed did not go to waste. The grim details are laid out in the histories of the Conquest. The Spanish Conquistadores, in order to obtain grease to lubricate the hubs of their animal drawn wagons, had to render human corpses. The Meso American civilizations had no livestock. Meanwhile, introduced disease from humans and from imported animals killed beyond count. And cruelties willfully inflicted by the conquerors where recorded by some of the accompanying clergy as testimony for the future.
Other popular myths: 1) Crusades happened purely because of religion. It is usually used in a "religion is bad" disputes. In reality, Crusades had certain political, social and economical benefits which could interest the rulers to go on Crusades. 2) When people make direct connections between the modern nation and some old one: Kievan Rus = Ukraine/Russia and not some other nation, Macedonian Empire = Macedonia and not some other nation. Such perception of history disregards the fact of migrations and cultural changes. These ideas are usually promoted to make people proud of their heritage.
Example of the second one Phoenicians and Lebanese people Thracians and Bulgarians Wessex and English people Vikings and Scandinavians Thirteen Colonies and Americans
yeah the use of crusades for religion is bad is really retarded, if the crusades was only motivated because of religion, the crusades could have happened earlier
There is very little hard evidence for the Congo Genocide. The colonial authorities would have had to kill more people than were actually living in the Congo. Each individual member of the small security force would have had to have killed tens of thousands himself for the narrative to be true. Surely there was cruelty, not doubt, but to call it a genocide of millions is a false narrative pushed by Black American intellectuals in the 20th century so they could have their own holocaust to guilt white people with.
ElCadejo172 When did I call it a genocide? Afaik, for the exploitation of the Congo to be a considered genocide it had to be the intentional extermination of the population. Millions definitely died, there's no question about that, but it was in the pursuit of the Belgian king's desire for profit and not for the mere extermination of an entire peoples. Not to mention many had their hands chopped off, which there's also plenty of proof. I'm not sure how anything you said refutes the fact Europeans exploited Africa.
@@SurprisinglyDynamicAnimeSideC I'm not sure if you're an American, but it is common for American children to be taught about the "Congo Genocide" even as most cannot find the Congo on a map. Your assertion of millions likens Leopold to Hitler, Stalin or Mao and it originated as ridiculous propaganda from professional "anti-racists".
ElCadejo172 Millions _did_ die in the Congo. And yes, I'm an American, and children are _not_ taught about the "Congo Genocide" until high school, and even then it's mostly glossed-over. So now I'm doubting that _you're_ American from how little you seem to know how broken and Americentric our education system is.
@L Dikx Not fully serios, but you do realize that Napoleon was a corsican, which is italian culture, and that Corsica was only recently occupied and not even properly annexed by France when Napoleon was born ? Napoleon's father was from Tuscany and his mother was genoese. His primary languages were corsican and italian and only at the age of 9 or 10 he learnt french. Not to mention that his family actually fought agaisnt the french, trying to maintain Corsica independent. In others words, he's not that much french in origin. Which explains his military prowess :P
@@appleslover It's simple, really. You said yourself just now that linguistic differences make one's identity, and this is how most Quebecers see it. There are about 8 million people descended from French-speaking catholic stock and who have been conquered 250 years ago by a British force. Attempts at assimilating them have been mostly unsuccessful for various reasons, so here we are today, you still have a ton of Quebecers who identify as such and not with the (rather artificial) Canadian identity. Of course there's a lot more nuance I could inject in it (the large amounts of French speakers outside Quebec, the Quebecers who reject the Quebecer identity for various reasons and prefer to call themselves Canadian, the immigrant population, the very word Canadian being used to refer to French-Canadians up until the end of the 19th century) but that's the gist of it. Or an even blunter way: a watermelon ≠ a pineapple a cat ≠ a dog Quebec ≠ Canada
@@appleslover Where are ya from, brother? The way I understand it, most French-Canadians refer to themselves as such, not just as Canadians. Almost like they're their own mini-nation inside a much larger one. It actually works, too! ...for The most part... 😆😆
Here's a question for ya, my northern compadre: I can read French fairly well, due to speaking native English, conversational Spanish, and beginner French, but I can somehow u understand spoken Québécois better than Parisian French. Why is that? It caught me off guard recently when a French-Canadian RUclipsr busted out his Native tongue and I somehow understood the gist of what he was saying! I jumped out of my seat! It was weird!
remember the thing that whatifallthist said about slavery likely being necessary to develop an advance society. even we today have slaves in third world countries and yet people say "the troops are heros"
@Luís Andrade i mean, in those days, there wasn't really a difference. Athens for instance, the most open society that we think of when thinking of ancient Greece had slaves atleast from what I've seen, so there wasn't much difference but it was the norm
Asdf He is wrong on that, poorly paid workers are enough, look at ancient Persia who despite having no proper slaves were able to build amazing architecture and roads which even the biased Herodotus said "were expertly maintained". And as he said, degree matters, the majority of Spartan slaves were poorly treated, routinely massacred, routinely beaten, routinely humiliated, and could be murdered or raped with no punishments. Compare that to pretty much the rest of the near east (there might be some exceptions I don't know about), the slaves where treated badly but at least they had rights and assaulting them could get you punished.
Fellow historian here. On your point about Indian morality, I often wondered as a young lad why the Indians didn’t simply unite to fight the Europeans more than they inevitably did. I once asked my history teacher this question, since much of our lessons on Native Americans clearly portrayed Europeans in an evil light and the Indians as the good guys. My teacher told me Indians were too few, given the effects of the plague, which is partly true. I later learned through my own studies that Indian unity was an extreme rarity. Rather than being alarmed by the immorality of Europeans, Indians usually found them and their industrialized trinkets very alluring. They mostly enjoyed the Europeans, especially when the Europeans would trade them rifles and ammo, which the Indians could then point at their long time Indian rivals. This in-fighting amongst Indians is rarely ever spoken of.
European colonisation was not inherently profitable true, but that is WHY it became so exploitative. They had to force native men into labour camps to either work on massive plantations or mining for raw materials just so they could get some money back from the whole thing. And not to mention that, just because the colony wasn't worth it financially for the whole empire, it might have been for one person. Cecil John Rhodes (who you should definitely make a video of) became a billionaire, perhaps one of the richest men on earth, from colonialism and he for that reason continued to drive it forward.
I know african colonies were more of a tool to use in international relations and to keep concert of europe/League of Nations alive by making concessions when necessary (Britain-Italy border exchange 192X). They were also big tools for pride and was also source to conscript soldiers from. Unless you are talking about specific colonies like Leopolds Congo(Which was very bad) or some specific parts of British and French empire
"labors were forced to work in massive plantation and mine". Cool story bro, it was the same shit for most of Europeans at that times. My grand grand father worked it mines in north of France from 13 to 62, for almost nothing. And yes, some very rich get money from colonization, but again, same thing in Europe. Pretty sure that the mine where my grand grand father worked made someone very very rich too.
Coast of Africa was also important in strategic sense that your ships could get coal in middle of travel beetween european and more lucratice colonies. Thats why "unimportant" islands and coast's were "important" in age where your ships need a lot of coal to sail.
@@mrsupremegascon yes, essentially, the same thing that was done on Africa was first done on the peasants. But back in Africa it was part of a much larger cultural shift, which was, basically, forced.
They tried twice actually. First France offered to change the Ivory Coast for The Gambia, but UK declined, lmao. And in the 1970s they tried out the Senegambia confederation, but it didn't work out, yeah.
@@haydenpack6947 While they theoretically could, since the colonization of Africa by Europeans, it practically has not. Furthermore, it is for all intents and purposed forbidden by international law. I suppose there could be some sort of peaceful land exchange between two countries, but I am not aware of even this happening anywhere in Africa.
The African one is a bit off to me. While economically speaking for an entire country European nations didn’t benefit however for private individual corporations they definitely benefitted. A perfect example would be in the diamond industry most of the diamond stores that we go to that are based in France and Switzerland were established in between 1875-1908 around the same time colonization started and and mining was going on. Just that industry alone had siphoned billions. And that’s just one industry let’s not even talk about rubber or Ore. not to mention that a lot of the same industries that were established during the colonial period are still there. Also Europe was very cost effective at how they ran their operations on the continent. For millions of Africans they built their houses out of recycled sheet metal as it was a way cheaper option the building proper buildings that were most likely only saved for important landmarks or for the very few European inhabitants.
@@dejankojic4293 that is an extremely romanticized view of African states and kingdoms, it's a lot more complicated then that, to deny otherwise is to play into the Noble Savage view of Africa. It really depends what region of Africa and who colonized it. Otherwise Ethiopia and Liberia should be the most advanced and happiest nations on the continent and not artificial states like Ghana and Botswana.
@@dejankojic4293 By saying "they would be happier", you are praising them. Humans are not happier because of the reality that surrounds them, it's biologically wired. We tend to idealise realities we don't live in, because they adjust more to our views and desires, but it's only that, an idea, reality is far different.
@@dejankojic4293 And no, their purpose was not exploitation, it ocurred, but was not the goal. The goal was more like "getting a girl because all the homies are married". Exploitation was more individually driven, like with King Leopold
Number 7: “Industrialization was awful” is a markedly frustrating misconception. The ability to mass produce goods lowered the price of said goods, making them available for more people to obtain. I think part of this misconception also comes from idealizing a quaint past where the artisan gave his or her creation a unique quality that elevated it above the soulless creations of an assembly line. Of course, one forgets that if shoes were custom made, fewer people could afford shoes. It’s equally bizarre that the early, high, and late Middle Ages are sort of seen as a single period without consideration for geopolitics either. A person living in the Eastern Roman Empire would have had a very different life than one living in Brittany. There’s also, as you alluded to, a tendency to confuse the late Middle Ages with the counter-reformation. Even theologically 13th-century Catholicism looks more familiar to us than its 16th-century counterpart.
Industrialization was very awful, though. Immigrants were systematically exploited, being given poor-paying, labor-intensive jobs with very few rights, and not to mention that the work environments were incredibly hazardous. Industrialization was a crucial step for us to enjoy the world of mass production we live in today, but to say that initial conditions weren't horrid would be to downplay the limbs lost and the various horrors that needlessly fell upon factory workers (the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire arguably being the epitome of such).
@@sylvestergharold7265 Exactly, the whole industrial age was an multi-national social experiment; at no other point before in human history were so many crammed into such a small space as a city for so long, which is why thing like waste disposal to prevent cholera, plagues and diseases being part of daily life rather than occasional events, reliance on merchants for food rather than growing your own allowing scammers to cut foods like bread flour with non-edibles like plaster of paris or brick dust to reduce costs, creation of workers rights, child labour laws and health and safety protocols, pressure on doctors to perform sugeries and other medical procedures quickly rather than correctly so they can move onto the next patient not to mention the number of harmful chemicals whose effects only manifested after years of use - all mistakes that needed to be happen before we realised it was an issue and worked out ways to prevent it.
Proto industrialisation : little farm wokers would produce at home for merchant a certain amount of a certain patern. Almost self suffiscient, in the same time.
Some aspects of industrialisation were shit. Like working in dangerous factories, pollution etc Vs working on a farm. But yes it made goods way cheaps.
@@Neion8 No. Studies showing asbestos killed people were presented to that industry before 1900. We continued to use it, spray it etc. through the 1960s. It is still legally sold in India. Industrialization is not universally good. If technologies had rolled out in a different way, if the peasantry of England hadn't been driven to destitution through the late middle ages and the Renaissance industrialists would have had to earn their labor force by providing competetive wages and a better standard of living than owning your own farm or craft business.
It's probably worth mentioning that the growth of cities during the early and mid- industrial revolution was caused by immigration from rural areas due to surplus population there. Cities did not, as a rule, grow due to internal population growth. This does indicate something about the brutality of the industrial revolution, but it also does indicate something about the constant inability to support a growing population in rural areas.
No, cities were population sinks from the dawn of civilization until about 1900 or so (in the Western world) due largely to contagious diseases. Improved hygiene as a result of industrial era developments in soapmaking and plumbing, and the late-industrial innovations in water supply (chlorination) and sewage disposal (activated solids sewage treatment plants), are largely the things that have allowed urban populations to grow by natural increase. So actually, you're wrong about it indicating anything at all about industrialization.
??? Industrialization meant that machines could perform farm labor that had previously required many people to do, which is where your "surplus population" in rural areas came from. There were less farms, and less farm jobs, so people moved to cities to work in factories. The same thing happened in Mexico after NAFTA, corn prices dropped so much that it was cheaper to buy US corn than to grow it for themselves, and it led to millions of farmers seeking work in large cities, or across the border.
"I'm not sure how much effect the Europeans themselves had on Africa." 21 countries in Africa speak French as their official language. 29 in total. I'd say there was a pretty big impact. This isn't even the most damning mistake in the video, just the most glaring.
I was actually wondering wtf I was listening to. I commented about lumping Indians hating Churchill with Holocaust deniers of the Jewish or Armenian hating variety.
Very few Africans I’m in the former french colonies actually speak fluent french and fewer still use it in regular daily communication it’s at most a public lingua Franca for governments but almost everyone speak native African languages everyday
French in Africa is mostly for the elite, but more importantly, it was deliberately maintained by African leaders on a common accord because that gives them a convenient system to talk to each other. Otherwise they would have to manage a bazillion dialects. Imagine the president or prime minister of your country only speaks the dialect of his people group and stayed in place for 20-ish years, his language would gradually become the de facto language of the country and make every other groups become second-class citizens, leading to social unrest. But since none of the sub-groups has French for its native tongue, you're alienating everyone equally, thus alienating no one. Which funnily enough is the Frenchest thing to do 😂
This guy have an aglo centered point of view. The reason why incas were fighting a civil war and their economy was on problems. Was becose their society colapsed by the plage. But in the views of this guys it was not related to the arrival of europeans.
@@nicolasignaciomerinonunez114 aglo? You mean Anglo? Because the Spaniards aren't Anglos my friend that's the English - totally different country. Also, blaming the plagues on Europeans is like blaming the plagues on the Asians; neither society had the technological advancement to know about disease control enough to prevent contamination. Plus, while Americans got Smallpox (which no longer exists outside of a lab) Europeans got Syphilis (which still exists and kills people to this day) so they got their own back in the long run lol.
@@trollerjakthetrollinggod-e7761 I mean, Louis Pasteur's Germ theory wasn't published until 1861 (and the link between Germs and infections was published in 1878) when beforehand then the prevailing theory among the educated about the spread of disease was split between 'spontaneous generation' and 'Miasma' - or 'bad air' causing disease. If you think that a bunch of soldiers knew more about infection than the best of pre-1861 scientists and doctors centuries beforehand, then it was certainly very selfish of them to keep that knowledge to themselves, and strange that they didn't protect themselves better. Catapulting dead bodies into cities is a millenia-old tactic to demoralise an enemy, the fact that the Mongolians used plague bodies is at best more akin to deductive-reasoning than outright knowledge of biological warfare (similar to how people used to poison wells by throwing a carcass into it) and plague-blankets are even more of a stretch for claims of intentional harm.
Yep trying justify that they're native to North India(even though the majority haplogroup in North India is R1a and that haplogroup originated somewhere from the western or Central Asian steppe region)and that their culture and language isn't related to Europeans(even tho their language is apart of the branch of the Indo-Aryan which is a sub-branch of the Indo-Iranian language family which also a sub-branch of the wait for it,wait for it.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Indo-European language family you know the language family that includes almost all of the European languages,Iranian&Aryan languages,Armenian languages,and the extinct Tocharian languages and they worship Indo-European Gods case close)
Omg. Your first part about getting upset when someone starts to frick with history is so true. I got way too heated the other night at a friend of mine when she started criticizing a bunch of aspects of Western Civilization and saying things that simply weren’t true.
@@tron1852 I don't know what documentary you are talking about but in the latter Empire almost all soldiers and plenty of generals and emperors were provincial, including of course the north african provinces. Would they look black in the modern sense? Maybe some of them. Would they be women? No
@@michaelpsellos2560 north African is definitely not black. Brown, sure, but if we're being honest you'd probably only see little difference from the north African Roman's to the Italian or Greek Roman's.
@@ncls.1371 Yeah I don't know how it was back then but nowadays there exist a pretty wide range of skin colors in north Africa. Probably no one you would mistake for sub saharan though you're right
@@skullcrusherm7425 The Caste system did achieve its current form during British rule. The Caste system started becoming more rigid during the Gupta Empire (220ce-550ce) but it became weaker over time until the 1200s due to the rise of Jainism and Veerashaivism which challenged Brahmanical society. However, it became more rigid again from the 1200s to 1450s due to early Islamic rule where highly influential Hindus made it rigid as a resistance to the early tyrannical Muslim rulers. However, from the 1450s to 1800s, the system became less rigid again due to Vijayanagara Empire, regional Sultanates and later Mughal Empire which all encouraged caste fluidity within communities and the administration. However, from the 1800s to early 1900s, caste became more rigid than ever before. This was because the British organised communities based on caste and religion in their censuses among other things that came under 'Divide and Rule'. From the 1900s onwards, due to the rise in free thinking amongst the Indian elite and intellectuals, caste became less rigid and social restrictions were gradually lifted. To be honest, the caste system wasn't as bad as people think it was; it was just as bad as the class systems used in other parts of the world at the time and fluidity between castes was just as common. Its just a shame that it still exists in India whilst other cultures have managed to almost completely get rid of it.
@@brownbricks6017 The Caste system did achieve its current form during British rule. The Caste system started becoming more rigid during the Gupta Empire (220ce-550ce) but it became weaker over time until the 1200s due to the rise of Jainism and Veerashaivism which challenged Brahmanical society. However, it became more rigid again from the 1200s to 1450s due to early Islamic rule where highly influential Hindus made it rigid as a resistance to the early tyrannical Muslim rulers. However, from the 1450s to 1800s, the system became less rigid again due to Vijayanagara Empire, regional Sultanates and later Mughal Empire which all encouraged caste fluidity within communities and the administration. However, from the 1800s to early 1900s, caste became more rigid than ever before. This was because the British organised communities based on caste and religion in their censuses among other things that came under 'Divide and Rule'. From the 1900s onwards, due to the rise in free thinking amongst the Indian elite and intellectuals, caste became less rigid and social restrictions were gradually lifted. To be honest, the caste system wasn't as bad as people think it was; it was just as bad as the class systems used in other parts of the world at the time and fluidity between castes was just as common. Its just a shame that it still exists in India whilst other cultures have managed to almost completely get rid of it.
The only historical misconception that really counts is the one where everyone thinks every other country/race/religion/gender is guilty of wrongdoing towards them whilst their own is oh so fluffy and cute and whimsical and innocent, always picked on and bullied by those other big meanies.
10:03 I think that is a missconception, too. The working-hours in an agricultural society was normaly lower than in the industrial age (harvest season not included). It just was not that well payed, especialy when the main farmland was occupied by big landlords. The reason that the farmes went to the cities was not the hard work on the land, it was because the hard work in the city was better payed.
Additionally, the closing of common lands forced a huge portion of farmers into poverty, where city/industrial jobs were a way to survive. I disagree with the video on that section from the study I've done on economic history in university.
In a factory you get payed every week or two while in agriculture the produce only grows every couple of months with varying degrees of success, not to mention having to go out and sell said produce.
I deeply appreciate the book recommendations, I'm studying history at uni and it gets real annoying with some groups judge the past peoples with modern standars for their political agendas.
That last part about judging peope by modern standards is so unbelievably true. I'm a member on quite a large AltHist forum,and we constantly have this debate, like, I joined late last year, and I've already been part of, or observed three different ones.
"Immensely subtle regimes that could be very nice places to live." What a refreshing description about, for example, the Persian Empire. The phrase could be applied rather fittingly to more modern states too, I think.
>Immensly subtle regimes. >Ottomans stealing Christian children and indoctrinating them into becoming the Sultan’s personal death squad. >Islamic caliphates treated Christians subjects like second class citizens until they converted. I think the Islamophilic view that the Islamic empires were good places to live if you were non-Muslim is another viewpoint that needs to go.
@@megakillerx This. It's not even just the jizya tax on non-believers. The Islamic world also had laws prohibiting the marriage of Muslim women to non-Muslim men (but of course Muslim men were free to take non-Muslim women as wives.) While I'm not a fan of judging historical practices by modern morals, this kind of discrimination is still far from great and definitely not much better than how almost any other region treated conquered peoples.
@@megakillerx I would agree with you, if I didn't compare that to what it was like elsewhere. Europe in that time was a horrific bloodbath of religious extremism - protestant and catholic people were killing each other on mass. He never made the argument that they were good places by modern standards, just that they were the best during their time.
@@megakillerx so christians were treated like second class citizens in the Ottoman Empire, how terrible. What do you think muslims were treated like in Western Europe at the same time? Way worse obviously.
@@jakub8782 Why yes, how else should you treat a foreign invader that tried to murder you, uproot your faith, you culture and your way of life? Give them a slap on the wrist? But then again, i still fail to see how the iberian ultimatum of “convert or be exiled into North Africa” is way worse than the Ottoman ultimatum of “convert or be taxed into oblivion and have your sons kidnapped and be indoctrinated into the Sultan’s personal death squad”.
so do the san of southern africa, i am unfamilair with the pamiri but if they are anything the san people then largely extinct (being a meer shadow in terms of numbers and population spread) and politically irrelevant.
true, but no one is saying that the Europeans were doing out of the kindness of their hearts. Most people where properly just in it for the money (as most people tend to do) although I will say that Europeans didn't see it as simply a way of exploiting (maybe except the Belgians), They saw it as a way of exporting civilisation to Africa, which they thought gave them the right to conquer. This is analogous to how Microsoft sees its vision to "empower companies of all sizes to be their best".
True, however, Europe would still have had the same level of wealth without Africa, and Africa would be much poorer without Europe (this, however, doesn't justify any act of conquest in itself)
This is obviously a sensitive issue and I should point out that I am not an expert on the subject. I just think that there are problems in the argument given in this video on this point, and I'm setting them out here. Moreover, "Europeans have exploited Africa" can be understood differently. If exploited is taken to mean that Europeans have done their utmost to extract as many resources as possible, I think that is wrong. As said in the video, there was no huge investment and industrialization would have made the exploitation of Africa much more efficient. I rather have the impression that the Europeans have mainly tried to extract as many resources as possible by relying almost exclusively on the local populations. In Madagascar, for example, slavery was massively used to build the infrastructure needed by Europeans, particularly for the transport of local production to the metropolis. There was therefore no cost to France apart from the deployment of the military, but there was a transfer of resources from the colony to Europe. It seems in fact that the wealth exploited in Africa is not so huge compared to other colonies or even to the resources present on the continent. If we take into account the fact that they have been exploited almost exclusively by the labour of local populations without modern tools, the term "exploitation" seems appropriate. Nor should it be forgotten that this is not the time of current liberalism. Empires tried to be as self-sufficient as possible and sought to obtain the resources necessary for their industries through colonisation. In this perspective, the colonies were mainly to produce enough resources to keep the industry of the mother country functioning, no more. In fact, the local populations were more or less (depending on the place and time) forced to produce various resources for the colonizer and used their pay to buy products sold by the colonizers (another considerable source of wealth for the industry of the colonizing countries). Anyway thank you for your very enjoyable videos.
Even to think that it was just Europeans is very ignorant, in the grand scheme of things the Islamic world exploited Africa for far longer, to a far greater extent and were far more brutal in doing it. At the end of the day every civilisation that beats another in the field of conflict have tended to go on to exploit and mistreat those they defeated, it's not just Europeans but humanity
I think the question can be broken into three parts: - Have the colonizers mistreated Africans for material gain? Yes, definitely. - Has this lead to a net benefit to the colonizing countries? Not really, trading for the needed resources would be more efficient in the long run. - Would Africans be economically better off if there had been no colonization? Only if they had adopted Western ideas and technologies on their own
@@TapOnX True, this whole thing is so deeply mixed with emotions and current narratives that we have forgotten what questions we actually are answering, moreover many people would answer yes to all 3, but when shown evidence to the contrary, would simply move the goal post by switching the question out with one that is easier to defend.
The problem wasn’t how the Europeans treated Africa after it was colonised, but how the Europeans destroyed African cities and infrastructure during the colonisation process. I’m a 2nd generation immigrant from Ghana and in there, the British burned down our original capital city (Kumasi) in 1896. This as well as the divide and conquer tactics, badly drawn borders, the Europeans’ lack of help in terms of development and the longer amount of time under colonial rule is what made Africa underdeveloped and slower to modernise than Asian countries for example. The problem wasn’t the exploitation (which still happened especially in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo) but the destruction caused by the wars and the prevention of growth.
I never could hold back chuckles when modern day activists behave as if atrocities are uniquely European and only exported to the rest of the world later on. There are segments In the ancient history of my people (Chinese) that always leave me disgusted when I happen upon them, where entire urban centers of men, women, and children got buried alive or otherwise executed _after they surrendered_ by hostile armies whose generals happened to have psychotic fits after conquering those cities, and rivalries between upper-echelon nobles often ended with entire families _and those of their friends_ massacred. It doesn't seem to occur to them that every country was draconian back then.
I disagree that people believe atrocities are uniquely European. However European atrocities are directly linked to our history in the united states. You are suffering from the straw man fallacy.
@@dy031101 1. What activists are you referring to? 2. Another straw man fallacy. I never claimed atrocities were not linked to all of human history. The history of our own country's founding is taught more in the united states than other elements of human history. Whether or not you or I agree with that being the right thing to do. Personally, with limited time, I would rather learn about our own countries history, and how it has shaped our country today, than that of ancient china, as an example. 3. I never attacked you personally. I never claimed to be special. This sounds like an ego attack, implying your ego may have been damaged by my comment. Apologies.
@@DOMOzCHANNEL >>What activists are you referring to?>I never claimed atrocities were not linked to all of human history.>The history of our own country and ancestors is taught more in the united states than all of human history.>Whether or not you or I agree with that being the right thing to do.
What if the Meiji Restoration failed? What if the Knights' Templar never fell? What if the Raid on Harper's Ferry succeeded? What if Bleeding Kansas never happened?
I can kind of answer #2. The Knights Templar were taken out by Philip the Fair primarily because they owned a lot of France's Debt, were a Papal force in country at a time when the King was trying to fight Papal influence, had ambitions to create a Papal state in country and were fabulously rich. Now, for the Templars to survive, that requires Pope Boniface VIII to survive and this isn't that difficult. When the Pope got word of what Philip was doing, he prepared to go down there to put a stop to it. Philip promptly sent thuggery commandos (yes I'm calling them that) to kidnap him (yes, I'm serious), which resulted in the Pope being decked across a room and dying a week later of a brain aneurysm. The result of this led to the French taking over the Papacy and rampant corruption that led to the Protestant Revolution. Now, if Boniface hadn't been decked across the face or was out of town, then he'd lead a Papal response to Philip. This likely would've led to France being invaded by militant orders and Papal loyalist countries, which Philip had no chance of winning. This would either lead to Philip being killed or deposed. This would mean the Papacy would still be in Rome, would not have taken such a massive reputation hit and such would not have suffered such massive corruption. While Protestantism likely would've risen eventually, it would've happened much later, since a lot of the issues that led to it occurring under Martin Luthor would not have been as exasperated. That means the 17th century would've completely altered. Likewise, Philip's line is completely derailed and France would've lost quite a bit of territory in the process. Now as for the Templars, they likely would've gotten a sizable chunk of France to rule for the Pope, essentially becoming akin to the Teutonic Knights. Like them, they would've lasted several centuries but probably would've been bested by the locals (either the Germans or French). They would continue to exist today as charity and honorary organization, much like the Hospitaliters. Hope this answers your question.
Aiden Wieder exactly my thoughts, with something like the Kansas Nebraska Act allowing the incoming settlers that populate the territories to decide if they will allow slavery or not some serious conflict was bound to happen
@Luís Filipe Andrade One point you're missing. If the Cotton Gin was never invented, slavery would have died out long before a Civil War even happened, because slavery would not have been a profitable economic system for the Southern landowners to latch onto. The South would have inevitably industrialized, like the North did. And African Americans would have been freed from slavery as early as 1840.
Bruh the intro is super relatable, I as well get fairly upset when a person makes a mistake about something historical. An example I remember is from a couple years ago when my class was learning about ww1, and I was making corrections left and right like "No one called the central powers axis" or "its pronounced Bulgaria not Buljaria".
You should have mentioned the Belgian Congo during your Africa segment. That was undeniably a brutal, exploitative slave state made entirely for profit EDIT: not made for profit. It was made because Belgium wanted to have an empire. It couldn't have been initially founded for profit because the Europeans thought nothing was there. It was when rubber was found that the congolese people were exploited
Whatifalthist as much as I like your videos there are countless instances where Europeans got more out of Africa than it put in. The French government extracted billions post independence from 14 of their former sub sharan colonies by dictating the financial guidelines of the separation of French rule and even have first claim to some of their natural resources. And by carving up the continent with no regard for ethnic differences when independence it created the space for civil wars,military dictatorship, ethnic cleansing and easier for neo-colonialism to start again. The Congo Is just one of the easiest explosions to cite due to the sheer brutality
Whatifalthist you forgot to mention how Africa was carved up for strategic reasons like the French control over the Sahara was used to link up their colonies in Algeria, Gabon, Senegal and the Ivory Coast. Many countries saw no economic investment other than military installations
When I was in the military, I became friends with a Jew who, while not my first Jewish friend, he was the first one really to tell me about their history. One thing I wasn't expecting was he said that the fanatical anti-Jewish attitude of the Arabs is actually a recent development, only really becoming a major force about 100 years ago. Before that, he said there would be isolated outbursts of persecution due to an emir or caliph having a personal grudge, but it would stop as soon as that ruler died or was out of power. Kind of like how Christianity was mostly tolerated by the Roman Empire, but you occasionally had someone like Nero come along.
@@ressljs as a Syrian I can tell you that eventhow it wasn't always perfect jews and Muslims all lived here in peace up until the conflict with Israel. Propaganda just spread fast and many became anti-semetic. There were definitely many Syrians who had nothing against jews but it wasn't socially acceptable.Although I have to say that the younger generation (luckily) is much more educated on the matter due to having the internet.
10:37 - Just to clarify, Marx was never against industrialisation, he was simply against the profits of industrialised labour going to the bourgeois class rather than the workers or proletariat. Hopefully that clears things up.
Marx has been refuted so many times by real economists that is really boring to hear someone explaining marxism. Prehistoric and very anti cientific theory. Also really dangerous.
@@FragRevel you talk about Marxism as though it’s an economic system, it is not, it’s a method of analysing the relationship between the human mind and the world it exists in. Marxist economics is a load of outdated garbage I’ll be the first to admit that, but that doesn’t mean the system of analysis Marx created should be discarded.
@@solortus Just because it's been the most successful so far doesn't mean that it doesn't need to be reformed. Capitalism through climate change is literally destroying the planet (yes i know the soviets were extremely bad for the environment as well).
Not to mention the fact that he fails to recognise the difference between Marxism and Marx’s theory as detailed in the communist manifesto. I like his channel in terms of historical documentation but his political understanding (with the exclusion of certain aspects of geopolitics) is soooo limited
@João Antonio honestly the market is flooded with diamonds now. They’re not nearly as valuable as they once were. The gold that ended the Bullion famine, however, now that African “contribution” definitely benefited Europe a great deal more than Africa
@Petri I'm aware, and I'm nkt able to rewatch the video right now, he made it sound like Africa somehow benefitted from their colonization, when they clearly didnt
I am sorry, but saying the European didn't exploited Africa IS controversial. The Congo's rubber plantation is the most profitable private business in the world at that time, French conquests of northern Africa is literally said the "biggest redistribution of wealth in the century", when the looting and killing subsided, "the french looter sold back Muslim property to Muslim,from Ottomans estate to the farmer's tool everything is sold back to the populace for whatever the soldiers can take back to France", the Brits conquest of ivory coast also marked with looting and poor investment, mines are profitable, you don't invest anything, the labor cost is "not losing money to bullet and kill those people". When you don't invest in governmental construction, you lose out on taxation, that's the basis of colonialisms. The amounts of colonist's wealth accumulated in Africa colony is tremendous, they just simply didn't pay the empire. And the comparison is simply ridiculous, the whole continent has 95 million people in 1850 divided by different countries, do you expect them to pay the same amount of tax as the tremendously larger Asian and white colonies with so much more investment. As an oil contractor in the Middle East i don't have the high moral ground for condemnation of the exploit but it's just simple economic isn't it.
@Noah Pritchett / The handsome apologist Even for the Brits it's profitable, the idea is just bonkers and has no logical ground. If you don't spent a cent and only took from the colony then it's exploitation, even the Japanese invested in China same time as they committing war crimes.
@Noah Pritchett / The handsome apologist That doesn't make sense, what exactly did they invest in Africa, they Brit didn't build road, they don't care about infrastructure, they amount of troop they station there is miniscule compared to the amount they have in Raj. To quote Kevin Shillington- history of Africa, "The investment is non- existence in tropical Africa and the amount of profit is tremendous, copper, gold, diamond, rubber, tin, cocoa, palm oil.. Is essential for European population, their lifestyles depended on it,in Africa, they don't build schools or roads, they didn't build a banking system, they don't like factory and power plants. The white colonies down south is more fortunate, they have nothing, no slave labor, no mineral, if you don't invest then there is no profit. Most of the money poured down the colony is lost in corruption and flow right back to Britain, there is no such thing as nonprofit-colonialism"
They probably would have expanded more if it wasn’t for their inheritance laws/rules. Like most pre 17th 18th century successions laws are quite flawed and lead to usurpers like in Imperial Rome with a general on a winning streak of battles could be proclaimed Emperor by his legions
@@thomasalvarez6456 that's pretty dumb to devide the empire between generals. Why wouldnt they chose one sucessor to rule the empire like 90% of the empires?
Egypt was ruled by a Mongolian slave-soldier in the thirteenth century surprisingly. The Mongol overlords and troops would probably mix into the local mamluk elite and Egypt would become independent again
@@wirelessbluestone5983 i don't think that's how it works. It is the population that represents the country, it is not because the elite is semi egyptian that the country would become egyptian, it like the european royal families, they are often mixed but the kingdoms still independent from each other and that because the population is different from a kingdom to enother.
My favorite example of how people of old times being introspective and intelligent is some people can observe their blind spots in their eyes. With know understanding of how the eye work seeing an object disappear and re appear in your peripheral vision would be confusing at best and possibly terrifying. Explains a few folk tales of demons or spirits that disappear and re appear in front of you.
The eleven misconceptions: 11 - World War I commanders were idiots 1:01 10 - Oriental despotism 3:18 9 - Dialogue 4:41 8 - People in the past were stupid and immoral 7:00 7 - Industrialization was awful 8:58 6 - The Europeans exploited Africa 10:43 5 - Early civilizations were good places 12:58 4 - The Dark Ages were terrible 14:58 3 - The Middle Ages were primitive 16:26 2 - Migrations never occurred 18:04 1 - The Native Americans were hippies 19:48
Man, number 6 seems a bit misleading. It's true that Africa was poor compared to Europe, and it's true that sometimes European used Africa as a relief valve to avoid conflict on the Continent, but they really interested in African resources, unexploited by Africans. Furthermore, they depicted themselves as "civilizer" but they only did little investments in their colonies, all made to favour white minority. Africa isn't poor only for Europeans but colonization really damaged African economy. Sorry for possible grammatical errors but I'm not a native speaker.
@Pecu Alex Not it wasnt, Colonization was not a dick-measuring contest, this is very wrong, and very false. Africa's resources were exploited, Rubber, Diamond, Coal, iron, anything that could be exploited, was exploited, railroads were only built in CERTAIN areas to tax the goods more and to carry the goods faster, they didnt build railroads in the heart of the continent for no reason. "Railroadism" is a gross but prevalent ideaology that praises European colonization, trying to pawn it off as a dick-measuring contest.
@Gregory Johnson that is an extremely false lie and you know it, African states were very advanced, not specifically technolagically, though that would have come from the North African States (which where on par to European states). Africa was not a backwater, and it had a very complex economy, they had rich cultures, complex societies, and had invented countless great inventions which the world has come to use. Please stop spreading your bullshit Eurocentric views.
Something you could add to a part 2: The Renaissance is a separate era that follows the Medieval era. The Late Medieval era is considered to be from mid 1200s to around 1500. The Italian Renaissance happened from the 1300s to 1500s. Donatello died the same year the War of the Roses ended. The period that involves European exploration and early colonization is the Early Modern era. Point of note: a lot of modern Medieval fantasy stories are set in the Renaissance. Organized armies, crossbows and realistic paintings
The oldest wheel currently was found in Slovenia, but yes we cant know where it came from, besides we dont know what else my lie underground somewhere, considering most finds are accidental
@@gajmlinar6950 i believe the idea that it was invented in modern day ukraine comes from indo-european invasions, which we know spread the wheel. although that doesn't mean they invented it.
I'm Asian (Indian) British. I'm sure many Indians will hate on Churchill - and have legitimate reasons. Personally I consider him the perfect (wartime) leader.
...but, it would be amazing. It's mind blowing that one of the world's largest sky-bird preyed on the world's largest land-bird, in the land of the world's smallest land-birds.
British colonialism overall was extremely profitable, and the British control over their colonies was brutal. I think what's got you confused was that a lot of the profit was realised in the British ruling class, in a classic set-up where the state covers costs and private enterprise reaps the profits.
Compared to most empires, the British and the French were in some ways pretty merciful. Belgium obviously had the absolutely cruel Congo Free state, the Japanese committed atrocities that defy all imagination, the Spanish often annihilated tribes or literally tortured them to change faiths, the Romans committed massacres on a routine basis, Alexander the Great had nearly all his subjugated forced to become more Greek, I could go on and on. I will not defend whatever atrocities Britain and France committed, but I'd much rather have to live under them than 85% of all other empires in history.
@@thunderbird1921 Except the Spanish were actually relatively nice to the Natives compared to the English who wanted to annihilate them in many areas. The idea that the Spanish were particularly vicious and cruel is ironically a misconception, stemming from English propaganda called the Black Legend.
@@ShivJ16 why did the natives turn Christian and whole empires fall due to the Spanish? Populations in colonies don’t just change their major religion because of the main country.
I wanna clarify something with the first myth, the way WW1 was fought was not new. In fact you could see mirrors in the American Civil War, especially towards the end. The technologies had advanced between the two, and WW1, was much more brutal, but in almost every way, the American Civil War was very much a proto-WW1. Point 1: Massive stalemat, with the exception of the Mississippi, no side was able to gain or lose much ground until the end of the war, especially in the main hotspots. When we are taught about the Civil War, we are taught about many offenses on both sides ultimately going nowhere for the better part of the war, such as the many attacks into the north, usually perpetrated by General Lee, or the initial failed attacks on Richmond. 2: Technological advancement, while not as extensive as WW1, the ACW used many new inventions or is one if not the earliest use of a preexisting invention in warfare, such as the repeater rifle, modern bullets, the ironclad, railways, gatling gun, and early submarines. There are a few other inventions that were new or untested in war at that point. 3: Shift in tactics, the Battle of Bull Run is famous for this combination of tactics that were slowly being dated and citizen naivety, but by 1864 with the Siege of Petersburg we start to see a full on trench warfare in the fashion of early to mid WW1 So, simply put, a precedent did exist, but everyone thought it would end up like the Franco-Prussian war, not the US Civil War
The Russo-Japanese war was even closer to WW1, being only 10 years before. Europeans watched it keenly (mostly because they were worried about possible Russian agression, and also because Japan had a "British" navy and "German" army so they could see tactics and ships in actual action), but don't seem to have noticed how grim the land campaign got (and how much worse it might be if, say, both countries had the majority of their armies on either side of a land border...)
I don’t buy this Petersberg-WW1 trench warfare statement. Armies have been fighting in trenches during sieges for hundreds of years. Nothing about Petersberg wasn’t seen in the second siege of Vienna, for instance.
I kinda feel the use of exploitation as synonymous with stealing of physichal resources for monetary gain is misleading. I understand the argument of europeans not having gained much monetary advantage from colonizing Africa, but there was clearly some form of resource that they were looking for - you even mention it actually: relative political power compared to other european rivals. Would you still argue that taking political and geographical power from the native population of Africa is not exploitative? It also seems like you are arguing that the europeans taking control over african geographical areas and implementing their governace (whether directly or not) has had an insignificant impact on history - which might be me misunderstanding your intentions, or might be a statement with which I cannot agree based on my understanding of our history. In either case, I still appreciate you having made this video. It is a good thing to challenge persistent ideas not based in the reality of history. Thank you!
I think his point was refuting the general idea Africa is poor because Europe ravaged it of all resources. In reality European colonialism in the late 18th & early 19th century introduced technology Africans wouldn't have acquired otherwise.
@@imoyabrax450 lol what geopolitical condition, every single African government before colonization is a joke and people lived like savages like Incas and they are real primitive compared to the average technology and considering that Europeans have actually modernized most of Africa, I don't see how it is wrong or a disadvantage to Africans, the governments which came after colonization are the ones that caused massive resource plundering for their own good and left people like slaves
Even if you're a Churchill defender (yikes), putting Indian grievances against him on the same level as holocaust denial and denial of the Armenian genocide is at best in very poor taste.
@@alexanderishere6205 Like the Armenian famine. Right? I am aware of the context. Listen even my comment made room for reasonable disagreement but I hope you can see that Indian historical perspectives on being colonised should not be equated to holocaust denial.
The Bengal famine is a very controversial historical event, both in terms of the involvement of Churchill and that of the British Raj. I always cringe when I see British or Indian nationalists fight over it, is a debate best left for historical researchers. As a historian who isn’t specialized in that field, I will only say that from what I know of British government correspondence regarding the famine, it seems unlikely they worsened the famine on purpose (while Churchill did not like Indians in the slightest, he was always advocating for non-lethal means of colonial repression and even supported a path to Indian independence) but they may still very well have worsened it by callous disregard for civilian Indian life. That’s all I’ll say on the matter though, I am no expert.
@@luxborealis That is exactly the perspective I was trying to get at. The holocaust and the Armenian genocide are historical facts that are not in dispute except by governments and groups who stand to gain from questioning them. That cannot fairly be said about the Bengal famine, and doing so strongly undermines the point of this introduction.
Hey man I just wanted to say I love your videos, and I love how balanced you are, but I have to disagree with the how Europe didn't exploit Africa, I'm surprised you didn't bring up king Kongo, or what's Germany did in Namibia, or Cecil rose using badly treated African to mine gold, and the destruction of the city of Benin, all the capital of the Ashanti empire, Africa was not perfect but what Europe did was not the most constructive, thing they could have done.
I'm Italian. Italian colonizers have done horrible things to the Ethiopians, but in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia they still have and use some of the infrastructures (streets, railways, schools, places of entertainment, etc.) that the Italians built there. We didn't expolit our colonies that much also because Italy had a very short colonial history compared to other European countries.
The destruction of Benin and the Ashanti capital were due to them being at war with the British also it is very clear that African colonies were far more costly than beneficial to European powers. Therefore Europe recieved very little if any actual benefit for colonial rule in Africa. Also the fact that non-colonial European nations such as Switzerland, Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Austria are just as wealthy per capita as the colonial nations such as Britain, France and Germany shows that the western world was not enriched by their Empires like some people like to believe in order to push a reparations narrative.
@@oreroundpvp896 That's ridiculus, you seem to forget that having a rich market with high population and high demands tends to make you have much more posibilities to make money. Just take a look to the way those countries make money, and those are by selling goods to the european markets. With the added benefit that not being a colony so they could put the price
A common misconception, especially in the USA is that Columbus reached America, as in their country. He, of course, never set foot in North America. The only part of mainland Americas that he set foot on is what is modern day Panama (hence the city of Colon, Christopher Columbus in Spanish is Cristobal Colon) and what is modern day Venezuela.
Whatifalthist I’m Afro-german it’s huge in some tribes they speak a Germanic dialect similar Dutch. Namibia is great just don’t call is South African because we hate we people do that.
I mostly agree but some point of disagreement: -While Middle Ages were not as bad as people think, if for no other reason than people trying to improve their lives and rejecting misery when possible. You go so far as to shortchange the Classical Era. It had some massive advantages over what came after, you mention bureaucracy but they had that in spades, ERE kept it up for the most part. They had professional armies the likes of which would not be seen for a thousand years after. Literacy and intellectualism was far higher, as was urbanization which I'd say is a plus even if it was somewhat hard to maintain. There were technological marvels that were lost even if they were being underutilized. The empire that fell was massive and orderly and in short people lived closer to modern times in it than they did in the result barbaric chiefdoms that came after. -Ottomans were at the very least abysmal given their various practices of slavery (for soldiers, concubines, eunuchs, workers...). Very brutal feudalism at least over Christians, which included besides the afore mentioned slave taking (so called tithe in blood), harsh forced labor, extremely onerous taxes and just general cruelty of Turkish lords. Extremely brutal and unfree to minority populations, and including horrific execution methods (impalement) and tortures. And they were encroaching on Europe and preying on Europeans, so at the very least from a European standpoint they were despotic. -Lastly I'd mention a more general one where you overstate your case a lot in a few myths. Maybe it is a pet peeve thing or maybe you wanted more myths on the list. WW1 generals were pretty terrible, if charging into machine guns doesn't work once then maybe try to avoid doing it twice and seek a different avenue of attack or a new way to do it. They did try this ofc but not enough, they sacrificed too many lives and were slow to learn lessons of past wars or battles fought. Industrialization pretty definitively helped things in the long run but in the short run it was horrible. Blacklung, kids workers shredded by machinery, insane work hours just some horrors that happened. Meanwhile many and probably most of those people did not go to towns joyfully, they were evicted from commons by enclosures, expelled as excessive due to new agricultural machinery and otherwise very desperate, easily exploited by nascent capitalists. No one gave a damn about you, you were a wage slave, easily replaceable cog it was in an odd way more alienating than feudalism and even slavery. Not saying those modes are better mind, but neither are they strictly worse. And finally ancient agricultural societies were harsh on the underclasses but living in a tribe was even harsher if you were the odd man out. In some ways choosing to be "uncivilized" was not a bad choice, for those non-bottom tier individuals. But it would have also probably kept humanity from progressing very far if it continued indefinitely.
The Ottomans weren't perfect, he never claimed that. but they were not that horrible either, just compare it with the the treatment of the Jews or other religious minorities in many European states. Hell Ottomans actually accepted Jews who were banished from Spain alongside Spanish Muslims, and those Jews only left the Middle East when the Arab regimes forced them out after the establishment of Israel.
your intro including "Indians will continue to hate Churchhill" alongside 2 examples of genocide denialism is just WEIRD man. Churchhill gave India (and many other places) PLENTY of valid reasons to hate him.
yeah, he also does it with the Industrialization "myth" to dunk on Marxists, and goes on to claim (in spite of the mountains of evidence that pre-industrial societies labored fewer hours not more) that the poor loved slaving away in factories prior to unionization and labor laws. pre-industrial societies averaged about 10-20 hours per week in production activities compared to the 40+ in modernity. It's a pretty dishonest take.
@@E.J.Crunkleton The work in agriculture was extremely unevenly distributed throughout the year. During sowing and harvesting, they work almost around the clock. But at other times of the year they did other things because there was nothing to do in agriculture. Yield / wage for agriculture was very uncertain and famine was common. So there was a great interest in getting to the city and working in industry, especially for those who had poor soil to cultivate in.
@@niklasmolen4753 No ones going to mentioned the Inclosure Acts and how they managed to take common land away from a lot of the rural folk, thereby forcing them into the cities? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts#List_of_acts
@@annoydivision There have been similar ones in several countries and they have helped to make agriculture more efficient. But as usual, some were probably cheated on their land. They were a prerequisite for having a more productive agriculture. Which enabled more people to work in more than just agriculture.
I feel like the Native American one is pretty misleading. While yes plains Indians where extremely warlike, a good portion of woodlands Indians where relatively peaceful (aside from the Iroquois). I also think to dismiss the idea that they werent in tune with their environment is extremely ignorant. The amazon rainforest was literally bred by natives to be more productive, and controlled burns by American Indians (that you called burning down forests) where done to prevent uncontrollable fires and made them more productive later on... that is literally being in control of the environment and understanding it, I think you are mistaking it as a problem because the way these things are done now and are unsustainable / unsuccessful with how modern ppl do them.
The part you skipped over with the colonization of Africa was when they drew lines, the longest lasting harm to Africa was when they actually created countries without any understanding of the pre-existing cultural lines or the fact that all of them were accustomed to moving around and not staying within permanent settlements. That certainly created long term negative affects upon Africa
6:01 this is not entirely true. People did of course swear in the past, just not in the same way we do. Words and their meanings change over time and common words back in history might have a more serious meaning today. If you want to learn more about this watch this video by Simon Roper, an excellent anthropologist and historical linguist. ruclips.net/video/ARgGguQlQ0w/видео.html It's also important to note that more formal language was used in the literature from the past, and thus isn't truly representative of how people commonly spoke, meaning that we aren't getting what was actually spoken, but instead a formalization of it. It's not hard to realize that people didn't really speak like they do in Shakespeare. Another note is the inaccuracy of the point made at 6:30. Old English and Southern English are not incredibly close, they just share a few pronunciations. Simon Roper also has a video discussing this. ruclips.net/video/4rb0HPDnc8Y/видео.html
Interestingly enough in my language we still swear sometimes like people from medieval times. Ok, even in english there is "damn" and "in god's name", swears with a more religious context. But we swear on words like "sacrament", "cross- crucifix", "cross- cruzifiction" and so on. Even some class/caste related swear words like "one who got shorn up from behind" (i really have no clue how i should translate this), which describes the style of hair serfs had to have in medieval times, so you basically call him a serf, a rightless man on the lowest social level, even though this class system died in our society around 500 years ago. Another one is "crucify the turks", even though the thing you are swearing about has nothing to do with them or generally any person. Maybe because my ancestors saw the invading turks as kind of dark wizards who could hex people.
1:30 - The Prussians did send observers to the American Civil War, but they looked down upon the American armies as undisciplined rabbles (in the first months of the war they were probably right if Mark Twain's account is any indication) so they probably didn't learn much.
If Italy didn't unify the North would have been taken by Austria and the south by Spain. The Pope would have been kn a better situation between 2 of his besties rather than cover by the Savoys.
I like the thought of one of the Moroccan crisies starting off WW1 as very nearly happened. Mainly because in that war Serbia would not bleed nearly as much, and would probably only join war late for spoils like Romania/Italy instead of having to bear the brunt of the war and massacres as in OTL (25% of all people died in the war, more if only counting men, and there were massacres of Serbs in Austria-Hungary too which don't count to this dark score). Bulgaria might even join Entente with no easy DoW on Serbia while they could instead try and take Constantinople from Ottomans. OTOH Austria and eventually Germany had to commit many troops to Serbian front, these would go elsewhere and potential be enough to win or at least knock out Russia a bit sooner.
I’m going to talk about if the Qing never existed. All of this would account for if the Ming did industrialised and modernised. 1. The Ming encounters the Opium Wars with Britain and wins it so it drives the colonial powers out of China instead of a longer war. 2. China builds up the military response to Japan modernising & trading with western powers. 3. Japan tried to invade Korea but failed to do so because of China advanced navy and army so then Japan will suffer a revolution & isolation after it. 4. The Ming dynasty supports the anti-communists Russians so therefore the Soviet Union will lose the civil war more likely and gained support of western powers. 5. The Ming send troops so the axis is defeated very early by 1943 and with Japan being isolated, the US would not intervene. Major powers would be British, French, Russians, and the Ming dynasty during the 1940s. 6. Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Ming dynasty would be an alliance. British empire, French empire, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and occupied Germany would be an alliance sort of like NATO. The US, Japan, Mexico, Central America, and South America would be an alliance. 7. With Russia and China having inferior economies compared to the western colonial powers still then Russia will end up in a economic and political crisis and will make concessions. 8. With the Qing not invading, then China will be in a much smaller area size that will exclude Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, and Guangxi probably and leaves with about 1,910,000 square miles of Chinese land as modern Chinese territory. 9. China in the alternate timeline would not include Dalai Lama as part of the Chinese nation. I know some other people also speculate that later Tang would exist with the Ming falling, Ming dynasty having a huge wealth gap that leads to rebellions probably, potentially Ming could have bad emperors that lead to lost of the Opium Wars, and Ming could reform its economy based on capitalism by 1700s and become a dominating capitalist empire by 1800s and 1900s. With all this said, anything could possibly happen had the Qing conquest didn’t happen.
X1 Gen KaneshiroX The Ming couldn't industrialize or modernize. It was practically intellectually, socially, and technologically stagnant for its duration, especially when compared to the dynamism of the Song. Part (certainly not all, but part) of why the Qing failed to modernize was their arrogance, which might be even worse under a dynasty not ruled by “barbarians”.
But to answer your question, OP, I think the Ming probably would've been overthrown by the Shun dynasty (which probably wouldn't last very long) or gone into a period of civil strife before being reunited by some warlord.
The Europeans, as a whole, didn't benefit from colonizing Africa, but the citizens of the Congo Free State, in the 1800s, would disagree. The Belgians, in particular King Leopold ii, benefited greatly.
Yeah, I was expecting something overall better. I am now thinking that I was simply not the target audience of this video and my expectations were a mistake.
@@Onlinerando Yeah, this was my second. I was impressed with his Timur video and instantly subscribed to Al Muqaddimah who assisted with it, then I watched this one which left me 'not wanting more'.
Even though the main point seems right imho, I too feel like this was quite a subjective . And found quite interesting that your view of europe was so foccused on the source nations of the northamerican colonizers.
@@christiano9693 not really. The biggest misconception is that today's Islamic countries actually practice sharia law. That's total bullshit. Iran and Saudi Arabia only enforce the laws that suite their regimes and call them Sharia Law. Many of those laws are actually way too far and sometimes false. Back in the day Islam really was present in the Umayyad and Abbassid caliphates, and the other states during theor time. Of course, not everyone was extremely religious and all, but real sharia law was actually there and many people were religious. We can't call them Arab empires either because they were dominated by races that weren't Arabs like Berbers, Persians and Turks. The Arabas were the majority only until around 710. Once the Caliphate expanded to other cultures, those cultures slowly started to mix with the Arab culture, with many elites preferring the Persian way of life for example as opposed to the ancient Arabian way. Caliphes and Sultans started trusting foreign races instead of Arabs, with the Abbassids giving huge influence and power to Persians later on, only to replace them with Turks some century later. Eventually, more and more cultures blended with the Arabian one. The last time the Caliphates were truly Arab was probably around 800-900.
@@alidokadri we are agree. I say that talk about islamic golden age or similar is like say the islam is the cause of that knowledge accumulation (the cause is the empire, Islam is just a tool of the imperial expansion and justification) when in fact Islam consensus reject the follow of the observable truth in order to find truth nature of God and world (christians do the opposite and this contribute to western successfull). Passed this imperial sweet moment, Islamic countries are the nothingness in knowledge accumulation and development. And when I say that Islam is the cause of almost all social and political problems in muslim countries, just look at them, religious civil wars is the most obvious, all the crimes in the name of "God's law" implementation other, tech kids more religion than useful things for countrie success, the high inbreeding marriages for sexual repression, the low incorporation of women to work (I know a man prefers just work him but if you are I competition with countries that both sex work you have a problem), the incapacity of have a democracy because if a religious party win eventually this subvert democracy, the absence of human rights recognition (because Islamic countries have their own vision of human rights based on sharia)...etc
I'm not sure you will mention this but here: Alot of people assume the great War was ended with a march on berlin thus destroying infrastructure etc, when in reality Germany was untouched and the Entente armies didn't even touch German soil until after the armistice.
True, it's why the Germans didn't see the reperations and punishments as justified as the propaganda just a week earlier would be saying Germany was doing good/winning.
It'd be interesting to know if the allies did march on Berlin, if WW2 would have happened as the people would know the Treaty of Versailles was justified and they might've known the land lost to Poland was through conquest and not just a part of the treaty. Also Hitler might have died or have been traumatised in the fighting if we were lucky.
Really? I've never heard anyone suggest this before. In fact it's typically the opposite. Because the Entente powers DIDN'T invade and conquer Germany much of the German populace did not believe that they had been defeated. A position aided by wartime propaganda ensuring them that victory was close right up until the point they lost. This underlying suspicion led to the "stab in the back" theory propounded by Hitler (and others). That Germany hadn't actually been defeated but had instead been stabbed in the back by (insert appropriate target here). For Hitler that was the Jews, of course. But others had their own targets too.
And which is also the reason why the treaty of Versailles was considered injust by Germans, even though ........... it was extremely lenient when you compare it to say the treaties of Lausanne, Saint-Germain, Trianon and Brest-Litovsk. Had the war been prolonged for a few weeks and had the entente marched into Germany, the Germans probably wouldn't have seen this treaty as harshly (but they would have realised that the reason for the post war hardship wasn't so much the reparations, their cost was offset by the fact they didn't need to spend a large percentage of their gdp on the military, but because their government was incompetent and thought that "money printer go brrrrr" was a solid economic plan, so the Weimar Republic probably wouldn't have been liked either way)
Another misconception I'd like to bring up is the idea that European line infantry tactics in the 1700s were insane and that the Americans won the revolution because the Native Americans taught them how to hide behind rocks. I was even taught this idea in a college course and it's just so blatantly idiotic.
The mythology behind the native American peoples is one of the most important things you mention here. People believe they were saints, in part to demonize the westerners who came after them. They did indeed fight wars of genocide and conquest, deforest their lands, and engage in slavery on a wide scale. Brave of you, frankly, to include this in the list!
This is also done with Africans during the Atlantic slave trade. It’s usually portrayed that Westerners came into Africa and enslaved the population themselves directly. In reality, the slave trade was started by African tribes and countries who had conquered other regions and taken them captive, then traded those captives with Westerners. Modern people tend to worship the poor innocent African tribals who were just going about their peaceful Stone Age lives before the Europeans stormed in and enslaved them all. Africa was a thriving part of the world for centuries, and a lot of that was due to slavery in some form or another.
That was amazing. You managed to challenge a couple of my presumptions; I’m going to have to rethink my stance on the Middle Ages and their relationship to the Dark Ages.
"Indians will continue to hate on Churchill" is not in the same category as genocide deniers. Genocide deniers ignore evidence and invent fake evidence out of hate and to protect their interests. Indians hate Churchill because he represented the British Empire and was taking active measures to ensure they never saw independence, and he didn't value their interests. Saying they have a "special interest" is like saying we have a "special interest" in the politics of our own countries. Yes, it is correct, but it is also a redundant statement. Also lol, European colonisers were sending expeditions out searching for rare earth minerals literal days before African nations were granted independence. How do you think that would have gone if they found any?
Colonization was, and never could have been, a good thing for the colonized. They most often replaced local warlords and kings with an external power which was even less likely to care about the people they ruled over. What incentive would an European governor have to consider the well-being of a group they didn't identify with, who they most-likely considered savages, to consider what they wanted? Even discounting the intellectual and economic theft that occurred throughout the existence of colonial Europe, you can't discard the colonization process by saying it was not profitable and 'a matter of pride'. Colonization brought vast spheres of influence and control to the colonial powers, and the ability to wage wars and concentrate their powers without their power centers being disrupted or their populations killed. And the colonies paid for all of that, be it by manpower or resources.
While there was a lot of oppression and subjugation, there were plenty of attempts at coexistence. Take 2 examples from Britain 1. The reason that the 13 colonies didnt expand its territory until after the american revolutionary war was because the British Government banned the colonies from expanding past the Appalachian mountains, this was because the British had a deal with the native americans. 2. The british made a deal with the Zulus that the Zulus could keep their land, and the british took and converted the wasteland
@@iowsiam492 Being from a country that was absorbed into the British Empire by means of conspiracy of nobles, I have to disagree. Sri Lanka was absorbed after repelling British invasion for years by means of an agreement with traitorous nobles in 1815. The nobles involved were swiftly exiled or otherwise contained to consolidate their power , and the locals were suppressed and taxed while our local customs and knowledge were suppressed. The British committed innumerable atrocities during their period of rule, and the effects of their high-handed and ignorant rule still shadows the country, as it does in the entire Indian subcontinent. No matter which way you look at it, the lands under colonialism suffered. The British were so thorough in their extermination of the indigenous cultures that scholars are still trying to recreate them. And this is in a country with a strong written tradition dating back thousands of years. A railroad and a culture they forcibly implanted doesn't make up for the fact that colonial powers used and destroyed the colonies they ruled over in their ignorance and greed. They stripped my country, as with every country they conquered, of everything that wasn't nailed down; the British museum still regularly 'loans' our own artefacts and treasures back to us for study. So this attempt to say that the colonies weren't profitable and it was a matter of pride and it wasn't that bad, really, is just another attempt at a narrative where the countries belonging to the powers that did the oppressing can deny guilt for their acts.
@@iowsiam492 also, coexistence has to come from a place of equality. Pretty hard to do that when you consider everyone without white skin as subhuman. Any and all deals colonial powers made with locals they broke or perverted as soon as the agreement didn't serve their purposes any longer.
@@nobodyspecial9 im not trying to deny that the British did horrendous things And being from Bulgaria i know what its like to grow up in a country that was invaded and taken over by an oppressive empire, 2 in fact. But its just a bit ignorant to deny that colonisation did have benefits to the countries colonised as well has negatives. The negatives may outweigh the benefits, but the benefits are still there. Africa in the early 1900s was in the same place that China was. Warlords and tribes, with only the northernmost areas being proper countries. Without colonisation those african countries would only be going through an industrial revolution now, like China is.
@@iowsiam492 assumptions are just that, assumptions. Europe went through a similar situation in the dark ages, and yet they recovered remarkably quickly. Africa and China both had thriving civilizations before their decline in the periods you mention. You could also argue that the colonization disrupted that circle right when it was recovering and thus delayed the establishment of civilization and government. Colonization caused a cultural disconnect that is a major reason for the political and social unrest in those countries to date.
A) The drawing of borders was done with some help from the Africans, since Europeans literally created governments for these countries when they left. Yes it had an insane amount of issues, but that doesn't completely lie on Europeans, especially since massive public opinion throughout the whole world, as well as the USA and USSR encouraging decolonization, as well as unrest in the colonies, put extreme pressure on the process, forcing it to become an unnatural escape from Africa, instead of a natural lay of the colonies with consideration, at the cost of them being colonies for longer. B) Tribes always fought each other anyway. Like mini nations they conquered land from each other and like nations they allied with other nations to destroy. Also he only mentioned the economic viability and exploitation, even mentioning that what the Europeans did was wrong.
Much smaller human population do to no potatoes, corn, sweet potatoes, beans, ect. Russia isn't a great power without potatoes giving them a population boost. Africa is less populated without corn, beans, and cassava. More extensive slave trade. Spain is never turbocharged by American gold and silver. Probably more isolated European settlers and runaway slaves making little maroon communities in the interior. For instance possibly Spanish or French nomads herding cattle on the plains.
When the first christian explorers arrive the whole east coast is already settled by viking descendants that never had to fight the natives when they first arrived. Finding land across the sea that "encircles the whole world" was part of the Norse world view. So they might have explored the coastline quite far.
It's funny how people think industrialization is awful but are quick to donate charity funds for poor africans and they don't realize what they lack is industrialization
You should do what if Ottomamans didn't manage to expand into Europe, good start for this would probably be Serbs winning battle of Maritsa and besieging Edrine (which was actually more likely than what happened). That would be very interesting.
Nothing much would change. Timurids beating and nearly destroying Ottomans only delayed Ottoman expansion for a few decades. Serbia and other Balkan states would begin fighting each other for power while Ottomans were recovering and strengthening their positions in Anatolia only to come back stronger to Balkans.
The last point was extremely poignant for me. I’m an Australian and I am sick to death of having this ridiculous progressive-hippy myth shoved down my throat that the native aboriginals were some kind of virtuous communist utopia until big bad Britain came along and ruined everything. The narrative we’re force-fed in school is totally one sided against colonial Britain and completely ignores the fact that the aboriginals were humans just like everyone else: they fought wars, committed crimes, wiped out native flora and fauna, etc. The impression you get from ‘education’ was that the British rocked up and just started indiscriminately slaughtering the aboriginals. Which is utterly farcical.
The same is here in Canada. Tribal confederations like the Iroquois and the Mikmaq had wiped out/ displaced most tribes around the Great Lakes and St.Lawrence for beaver furs. While French and English settlement in the region was mostly peaceful and cooperative until confederation
The "black europeans" part is very wrong. They all had blue eyes, European hair and bone structure and while they do lack the mutations for modern European type fair skin, no evidence for dark skin has been found either. The reconstruction you showed is known as "Cheddar man" and was almost certainly a politically motivated one. Saying that these populations have no descendants is also incorrect, as these ancient Europeans(real name is Western Hunter-Gatherers) constitute genetically around 40% of the gene pool in many Northern European populations.
Well the article mentioned they had found genes for melanine that showed that the skin was either black or brown. In fact there have been found paleolitic europeans with haplogroup C, as australoids or mogols.
I absolutely love your videos. With that said, I wholeheartedly disagree with your views on African colonization. I think you completely downplayed the atrocities that were committed by Europeans, and it is untrue to say that Europeans didn't exploit the continent. The Belgian Congo is a perfect example of complete economic exploitation combined with atrocities on a genocidal scale, and it resulted in an immense amount of wealth pouring into Belgium. Similar exploitation occurred all of africa by numerous European powers, another good example being the lucrative slave trade. Whether or not their exploitation overall was successful is up for debate, like you said many colonies cost more than they were worth. But the only thing that matters is that they tried, oftentimes successfully and sometimes not, and the results were devastating.
(Ftr, I know class is more than just wealth status, I just think it’s important to critically examine the ‘egalitarianism’ of modern liberal democracies)
It's not that the US is a classless society or class doesn't matter. It's that in many countries there is a huge class distinction and one that isn't even based on wealth. For example, there have been countries and societies where you can be one of the wealthiest people in there are and still not accepted by the upper-classes if you were not born into wealth. Your children might not even be accepted, it would take several generations of continued wealth before anyone in your family would have the ear of the powerful or access to prestigious schools and clubs or be allowed to live in certain areas. Likewise, you can come from the aristocracy or have prominent ancestor several centuries back and be considered part of the elite even though you're hugging the poverty line. This type of class system was common in Britain up until very recently (and still exists to some extent) and it was certainly the way Ancient Rome worked for most its history.
Fun fact: Africa was such an easy conquest for Europe because they (the british in particular) often had numerical superiority and Africa went into a dark age before colonization after the fall of their empires.
Another interesting fact: from what I've read, during the Opium Wars (even the Second one in the 1850s), a number of the British were expecting a VERY hardfought and grueling war with the Chinese (remember that they were still considered an empire before then). The fact that it ended up being so lopsided was incredibly surprising to many Europeans (as the Chinese were thought to be much more advanced than other powers of the region and most nations around the world, which they were to some extent). The exploitation of China really got started after 1860, when China accepted nearly unconditional surrender to the British and French forces.
While I absolutely agree that the number 1 misconception has to do with Indigenous American societies, and characterizing them as either Noble or barbaric savages, as somebody into Aztec history I've got some issues with some of the info you list in that part of the video. While i'm not able to speak for the Inca, I'm not aware of any sort of widespread environmental/agricultural sustainability issues the Aztec (I assume by "Aztec" here you mean Mexica, the specific subgroup of the Nahua civilization who lived in Tenochtitlan that the term "Aztec" is most associated with, with the Nahuas being the broader "Aztec culture" and the Aztec Empire being an alliance between Tenochtitlan and 2 other cities and their various subject states) had. I could just be not be informed on the topic of it being unsustainable (My interest is on Mesoamerica generally, not Chinampas speffically) but my understanding is that the Chinampa (artificial islands made in shallow lakebed via filling a staked out plot of lake with soil and then planting trees to anchor it, which were the primary farming method used in Tenochtitlan and one of the major methods used in the Valley of Mexico, which was where the Nahuas were centered in and was the political core of the Aztec Empire) agricultural model was very sustainable and agriculturally productive. In fact pretty much everything i've read on them stresses that fact: That it retains much of the elements of the areas's existing ecosystem and uses local soil, crops, and trees (the trees themselves also acting as wind breakage); that it re-uses human waste for fertilizers, that the existing lake irrigates the soil, and can produce as many as 7 harvests a year. In fact, I've even read that even using the traditional population estimate of 200,000 people in Tenochtitlan and 1.5 million people across the whole valley (which would have made it one of the most densely populated areas on the planet) in 1519, which resulted from a massive population explosion over a few centuries, it was still was far from it's total carrying capacity. I've also got some disagreements with what you state regarding the Mexica's institutionalized warfare. While the Mexica (and by extension the Aztrec Empire) absolutely had annual offensive military campaigns as an institutionalized practice, they did NOT systemically wage war against existing subject states. In fact, subject states in the Aztec Empire were generally left very hands off, keeping their rulers, laws, and customs; typically only having tax ("Tribute") burdens of economic goods, and/or burdens of supplying services, usually aid on military campaigns or for public construction projects in Tenochtitlan, along with at times having to put up a shrine to Huitzlipotchli. I think the misconception that their conquered subjects had war waged on them for captives originates from a misunderstanding of what Xochiyaoyotl (Flower Wars) were and how they were used. Flower Wars were ritualistic, usually pre-arranged conflicts between Nahua cities/towns that were smaller in scale compared to normal wars (Yaoyototl) and were more focused around collecting enemy soldiers as captives rather then trying to conquer urban centers; and were usually waged between two agreeing parties for various reasons, sometimes even cementing alliances, or against a target of conquest which would be costly or ineffective to try to conquer outright, and where Flower Wars could act as a way to feel each other out or to gradually wear the other side down (as their smaller scale nature meant they could be done throughout the year, vs large scale invasions needing to be seasonal). In fact, glancing through Hassig's "Aztec Warfare: Imperial Expansion and Political Control" to double check things, I see NO mentions of Flower Wars being used against existing subjects (contrary to what I remeber hearing about it being used on them occasionally via mutual consent to cement alliances and the like), and rather exclusively in the more pragmatic "testing each other/wearing them down" context. It even notes that in the early Flower Wars the Mexica had against Chalco under the rule of Acamapichtli starting in 1375, that many of the initial Flower Wars had NO causalities, and only over time as both sides felt each other out did it shift to be involve taking captives and then stopped before escalating further into actual, non-flower wars wars. His lack of mention of the pre-arranged, "friendly" flower wars could just be because that book is focused on a pragmatic view of Aztec militarism in contrastto the ritualistic view a lot of other texts take, so he may have saw covering them outside the scope of the book. Regardless, forced raids or flower wars against subjects wasn't a thing on any widespread basis. I'm also not sure where you are drawing the 2 million figure from or what length of time or what geographic expanse it is meant to encompass, but even if it's meant to be all sacrifices in Tenochtitlan from it's founding in the 1320's to 1521, or all of the states and towns the Aztec Empire contained from it's founding in the late 1420's (when Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan allied together to overthrow Azcapotzalco, the then most dominant city-state in the Valley of Mexico) to 1521; I would say that's a pretty, arguably unreasonably high estimate, for a few reasons. The first being that the Mexica were the only Mesoamerican group to really practice mass-scale sacrifices, as a result of religious reforms made by the Tlatoani (King) of Tenochtitlan, Itzcoatl, and the Cihuacoatl ("Woman-Snake"; a head adminstrative, religious, and judicial office underneath the Tlatoani to handle internal domestic affairs, especially when the Tlatoani was handling external diplomacy and warfare) Tlacaelel shortly after the formation of the Aztec Empire, with Itzcoatl ordering the burning of existing religious and historical texts in Tenochtitlan and Tlacaelel devising a new state-sponsored history and creation myth to glorify the Mexica's origins and place an increased emphasis on the need of the blood of enemy soldiers to sustain Huitzlipotchli as a way to provide a cosmological justification/rationalization for military campaigns. So the amount of sacrifices other towns and cities, even other Nahua ones, would be doing would likely be a fraction of that as Tenochtitlan, and even Tenochtitlan was probably not sacrificing many thousands of people a year, let alone tens or hundreds of thousands: The recent excavations as the Tzompantli (Skull Rack) in Tenochtitlan's ceremonial district/downtown Mexico City have, per the media reports I can find (sadly I haven't found published papers on it yet),found that it held "Thousands" of skulls at it's "maximum extent". Now, the rack WAS cleared at times and then refilled, and sacrifices did occur in other temples in the city and not all sacrifices had their skulls put on the rack, but based on that wording and some numbers I crunched, I think it's pretty likely that the actual amount of annual sacrifices was probably in the hundreds, if not dozens, MAYBE between 1 and 2 thousand, most of which (up to 75% per the Tzompantli findings) would have been enemy soldiers, not civilians. Even if we take Cortes's estimate of 3000 a year at face value in Tenochtitlan, across the roughly 200 years the Tenochtitlan would be around, that would still be only 600,000, not 2 million, and, again, the Mexica only even really ramped up their sacrifices 100 years after Tenochtitlan was founded, so even that's being pretty charitable. To shift to the "All of the Aztec empire from the 1420's to 1520's" model for the 2M estimate, using Cortes's likely already inflated 3000 a year figure again, and say that the rest of the Aztec Empire's cities/towns sacrificed 3x that combined abnnually (which I would find unlikely, since, again, others didn't do mass scale sacrifices), so 3000 + 9000 = 12,000 a year, across 1000 years that'd be 1.2m sacrifices, still only a bit over half the 2M figure. None of these are meant to be accurate estimates, but are rather numbers I'm relatively sure are *higher* then what would be accurate as to show you that even when using those you wouldn't reach 2 million. Anyways, with corrections/nitpicks out of the way, I wanna talk about some further/additional/related misconceptions regarding Indigenous American history and societies, but I ran out of space, so... CONTINUED IN A FOLLOW UP REPLY
CONTINUED: So, now with those corrections done, here's some more misconceptions I want to tackle................ 1.That the Mesoamericans and the Andeans were "Stone Age". On an easy surface level, this is wrong because both Mesoamerica (the Cultural area incluiding the Aztec, Maya, Olmec, etc; usually defined as roughly the bottom half of Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize, and bits of Hondouras and el Salvador), Central America below it, and the Andes (the Inca, Nazca, Moche, etc; so Peru and bits of adjacent countries like Bolvia and Ecuador) all had metallurgy, smelting both soft metals like gold, silver, and copper, as well as Bronze. You can quite litterally google images of copper and bronze Inca weapons and armor or Aztec Axe-monies or tweezers with little effort. Beyond that, though, it's just a bad premise: the whole Stone/Bronze/Iron age model isn't meant to be a measure of technological progression, but rather just specific periods of European and Near-Eastern history since the widespread shift from/to each material makes a convenient set of Milestones. Metallurgical technology is just one of many facets of society and technology, and trying to make any sort of broader assessment of complexity just based on it is, frankly, silly: Let's look at Mesoamerica again. Teotihuacan was a massive metropolis with 150,000 denizens across 37 square kilometers, 22 sq.km. of which was a dense urban grid of fancy stone temples, plazas, villas, etc. Almost the entire city's population was living in opulent housing complex/villas with dozens of rooms, large open air courtyards, rich painted frescos on walls, and fine ceramics and stuatary. Some complexes had toilets, and like a lot of other large Mesoamerican cities it had a complex water mangement system that included canals, resvoirs, and drainage systems/plumbing. It could even flood the Plaza outside the Temple of the Feathered Serpent for rituals like the Roman Colosseum could be flooded..... and Teotihuacan's apex passed BEFORE Mesoamerica had ANY metallurgy, even of soft metals like Gold. The Mesoamericans might not have worked Iron or made Steel, but rest assured they were more comparable to Iron age, Classical and Medieval Old World socities then they were Bronze age ones in quite a few respects, and almost all respects vs Stone age ones. Medicine, Sanitation, and Botanical science in particular the Aztec I'd argue were cutting-edge with even by global standards. 2. That the Native Americans outside of Mesoamerica and the Andes were simple hunter-gatherers. This is sort of an extension of the 1st point I just split up because I didn't want the paragraph to go on for too long, and Whatifist actually covers this briefly in the video; but there was a suprising amount of complexity in many socities in what's now the US and Canada (and the rest of Central and South America), even if not as much in Mesoamerica in the Andes by traditional Western standards : As noted in the video, even for the non-sendatary socities, there was often a notable degree of environmental modification, such as agroforestry where the brush of forests were managed with fire and crops were planted and then then the whole forests would be used as "farms" for said crops and animals were hunted. A large amount, perhaps even a majority, of Native Americans north of Mexico were in fact agricultural, they just didn't practice "Western" style agriculture. And there were many that DID and had towns and even (albiet not of stone) cities: The Pueblo and related Oasisamerican cultures in New Mexico, Arizona, etc, or the Mississipians in the Eastern US who were basically their own Cradle of Civilization: Cahokia, located in what's St Louis, had 30,000 to 40,000 denizens. Down in the Amazon, LIDAR has found huge networks of earthenwork complexes, towns, and irrigration from a former culture there, (probably closer to the Missiissipians then the Mesoamericans, for the sake of your mental image), with a notable amount of the Amazon rainforest really being an overgrown human-made ecosystem. In reality a fair amount of cultures across the Americas even outside of Mesoamerica and the Andes were sedentary, but collapsed from European diseases spread by the Spanish before the British, French, and American colonists spread throughout the Continent: They were seeing what was already a post-apocalyptic landscape. 3. That the only heavily urbanized, complex civilizations in the Americas were the Aztec, Inca, and Maya: Even putting aside the cultures I mention in point 2, and looking at what we'd consider full, complex civilizations (as arbitrary as that can be at times), there's DOZENS more then just those 3: stuff like monumental archtecture, rulership, class systems, etc goes back in Mesoamerica almost 3000 years prior to Europeans arriving in the late 15th/early 16th century, and around 2000 years in the Andes (some will say as far as 9000 years due to sites like Caral, but my understanding is these were more akin to stuff like Gobekli Tepe or stonehenge, being large monumental sites visited seasonally rather then cities). There's so many other civilizations, city-states, kingdoms, empires, etc. I already mentioned Teotihuacan as another Mesoamerican one, but there's also the Olmec (probably the next most well known, thanks to their giant stone head sculptures), the Zapotec and Mixtec (two major ones in what's now Oaxaca, the exploits of the Mixtec warlord 8-Deer-Jaguar-Claw matches the most thrilling tales of great conquerers from Europe and Asia, going from a noble working for a general of other cities to making key alliances with influiential religious lords, to then conquering almost 100 cities in under 2 decades and finally dying in an ironic twist when the one boy he left alive from his arch-rivals family grew up to overthrow him), the Purepecha/Tarascans (the second largest Empire in Mesoamerica after the Aztec, who repelled numerpous invasions from them and built a series of forts and watchtowers along their border) etc'; or down in the Andes, the Moche (who built giant, impressive temple complexes called Huacas a bit like Mesopotamian ziggurats, google some of the well preserved bits of Huaca de la Luna or Huaca Cao Viejo), the Chimor Kingdom (The largest state in late Andean history before the Kingdom of Cusco conquered them and then swallowed up the rest of the region as the Inca Empire; The Chimu captial, Chan Chan, was the largest city in Prehispanic South American history, with 60,000 denizens), etc. I was going to do a 4th one, which is the myth that the Conquest of Mexico and Peru or the collapse of Mesoamerican and Andean civilization and the complete colonization of the Americas was inevitable, but I already left an even more massive comment(s) on the "What if the Aztec Empire survived?" Whatifist video you can see here: ruclips.net/video/52yu6hA_k2Y/видео.html&lc=Ugz9cPOGU-Iwg802o2l4AaABAg which goes into that, and frankly I have other stuff to do, so I'll leave it at that.
I know this video was posted two months ago, but I only discovered this channel recently (although I wish I'd learned of it sooner). I really like the way it works to present history with an authentisity-based, non-dogmatic lens--trying to speak the facts for the sake of speaking the facts. I really look forward to seeing more videos in the library.
I as a Latin American confirm. Educational systems sell us a totally idealized and idyllic idea of pre-Columbian cultures and empires. As if they were almost the very Garden of Eden until the Spanish came to "Kill and Steal Everything" and not as if they were like any other civilization of the time that fell into the same dynamics of subjugation and slavery. Even though Hispanism seems extremely autistic to me at times, I can almost justify it as an ideology in view of Indigenism that is sold from the educational system and many political formations.
All too many, even historians, have fully embraced Rousseau's and Jefferson's "Noble Savage". Humans don't vary that much in their tribalism and cruelty in comparison to recent times. It is just that literate societies wrote their atrocities down. Most of Rousseau's and Marx's concepts really are derived from the middle eastern myths of the "Garden of Eden" and the Greek myths of the "Golden Age." I point to the Tasadays, Samoans, even chimps, etc. as many a failed attempt for this quest to see how the world fell from grace and became evil instead of by many measures, with many waves of progress and decline, the world is improving.
12: Italy is an "artificial" nation which didn't exist before 1861 and it was better when divided, the South in particular (SPOILER: it was the other way around)
The Middle Ages were also an incredibly creative period in China thanks to the Song Dynasty, as well as in India; and the "Dark Ages" coincided with the "Golden Age" of Islam, in which that particular group of civilizations developed high standards of living and technology, but due to the rise of Sunni "Orthodoxy" and clericalism, it died.
@@StickWithTrigger not really. It was a combination of factors, which included the rise of conservative Sunni clerics, the Mongol sack of Baghdad, the conquest of Al-Andalus by the Christians, and the mass killings of people who had other more progressive and rational religious ideas like the Kharijites and the Mutazila.
There are a wealth of resources written by many contemporaries who weren't Marxists who express how truly awful life during the early-mid industrial revolution was. I'm going to do the same and focus my comment on Britain in the industrial revolution here. People didn't move to the cities because life was better there, they moved to the cities because of bad harvests. The Hungry Forties (1840s) were called that for a reason. Not only that, but before and after that decade food was much cheaper due to the establishment of colonial empires and so farmers were losing their jobs anyway. Average life expectancy in Liverpool during the mid 1800s was 17! Marxism and Socialism didn't emerge because people were whining about issues they should have just dealt with, there were serious problems that Socialism offered viable solutions to and things got better (in Britain at least) throughout the 1800s not because rich industrial oligarchs thought "Hey, maybe we should make life for workers easier" but because of massive social movements and unrest; even the old aristocracy started backing some of the workers movements because of how bad things were! I feel like your points on industrialisation come from your political views of anti-socialism rather than actual historical accounts.
Sorry for number 3 I made a mistake and left out the reason for the why we look down upon the Middle Ages. The big reason is that modern Western civilization came out of the failings of 14th century Medieval Civilization. Medieval Civilization lasted longer than it probably should have and thus collapsed spectacularly in the 14th century. Thus, since modern Western Civilization was formed out of Medieval Civilization, we remember it at its most brutal and dysfunctional and forget all the successes it had in the previous 500 years.
The best source for #3 is "The Age of Faith" by Will Durant
When you talked about Europeans in Africa, why didn’t you speak about the Atlantic slave trade or Leopoldian Congo, or the apartheid. I feel like those are significant points made for the argument of exploitation of Africa that you didn’t mention
I’ve been wondering I had an argument with this guy about the German Army of World War II and saying that not all or at least less than half or more than half of the Germans that fight during World War II were not harmed by Nazis or radical Nazis most are just fighting for their country I would say about 35% were really hard line Nazis and from what the sources I seen I leave that to be true but is that just a misconception on my part
Yo, this is the best video you've ever made. I swear to God I've learnt so much!
Any citations for the extinct/near extinct racial map part? I was aware of the african and asian groups, but not of the others.
He explicitly did mention the slave trade and South Africa tho... And specifically clarified he was talking about the direct colonial period. As for the Congo. Though Belgium didn't help any it was just as murder heavy before and after.
Public atheism in the middle ages genuinely surprised me.
Damn
Same here
@@appleslover um no. Did you watch it? The University of Bologna was the centre of atheism
Grubby bum I think university were given special privilege which is funny considering they setup by the theocratic governments
Have you ever heard of struggle between Holy Roman Emperors and Popes? It lasted several centuries, and got to a point where one Emperor was exluded from the church.
I love how we moderns look down on tenement housing, poor farms and mental hospitals, while we are surrounded by thousands of people living in tents or just shelter less on the sidewalks.
Word
based
@@Clumsy-vp3if not really
@@nathanielcueto2339 why not
@@Clumsy-vp3if because people say stuff like that all the time, it doesn't go against societal standards it goes with them
"American English is the most direct way of talking in the world"
Australian: "... get (censored)"
No way man Australians like to pretend but in reality the English roots show through in our highly conflict-shy way of speaking
Americans are direct to the point of a fault..a lot of times we make foreigners feel uncomfortable without meaning to do so.
Depending on how to define "direct,, I wouldn't argue for any form of English at all. I see his statement interpreted as regarding politeness and yeah okay Americans and Australians sure are rude but when giving criticism in a work environment America is much less direct compared to Germany. At least before everything was globalized. A few years ago Germans were still much more direct in terms of criticism and orders to an extent far greater than in any Anglo culture.
@@authenticbitterleben7434 probably true, you can see that on the chart with American English vs. French. The French are _not_ shy about giving negative feedback and being confrontational, lol. German culture/language is probably different than French, but they might be more similar to each other than either is to American English in that way.
@@RickJaeger I disagree. This is a cultural difference. You perceive the French as not shy. The French (and many others) perceive the Americans as rude. The difference is the French being polite and indirect while criticizing; the Americans shed politeness off and are brutally direct. The French also take a very generalist view, of reason A against reason B; the Americans take a view of "My American way or the highway", which is very confrontational. Isn't it curious that American presidents routinely say or mean "You're either with us or against us" (Bush, 2001, First Invasion of Irak) and put themselves in the same footing as dictators from China, North Korea, and Turkey, to name a few?
As far as the fetishization of the "noble savage" goes, Thomas Sowell writes of this as a recurring theme throughout (at least) Western history, as many Roman writers would glorify the Germanic tribes as well for rejecting corrupt urbanity and living in nature.
Makes sense, a sort of the grass is greener kind of thing as well as an inate desire to be closer to nature and freer
Classical Greek bourgeoisie wore barbarian-style pelts for fashion too
The German tribes were actually able to hold against the Romans, tho. So they had to be good.
But there was a reason to glorify the Germans. They were not in fact savages. Note they used metal weapons and tools. As the uploader points out, Rome essentially was a state where the rural areas were taxed to support an urban civilization. (Hmmmmm.....sounds familiar...)
@@Fridaey13txhOktober They repeatedly lost, but due to shitty emperors got to keep their land. Large parts of Germany and Hungary were subjugated by Marcus Aurelius, but when he died Commodus just abandoned the conquests. Same with Germanicus's conquests being left behind by Tiberius and so on and so forth
7:12 I'm a culinary student, and I notice this about every time a professor talks about the past. A lot of assuming, without research or context. A common one is "the Egyptians accidentaly discovered beer, and had no idea how yeast worked" (seeing as beer is older than agriculture, it was already old news by the time of the pyramids), or even "they ate only meat, and only occasionally would feed on other things" (the societies that are literary called hunter-gatherers), or the opposite: "the Aztecs were incredible due to their highly vegetarian diet" (ignoring the fact that they had no choice, and even raised small dogs for protein).
The elite priests ate human meat regularly.
@@meneither3834 The elite priests ARE human meat.....
Also guinea pigs, alpacas and llamas I think.
@@fainitesbarley2245 people from incan empire, used to eat those cuyes, alpacas and llamas, but non different from other places: Wealthy people ate a lot and more variety more than the usual normal low class people.
Regarding the Aztecs,
The bodies of the sacrificed did not go to waste. The grim details are laid out in the histories of the Conquest.
The Spanish Conquistadores, in order to obtain grease to lubricate the hubs of their animal drawn wagons, had to render human corpses.
The Meso American civilizations had no livestock.
Meanwhile, introduced disease from humans and from imported animals killed beyond count.
And cruelties willfully inflicted by the conquerors where recorded by some of the accompanying clergy as testimony for the future.
Other popular myths:
1) Crusades happened purely because of religion. It is usually used in a "religion is bad" disputes. In reality, Crusades had certain political, social and economical benefits which could interest the rulers to go on Crusades.
2) When people make direct connections between the modern nation and some old one: Kievan Rus = Ukraine/Russia and not some other nation, Macedonian Empire = Macedonia and not some other nation. Such perception of history disregards the fact of migrations and cultural changes. These ideas are usually promoted to make people proud of their heritage.
Very true, both of your points
Example of the second one
Phoenicians and Lebanese people
Thracians and Bulgarians
Wessex and English people
Vikings and Scandinavians
Thirteen Colonies and Americans
yeah the use of crusades for religion is bad is really retarded, if the crusades was only motivated because of religion, the crusades could have happened earlier
Humans need some sort of heritage to be proud of or they have nothing
And Crusades happened after Muslim rulers have invaded Europe, it wasn't the first act of aggression.
"Europeans would exploit Africa if they could, but they couldn't"
Belgian Congo would like to have a word with you...
Only belgian africa!!!!!
There is very little hard evidence for the Congo Genocide. The colonial authorities would have had to kill more people than were actually living in the Congo. Each individual member of the small security force would have had to have killed tens of thousands himself for the narrative to be true. Surely there was cruelty, not doubt, but to call it a genocide of millions is a false narrative pushed by Black American intellectuals in the 20th century so they could have their own holocaust to guilt white people with.
ElCadejo172 When did I call it a genocide? Afaik, for the exploitation of the Congo to be a considered genocide it had to be the intentional extermination of the population. Millions definitely died, there's no question about that, but it was in the pursuit of the Belgian king's desire for profit and not for the mere extermination of an entire peoples. Not to mention many had their hands chopped off, which there's also plenty of proof.
I'm not sure how anything you said refutes the fact Europeans exploited Africa.
@@SurprisinglyDynamicAnimeSideC I'm not sure if you're an American, but it is common for American children to be taught about the "Congo Genocide" even as most cannot find the Congo on a map. Your assertion of millions likens Leopold to Hitler, Stalin or Mao and it originated as ridiculous propaganda from professional "anti-racists".
ElCadejo172 Millions _did_ die in the Congo. And yes, I'm an American, and children are _not_ taught about the "Congo Genocide" until high school, and even then it's mostly glossed-over. So now I'm doubting that _you're_ American from how little you seem to know how broken and Americentric our education system is.
Im surprised that the "France always surrenders" thing wasn't on here. Maybe people finally realized they don't I guess.
Its always been a running gag that is kept alive solely by the hilarious reactions of thin skinned frenchmen.
@@Nutellafuerst that's all fun until the US President makes the joke to shame the french for not approving of the invasion of Iraq.
Of course it wasn't here, because it's true
hue hue hue
@@Winnetou17 hon hon hon... wait a minute
@L Dikx Not fully serios, but you do realize that Napoleon was a corsican, which is italian culture, and that Corsica was only recently occupied and not even properly annexed by France when Napoleon was born ? Napoleon's father was from Tuscany and his mother was genoese. His primary languages were corsican and italian and only at the age of 9 or 10 he learnt french. Not to mention that his family actually fought agaisnt the french, trying to maintain Corsica independent.
In others words, he's not that much french in origin. Which explains his military prowess :P
As a Québécois, hearing you talk about our swear words makes me unreasonably proud 😂
That’s called nationalism haha
@@appleslover It's simple, really. You said yourself just now that linguistic differences make one's identity, and this is how most Quebecers see it. There are about 8 million people descended from French-speaking catholic stock and who have been conquered 250 years ago by a British force. Attempts at assimilating them have been mostly unsuccessful for various reasons, so here we are today, you still have a ton of Quebecers who identify as such and not with the (rather artificial) Canadian identity.
Of course there's a lot more nuance I could inject in it (the large amounts of French speakers outside Quebec, the Quebecers who reject the Quebecer identity for various reasons and prefer to call themselves Canadian, the immigrant population, the very word Canadian being used to refer to French-Canadians up until the end of the 19th century) but that's the gist of it.
Or an even blunter way:
a watermelon ≠ a pineapple a cat ≠ a dog Quebec ≠ Canada
@@appleslover Where are ya from, brother? The way I understand it, most French-Canadians refer to themselves as such, not just as Canadians. Almost like they're their own mini-nation inside a much larger one. It actually works, too! ...for The most part... 😆😆
Here's a question for ya, my northern compadre:
I can read French fairly well, due to speaking native English, conversational Spanish, and beginner French, but I can somehow u understand spoken Québécois better than Parisian French. Why is that? It caught me off guard recently when a French-Canadian RUclipsr busted out his Native tongue and I somehow understood the gist of what he was saying! I jumped out of my seat! It was weird!
@@FG-om9jb What about New Brunswick? I did a report on that province back in middle school. It fascinated me.
ahh yes Leonidas and his 300 spartans, who made their honorable last stand to defend their slave reliant economy
remember the thing that whatifallthist said about slavery likely being necessary to develop an advance society. even we today have slaves in third world countries and yet people say "the troops are heros"
@Luís Andrade i mean, in those days, there wasn't really a difference. Athens for instance, the most open society that we think of when thinking of ancient Greece had slaves atleast from what I've seen, so there wasn't much difference but it was the norm
@Luís Andrade dumbass
Asdf
He is wrong on that, poorly paid workers are enough, look at ancient Persia who despite having no proper slaves were able to build amazing architecture and roads which even the biased Herodotus said "were expertly maintained".
And as he said, degree matters, the majority of Spartan slaves were poorly treated, routinely massacred, routinely beaten, routinely humiliated, and could be murdered or raped with no punishments. Compare that to pretty much the rest of the near east (there might be some exceptions I don't know about), the slaves where treated badly but at least they had rights and assaulting them could get you punished.
Tydras
Bro you have to explain why he is a a dumb ass, this is not how debates work.
Fellow historian here. On your point about Indian morality, I often wondered as a young lad why the Indians didn’t simply unite to fight the Europeans more than they inevitably did. I once asked my history teacher this question, since much of our lessons on Native Americans clearly portrayed Europeans in an evil light and the Indians as the good guys. My teacher told me Indians were too few, given the effects of the plague, which is partly true. I later learned through my own studies that Indian unity was an extreme rarity. Rather than being alarmed by the immorality of Europeans, Indians usually found them and their industrialized trinkets very alluring. They mostly enjoyed the Europeans, especially when the Europeans would trade them rifles and ammo, which the Indians could then point at their long time Indian rivals. This in-fighting amongst Indians is rarely ever spoken of.
Cree chief Billy Diamond used to joke about hunting Inuit. It hadn't been a practice for a while, but the theme did have a historic basis.
European colonisation was not inherently profitable true, but that is WHY it became so exploitative. They had to force native men into labour camps to either work on massive plantations or mining for raw materials just so they could get some money back from the whole thing. And not to mention that, just because the colony wasn't worth it financially for the whole empire, it might have been for one person. Cecil John Rhodes (who you should definitely make a video of) became a billionaire, perhaps one of the richest men on earth, from colonialism and he for that reason continued to drive it forward.
I know african colonies were more of a tool to use in international relations and to keep concert of europe/League of Nations alive by making concessions when necessary (Britain-Italy border exchange 192X). They were also big tools for pride and was also source to conscript soldiers from. Unless you are talking about specific colonies like Leopolds Congo(Which was very bad) or some specific parts of British and French empire
"labors were forced to work in massive plantation and mine".
Cool story bro, it was the same shit for most of Europeans at that times.
My grand grand father worked it mines in north of France from 13 to 62, for almost nothing.
And yes, some very rich get money from colonization, but again, same thing in Europe.
Pretty sure that the mine where my grand grand father worked made someone very very rich too.
@@mrsupremegascon I´m not saying your grandfather was treated with justice but you have to understand that he wasn´t a slave
Coast of Africa was also important in strategic sense that your ships could get coal in middle of travel beetween european and more lucratice colonies. Thats why "unimportant" islands and coast's were "important" in age where your ships need a lot of coal to sail.
@@mrsupremegascon yes, essentially, the same thing that was done on Africa was first done on the peasants. But back in Africa it was part of a much larger cultural shift, which was, basically, forced.
“I’m not sure how much of an effect Europeans had on Africa”
Dude, have you even SEEN the borders?
I mean, borders can change.
The former european colonial powers essentially drew up all the modern day borders in Africa
Geoff Williams this ^ which is why THE Gambia is a long narrow country
They tried twice actually. First France offered to change the Ivory Coast for The Gambia, but UK declined, lmao. And in the 1970s they tried out the Senegambia confederation, but it didn't work out, yeah.
@@haydenpack6947 While they theoretically could, since the colonization of Africa by Europeans, it practically has not. Furthermore, it is for all intents and purposed forbidden by international law. I suppose there could be some sort of peaceful land exchange between two countries, but I am not aware of even this happening anywhere in Africa.
The African one is a bit off to me. While economically speaking for an entire country European nations didn’t benefit however for private individual corporations they definitely benefitted. A perfect example would be in the diamond industry most of the diamond stores that we go to that are based in France and Switzerland were established in between 1875-1908 around the same time colonization started and and mining was going on. Just that industry alone had siphoned billions. And that’s just one industry let’s not even talk about rubber or Ore. not to mention that a lot of the same industries that were established during the colonial period are still there. Also Europe was very cost effective at how they ran their operations on the continent. For millions of Africans they built their houses out of recycled sheet metal as it was a way cheaper option the building proper buildings that were most likely only saved for important landmarks or for the very few European inhabitants.
Ye that was just stupid with easily dismissed and refured points, anything to defend racism
@@dejankojic4293 that is an extremely romanticized view of African states and kingdoms, it's a lot more complicated then that, to deny otherwise is to play into the Noble Savage view of Africa. It really depends what region of Africa and who colonized it. Otherwise Ethiopia and Liberia should be the most advanced and happiest nations on the continent and not artificial states like Ghana and Botswana.
Ignore, i wanna see where this goes
@@dejankojic4293 By saying "they would be happier", you are praising them. Humans are not happier because of the reality that surrounds them, it's biologically wired. We tend to idealise realities we don't live in, because they adjust more to our views and desires, but it's only that, an idea, reality is far different.
@@dejankojic4293 And no, their purpose was not exploitation, it ocurred, but was not the goal. The goal was more like "getting a girl because all the homies are married". Exploitation was more individually driven, like with King Leopold
King Leopold II of Belgium: "I agree with No. 6."
King Leopold II*
@@matthings4133 I respect this level of nitpicking.
@@bobbyswan5659 Leopold II of Belgium or King of the belgians***
@@matthings4133 Leopold II of Belgium or King of the belgians; in either case, owner of the Congolese****
Vatican viewed dark skin was a curse until a century ago lol.
Racist was the culture In Europe until recently.
Number 7: “Industrialization was awful” is a markedly frustrating misconception. The ability to mass produce goods lowered the price of said goods, making them available for more people to obtain. I think part of this misconception also comes from idealizing a quaint past where the artisan gave his or her creation a unique quality that elevated it above the soulless creations of an assembly line. Of course, one forgets that if shoes were custom made, fewer people could afford shoes.
It’s equally bizarre that the early, high, and late Middle Ages are sort of seen as a single period without consideration for geopolitics either. A person living in the Eastern Roman Empire would have had a very different life than one living in Brittany. There’s also, as you alluded to, a tendency to confuse the late Middle Ages with the counter-reformation. Even theologically 13th-century Catholicism looks more familiar to us than its 16th-century counterpart.
Industrialization was very awful, though. Immigrants were systematically exploited, being given poor-paying, labor-intensive jobs with very few rights, and not to mention that the work environments were incredibly hazardous. Industrialization was a crucial step for us to enjoy the world of mass production we live in today, but to say that initial conditions weren't horrid would be to downplay the limbs lost and the various horrors that needlessly fell upon factory workers (the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire arguably being the epitome of such).
@@sylvestergharold7265 Exactly, the whole industrial age was an multi-national social experiment; at no other point before in human history were so many crammed into such a small space as a city for so long, which is why thing like waste disposal to prevent cholera, plagues and diseases being part of daily life rather than occasional events, reliance on merchants for food rather than growing your own allowing scammers to cut foods like bread flour with non-edibles like plaster of paris or brick dust to reduce costs, creation of workers rights, child labour laws and health and safety protocols, pressure on doctors to perform sugeries and other medical procedures quickly rather than correctly so they can move onto the next patient not to mention the number of harmful chemicals whose effects only manifested after years of use - all mistakes that needed to be happen before we realised it was an issue and worked out ways to prevent it.
Proto industrialisation : little farm wokers would produce at home for merchant a certain amount of a certain patern. Almost self suffiscient, in the same time.
Some aspects of industrialisation were shit. Like working in dangerous factories, pollution etc Vs working on a farm. But yes it made goods way cheaps.
@@Neion8 No. Studies showing asbestos killed people were presented to that industry before 1900. We continued to use it, spray it etc. through the 1960s. It is still legally sold in India. Industrialization is not universally good. If technologies had rolled out in a different way, if the peasantry of England hadn't been driven to destitution through the late middle ages and the Renaissance industrialists would have had to earn their labor force by providing competetive wages and a better standard of living than owning your own farm or craft business.
It's probably worth mentioning that the growth of cities during the early and mid- industrial revolution was caused by immigration from rural areas due to surplus population there. Cities did not, as a rule, grow due to internal population growth. This does indicate something about the brutality of the industrial revolution, but it also does indicate something about the constant inability to support a growing population in rural areas.
No, cities were population sinks from the dawn of civilization until about 1900 or so (in the Western world) due largely to contagious diseases. Improved hygiene as a result of industrial era developments in soapmaking and plumbing, and the late-industrial innovations in water supply (chlorination) and sewage disposal (activated solids sewage treatment plants), are largely the things that have allowed urban populations to grow by natural increase. So actually, you're wrong about it indicating anything at all about industrialization.
??? Industrialization meant that machines could perform farm labor that had previously required many people to do, which is where your "surplus population" in rural areas came from. There were less farms, and less farm jobs, so people moved to cities to work in factories. The same thing happened in Mexico after NAFTA, corn prices dropped so much that it was cheaper to buy US corn than to grow it for themselves, and it led to millions of farmers seeking work in large cities, or across the border.
"I'm not sure how much effect the Europeans themselves had on Africa."
21 countries in Africa speak French as their official language. 29 in total. I'd say there was a pretty big impact. This isn't even the most damning mistake in the video, just the most glaring.
Yeah it's strangely inconsistent and incoherent at times. There are some points that are well sourced but this video is just kind of a mess.
I was actually wondering wtf I was listening to. I commented about lumping Indians hating Churchill with Holocaust deniers of the Jewish or Armenian hating variety.
Very few Africans I’m in the former french colonies actually speak fluent french and fewer still use it in regular daily communication it’s at most a public lingua Franca for governments but almost everyone speak native African languages everyday
French in Africa is mostly for the elite, but more importantly, it was deliberately maintained by African leaders on a common accord because that gives them a convenient system to talk to each other. Otherwise they would have to manage a bazillion dialects.
Imagine the president or prime minister of your country only speaks the dialect of his people group and stayed in place for 20-ish years, his language would gradually become the de facto language of the country and make every other groups become second-class citizens, leading to social unrest.
But since none of the sub-groups has French for its native tongue, you're alienating everyone equally, thus alienating no one.
Which funnily enough is the Frenchest thing to do 😂
He also didn’t mention that France still tax those 21 countries till this day and all their currency is kept in frances central bank
“The incas were facing food problems “
Me, a spaniard: so we saved them?
Incas: no you just sped up the inevitable
Me: that works too
They were facing food problems?
Form what ive read, their agriculture was really advanced.
This guy have an aglo centered point of view. The reason why incas were fighting a civil war and their economy was on problems. Was becose their society colapsed by the plage. But in the views of this guys it was not related to the arrival of europeans.
@@nicolasignaciomerinonunez114 aglo? You mean Anglo? Because the Spaniards aren't Anglos my friend that's the English - totally different country. Also, blaming the plagues on Europeans is like blaming the plagues on the Asians; neither society had the technological advancement to know about disease control enough to prevent contamination. Plus, while Americans got Smallpox (which no longer exists outside of a lab) Europeans got Syphilis (which still exists and kills people to this day) so they got their own back in the long run lol.
@@Neion8 except both societies knew how disease worked. The Mongols literally weaponized the plague on purpose.
@@trollerjakthetrollinggod-e7761 I mean, Louis Pasteur's Germ theory wasn't published until 1861 (and the link between Germs and infections was published in 1878) when beforehand then the prevailing theory among the educated about the spread of disease was split between 'spontaneous generation' and 'Miasma' - or 'bad air' causing disease. If you think that a bunch of soldiers knew more about infection than the best of pre-1861 scientists and doctors centuries beforehand, then it was certainly very selfish of them to keep that knowledge to themselves, and strange that they didn't protect themselves better.
Catapulting dead bodies into cities is a millenia-old tactic to demoralise an enemy, the fact that the Mongolians used plague bodies is at best more akin to deductive-reasoning than outright knowledge of biological warfare (similar to how people used to poison wells by throwing a carcass into it) and plague-blankets are even more of a stretch for claims of intentional harm.
there's also misconception among Hindu nationalists and some Indians that Indo-Aryan migration never happened.
Yep trying justify that they're native to North India(even though the majority haplogroup in North India is R1a and that haplogroup originated somewhere from the western or Central Asian steppe region)and that their culture and language isn't related to Europeans(even tho their language is apart of the branch of the Indo-Aryan which is a sub-branch of the Indo-Iranian language family which also a sub-branch of the wait for it,wait for it.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................Indo-European language family you know the language family that includes almost all of the European languages,Iranian&Aryan languages,Armenian languages,and the extinct Tocharian languages and they worship Indo-European Gods case close)
Not so much a misconception as a belief brought about by motivated reasoning
@Edmond Schwab Not really, DNA evidence suggest that the Aryans and Dravidians mixed over time, resulting in modern day Indians.
@Emperor Basil the Bulgar Slayer Yah, Indian people are obsessed with their "genetic purity".
@Metsarebuff 22 Aryan is Iranian not Germans, yes the Nasi Germs actually thought that an Iranian looked like Odin.
Omg. Your first part about getting upset when someone starts to frick with history is so true. I got way too heated the other night at a friend of mine when she started criticizing a bunch of aspects of Western Civilization and saying things that simply weren’t true.
@Jake don't forget the BBC documentaries about Rome with black female generals 😬
@@tron1852 I don't know what documentary you are talking about but in the latter Empire almost all soldiers and plenty of generals and emperors were provincial, including of course the north african provinces. Would they look black in the modern sense? Maybe some of them. Would they be women? No
@@michaelpsellos2560 north African is definitely not black. Brown, sure, but if we're being honest you'd probably only see little difference from the north African Roman's to the Italian or Greek Roman's.
@@ncls.1371 Yeah I don't know how it was back then but nowadays there exist a pretty wide range of skin colors in north Africa. Probably no one you would mistake for sub saharan though you're right
There's so much propaganda taught these days.
One problem: India's caste system was formed after the Indus river civilization was long gone.
They still had a previous caste system that was exploitative as well. The Dravidians were not the good guys either.
From what I gather, the caste system wasn't so rigid until British dominion over India, though I could be wrong on that.
@@brownbricks6017 No the British division was based on more religious lines
@@skullcrusherm7425 The Caste system did achieve its current form during British rule. The Caste system started becoming more rigid during the Gupta Empire (220ce-550ce) but it became weaker over time until the 1200s due to the rise of Jainism and Veerashaivism which challenged Brahmanical society. However, it became more rigid again from the 1200s to 1450s due to early Islamic rule where highly influential Hindus made it rigid as a resistance to the early tyrannical Muslim rulers. However, from the 1450s to 1800s, the system became less rigid again due to Vijayanagara Empire, regional Sultanates and later Mughal Empire which all encouraged caste fluidity within communities and the administration. However, from the 1800s to early 1900s, caste became more rigid than ever before. This was because the British organised communities based on caste and religion in their censuses among other things that came under 'Divide and Rule'. From the 1900s onwards, due to the rise in free thinking amongst the Indian elite and intellectuals, caste became less rigid and social restrictions were gradually lifted. To be honest, the caste system wasn't as bad as people think it was; it was just as bad as the class systems used in other parts of the world at the time and fluidity between castes was just as common. Its just a shame that it still exists in India whilst other cultures have managed to almost completely get rid of it.
@@brownbricks6017 The Caste system did achieve its current form during British rule. The Caste system started becoming more rigid during the Gupta Empire (220ce-550ce) but it became weaker over time until the 1200s due to the rise of Jainism and Veerashaivism which challenged Brahmanical society. However, it became more rigid again from the 1200s to 1450s due to early Islamic rule where highly influential Hindus made it rigid as a resistance to the early tyrannical Muslim rulers. However, from the 1450s to 1800s, the system became less rigid again due to Vijayanagara Empire, regional Sultanates and later Mughal Empire which all encouraged caste fluidity within communities and the administration. However, from the 1800s to early 1900s, caste became more rigid than ever before. This was because the British organised communities based on caste and religion in their censuses among other things that came under 'Divide and Rule'. From the 1900s onwards, due to the rise in free thinking amongst the Indian elite and intellectuals, caste became less rigid and social restrictions were gradually lifted. To be honest, the caste system wasn't as bad as people think it was; it was just as bad as the class systems used in other parts of the world at the time and fluidity between castes was just as common. Its just a shame that it still exists in India whilst other cultures have managed to almost completely get rid of it.
The only historical misconception that really counts is the one where everyone thinks every other country/race/religion/gender is guilty of wrongdoing towards them whilst their own is oh so fluffy and cute and whimsical and innocent, always picked on and bullied by those other big meanies.
Just fragile african americans
@@NordProductions *Laughs in Eastern European*
Otherwise known as " My side is good -- any bad ones are the exception. The other side is bad, and any good ones are the exception."
Vietnam?
Romania rings a bell ?
10:03 I think that is a missconception, too. The working-hours in an agricultural society was normaly lower than in the industrial age (harvest season not included). It just was not that well payed, especialy when the main farmland was occupied by big landlords. The reason that the farmes went to the cities was not the hard work on the land, it was because the hard work in the city was better payed.
Additionally, the closing of common lands forced a huge portion of farmers into poverty, where city/industrial jobs were a way to survive. I disagree with the video on that section from the study I've done on economic history in university.
Yup, during winter time that's not even 7 hours a day
Why would you exclude the harvest season in the calculation of working hours of an agricultural society?
@@jeremiesdavidson4450 Because its just one part of the year.
In a factory you get payed every week or two while in agriculture the produce only grows every couple of months with varying degrees of success, not to mention having to go out and sell said produce.
I deeply appreciate the book recommendations, I'm studying history at uni and it gets real annoying with some groups judge the past peoples with modern standars for their political agendas.
which groups?
That’s odd, I had many of the same books in college history classes, can’t say I experienced them as notably biased.
@@luxborealis I don't think you and I are getting the same books for class bud.
The ones he mentions are pretty good though.
South korea japan taiwan hong kong philipines would like a talk
That last part about judging peope by modern standards is so unbelievably true. I'm a member on quite a large AltHist forum,and we constantly have this debate, like, I joined late last year, and I've already been part of, or observed three different ones.
"Immensely subtle regimes that could be very nice places to live." What a refreshing description about, for example, the Persian Empire. The phrase could be applied rather fittingly to more modern states too, I think.
>Immensly subtle regimes.
>Ottomans stealing Christian children and indoctrinating them into becoming the Sultan’s personal death squad.
>Islamic caliphates treated Christians subjects like second class citizens until they converted.
I think the Islamophilic view that the Islamic empires were good places to live if you were non-Muslim is another viewpoint that needs to go.
@@megakillerx This. It's not even just the jizya tax on non-believers. The Islamic world also had laws prohibiting the marriage of Muslim women to non-Muslim men (but of course Muslim men were free to take non-Muslim women as wives.) While I'm not a fan of judging historical practices by modern morals, this kind of discrimination is still far from great and definitely not much better than how almost any other region treated conquered peoples.
@@megakillerx I would agree with you, if I didn't compare that to what it was like elsewhere. Europe in that time was a horrific bloodbath of religious extremism - protestant and catholic people were killing each other on mass. He never made the argument that they were good places by modern standards, just that they were the best during their time.
@@megakillerx so christians were treated like second class citizens in the Ottoman Empire, how terrible. What do you think muslims were treated like in Western Europe at the same time? Way worse obviously.
@@jakub8782 Why yes, how else should you treat a foreign invader that tried to murder you, uproot your faith, you culture and your way of life? Give them a slap on the wrist? But then again, i still fail to see how the iberian ultimatum of “convert or be exiled into North Africa” is way worse than the Ottoman ultimatum of “convert or be taxed into oblivion and have your sons kidnapped and be indoctrinated into the Sultan’s personal death squad”.
18:34 "white central asians" do still exist in some form today. Look up Pamiri
Iranians, kalash, some kazakh...
so do the san of southern africa, i am unfamilair with the pamiri but if they are anything the san people then largely extinct (being a meer shadow in terms of numbers and population spread) and politically irrelevant.
@@matthiuskoenig3378 they are very small and insignificant. Only around 100-200 thousand of them are there.
Nah vast majority of them are brown, it's just that central and south Asians are obsessed with trying to be "white"
And russians
I'm from Africa and most of the infrastructures built during colonisation were simply to help ship raw materials back to Europe... 🤷♂️
Exactly
You still got it
That infrastructure is better than none
true, but no one is saying that the Europeans were doing out of the kindness of their hearts.
Most people where properly just in it for the money (as most people tend to do) although I will say that Europeans didn't see it as simply a way of exploiting (maybe except the Belgians),
They saw it as a way of exporting civilisation to Africa, which they thought gave them the right to conquer. This is analogous to how Microsoft sees its vision to "empower companies of all sizes to be their best".
True, however, Europe would still have had the same level of wealth without Africa, and Africa would be much poorer without Europe (this, however, doesn't justify any act of conquest in itself)
This is obviously a sensitive issue and I should point out that I am not an expert on the subject. I just think that there are problems in the argument given in this video on this point, and I'm setting them out here.
Moreover, "Europeans have exploited Africa" can be understood differently.
If exploited is taken to mean that Europeans have done their utmost to extract as many resources as possible, I think that is wrong. As said in the video, there was no huge investment and industrialization would have made the exploitation of Africa much more efficient.
I rather have the impression that the Europeans have mainly tried to extract as many resources as possible by relying almost exclusively on the local populations. In Madagascar, for example, slavery was massively used to build the infrastructure needed by Europeans, particularly for the transport of local production to the metropolis. There was therefore no cost to France apart from the deployment of the military, but there was a transfer of resources from the colony to Europe.
It seems in fact that the wealth exploited in Africa is not so huge compared to other colonies or even to the resources present on the continent.
If we take into account the fact that they have been exploited almost exclusively by the labour of local populations without modern tools, the term "exploitation" seems appropriate.
Nor should it be forgotten that this is not the time of current liberalism. Empires tried to be as self-sufficient as possible and sought to obtain the resources necessary for their industries through colonisation. In this perspective, the colonies were mainly to produce enough resources to keep the industry of the mother country functioning, no more.
In fact, the local populations were more or less (depending on the place and time) forced to produce various resources for the colonizer and used their pay to buy products sold by the colonizers (another considerable source of wealth for the industry of the colonizing countries).
Anyway thank you for your very enjoyable videos.
Belgium, Leopold, rubber, Congo ?
Even to think that it was just Europeans is very ignorant, in the grand scheme of things the Islamic world exploited Africa for far longer, to a far greater extent and were far more brutal in doing it. At the end of the day every civilisation that beats another in the field of conflict have tended to go on to exploit and mistreat those they defeated, it's not just Europeans but humanity
I think the question can be broken into three parts:
- Have the colonizers mistreated Africans for material gain? Yes, definitely.
- Has this lead to a net benefit to the colonizing countries? Not really, trading for the needed resources would be more efficient in the long run.
- Would Africans be economically better off if there had been no colonization? Only if they had adopted Western ideas and technologies on their own
The main negative impacts of colonialism weren’t exploitation of resources, rather the classic European tradition of drawing random lines on a map
@@TapOnX True, this whole thing is so deeply mixed with emotions and current narratives that we have forgotten what questions we actually are answering, moreover many people would answer yes to all 3, but when shown evidence to the contrary, would simply move the goal post by switching the question out with one that is easier to defend.
The problem wasn’t how the Europeans treated Africa after it was colonised, but how the Europeans destroyed African cities and infrastructure during the colonisation process. I’m a 2nd generation immigrant from Ghana and in there, the British burned down our original capital city (Kumasi) in 1896. This as well as the divide and conquer tactics, badly drawn borders, the Europeans’ lack of help in terms of development and the longer amount of time under colonial rule is what made Africa underdeveloped and slower to modernise than Asian countries for example.
The problem wasn’t the exploitation (which still happened especially in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo) but the destruction caused by the wars and the prevention of growth.
I never could hold back chuckles when modern day activists behave as if atrocities are uniquely European and only exported to the rest of the world later on.
There are segments In the ancient history of my people (Chinese) that always leave me disgusted when I happen upon them, where entire urban centers of men, women, and children got buried alive or otherwise executed _after they surrendered_ by hostile armies whose generals happened to have psychotic fits after conquering those cities, and rivalries between upper-echelon nobles often ended with entire families _and those of their friends_ massacred.
It doesn't seem to occur to them that every country was draconian back then.
I disagree that people believe atrocities are uniquely European. However European atrocities are directly linked to our history in the united states. You are suffering from the straw man fallacy.
@@DOMOzCHANNEL >>I disagree that people believe atrocities are uniquely European.
@@dy031101 1. What activists are you referring to?
2. Another straw man fallacy. I never claimed atrocities were not linked to all of human history. The history of our own country's founding is taught more in the united states than other elements of human history. Whether or not you or I agree with that being the right thing to do. Personally, with limited time, I would rather learn about our own countries history, and how it has shaped our country today, than that of ancient china, as an example.
3. I never attacked you personally. I never claimed to be special. This sounds like an ego attack, implying your ego may have been damaged by my comment. Apologies.
@@DOMOzCHANNEL >>What activists are you referring to?>I never claimed atrocities were not linked to all of human history.>The history of our own country and ancestors is taught more in the united states than all of human history.>Whether or not you or I agree with that being the right thing to do.
@@DOMOzCHANNEL touch grass you obese loser
What if the Meiji Restoration failed?
What if the Knights' Templar never fell?
What if the Raid on Harper's Ferry succeeded?
What if Bleeding Kansas never happened?
I can kind of answer #2. The Knights Templar were taken out by Philip the Fair primarily because they owned a lot of France's Debt, were a Papal force in country at a time when the King was trying to fight Papal influence, had ambitions to create a Papal state in country and were fabulously rich.
Now, for the Templars to survive, that requires Pope Boniface VIII to survive and this isn't that difficult. When the Pope got word of what Philip was doing, he prepared to go down there to put a stop to it. Philip promptly sent thuggery commandos (yes I'm calling them that) to kidnap him (yes, I'm serious), which resulted in the Pope being decked across a room and dying a week later of a brain aneurysm. The result of this led to the French taking over the Papacy and rampant corruption that led to the Protestant Revolution.
Now, if Boniface hadn't been decked across the face or was out of town, then he'd lead a Papal response to Philip. This likely would've led to France being invaded by militant orders and Papal loyalist countries, which Philip had no chance of winning. This would either lead to Philip being killed or deposed.
This would mean the Papacy would still be in Rome, would not have taken such a massive reputation hit and such would not have suffered such massive corruption. While Protestantism likely would've risen eventually, it would've happened much later, since a lot of the issues that led to it occurring under Martin Luthor would not have been as exasperated. That means the 17th century would've completely altered. Likewise, Philip's line is completely derailed and France would've lost quite a bit of territory in the process.
Now as for the Templars, they likely would've gotten a sizable chunk of France to rule for the Pope, essentially becoming akin to the Teutonic Knights. Like them, they would've lasted several centuries but probably would've been bested by the locals (either the Germans or French). They would continue to exist today as charity and honorary organization, much like the Hospitaliters.
Hope this answers your question.
How would bleeding Kansas not happen. I mean wouldn't something like it have to happen
There's already a video about #1
Aiden Wieder exactly my thoughts, with something like the Kansas Nebraska Act allowing the incoming settlers that populate the territories to decide if they will allow slavery or not some serious conflict was bound to happen
@Luís Filipe Andrade One point you're missing.
If the Cotton Gin was never invented, slavery would have died out long before a Civil War even happened, because slavery would not have been a profitable economic system for the Southern landowners to latch onto. The South would have inevitably industrialized, like the North did. And African Americans would have been freed from slavery as early as 1840.
12:53 Ok we are just gonna ignore the Belgium king here.
He is an outlier. An extreme example not representative...
Still a much better place than post-colonial Congo.
He was more doing generalisations, the Belgian king was a outlier in the colonial leaders as he was a especially vindictive ruler
@@paulanderson6834 Not if you're the one getting your hand chopped off!
"Roughly similar tactics like musket fire have existed for hundreds to thousands of years" *Confused Alfred The Great noises*
I think he said or
Bruh the intro is super relatable, I as well get fairly upset when a person makes a mistake about something historical.
An example I remember is from a couple years ago when my class was learning about ww1, and I was making corrections left and right like "No one called the central powers axis" or "its pronounced Bulgaria not Buljaria".
just to be sure, it is bulgaria, not buljaria? i've always said bulgaria so it'd be nice to have confirmation from a person of the mighty bulgaria.
@@jokullah B u l g a r i a
@@k9cobra728 good good
Someone in my class said Hitler wasnt german he was austrian why didnt he get gased
Buljaria? Haha
"It is easy to judge what you haven't lived through." - Me
I think a lot of people sense that in the past
No one's situation allows them to wrong others. We can absolutely 100% judge others.
You should have mentioned the Belgian Congo during your Africa segment. That was undeniably a brutal, exploitative slave state made entirely for profit
EDIT: not made for profit. It was made because Belgium wanted to have an empire. It couldn't have been initially founded for profit because the Europeans thought nothing was there. It was when rubber was found that the congolese people were exploited
That was one of the exceptions for a colony that turned a profit.
It was not financially worthwhile hence the hasty escape from Africa after ww2.
Whatifalthist as much as I like your videos there are countless instances where Europeans got more out of Africa than it put in. The French government extracted billions post independence from 14 of their former sub sharan colonies by dictating the financial guidelines of the separation of French rule and even have first claim to some of their natural resources. And by carving up the continent with no regard for ethnic differences when independence it created the space for civil wars,military dictatorship, ethnic cleansing and easier for neo-colonialism to start again. The Congo Is just one of the easiest explosions to cite due to the sheer brutality
@@appleslover Nice argument.
Whatifalthist you forgot to mention how Africa was carved up for strategic reasons like the French control over the Sahara was used to link up their colonies in Algeria, Gabon, Senegal and the Ivory Coast. Many countries saw no economic investment other than military installations
As a jew, the ottoman empire thing was particularly good. Many of us left europe for the ottoman empire just to be somewhere safe!
based
When I was in the military, I became friends with a Jew who, while not my first Jewish friend, he was the first one really to tell me about their history. One thing I wasn't expecting was he said that the fanatical anti-Jewish attitude of the Arabs is actually a recent development, only really becoming a major force about 100 years ago. Before that, he said there would be isolated outbursts of persecution due to an emir or caliph having a personal grudge, but it would stop as soon as that ruler died or was out of power. Kind of like how Christianity was mostly tolerated by the Roman Empire, but you occasionally had someone like Nero come along.
@@ressljs as a Syrian I can tell you that eventhow it wasn't always perfect jews and Muslims all lived here in peace up until the conflict with Israel. Propaganda just spread fast and many became anti-semetic. There were definitely many Syrians who had nothing against jews but it wasn't socially acceptable.Although I have to say that the younger generation (luckily) is much more educated on the matter due to having the internet.
the ottomans invited the jews over for economy
@@johnmalik2631 the secular ba’athists are pretty much the ones who ramped up all the anti semtisim
10:37 - Just to clarify, Marx was never against industrialisation, he was simply against the profits of industrialised labour going to the bourgeois class rather than the workers or proletariat. Hopefully that clears things up.
Marx has been refuted so many times by real economists that is really boring to hear someone explaining marxism. Prehistoric and very anti cientific theory. Also really dangerous.
@@FragRevel you talk about Marxism as though it’s an economic system, it is not, it’s a method of analysing the relationship between the human mind and the world it exists in. Marxist economics is a load of outdated garbage I’ll be the first to admit that, but that doesn’t mean the system of analysis Marx created should be discarded.
Capitalism is still the best and has done the most good for humanity
@@solortus Just because it's been the most successful so far doesn't mean that it doesn't need to be reformed. Capitalism through climate change is literally destroying the planet (yes i know the soviets were extremely bad for the environment as well).
Not to mention the fact that he fails to recognise the difference between Marxism and Marx’s theory as detailed in the communist manifesto. I like his channel in terms of historical documentation but his political understanding (with the exclusion of certain aspects of geopolitics) is soooo limited
The past isn't what it used to be.
Revisionist boomers be like
Same fam
You kind of overlooked the Congo and the theft of African gold and diamonds
no he didn't
Without anyone outside of africa to sell too, those diamonds wouldn’t be very useful
@João Antonio honestly the market is flooded with diamonds now. They’re not nearly as valuable as they once were. The gold that ended the Bullion famine, however, now that African “contribution” definitely benefited Europe a great deal more than Africa
@Petri I'm aware, and I'm nkt able to rewatch the video right now, he made it sound like Africa somehow benefitted from their colonization, when they clearly didnt
Just another example of brutality rather than profit.
I am sorry, but saying the European didn't exploited Africa IS controversial. The Congo's rubber plantation is the most profitable private business in the world at that time, French conquests of northern Africa is literally said the "biggest redistribution of wealth in the century", when the looting and killing subsided, "the french looter sold back Muslim property to Muslim,from Ottomans estate to the farmer's tool everything is sold back to the populace for whatever the soldiers can take back to France", the Brits conquest of ivory coast also marked with looting and poor investment, mines are profitable, you don't invest anything, the labor cost is "not losing money to bullet and kill those people". When you don't invest in governmental construction, you lose out on taxation, that's the basis of colonialisms. The amounts of colonist's wealth accumulated in Africa colony is tremendous, they just simply didn't pay the empire. And the comparison is simply ridiculous, the whole continent has 95 million people in 1850 divided by different countries, do you expect them to pay the same amount of tax as the tremendously larger Asian and white colonies with so much more investment. As an oil contractor in the Middle East i don't have the high moral ground for condemnation of the exploit but it's just simple economic isn't it.
@Noah Pritchett / The handsome apologist Even for the Brits it's profitable, the idea is just bonkers and has no logical ground. If you don't spent a cent and only took from the colony then it's exploitation, even the Japanese invested in China same time as they committing war crimes.
@Noah Pritchett / The handsome apologist That doesn't make sense, what exactly did they invest in Africa, they Brit didn't build road, they don't care about infrastructure, they amount of troop they station there is miniscule compared to the amount they have in Raj. To quote Kevin Shillington- history of Africa, "The investment is non- existence in tropical Africa and the amount of profit is tremendous, copper, gold, diamond, rubber, tin, cocoa, palm oil.. Is essential for European population, their lifestyles depended on it,in Africa, they don't build schools or roads, they didn't build a banking system, they don't like factory and power plants. The white colonies down south is more fortunate, they have nothing, no slave labor, no mineral, if you don't invest then there is no profit. Most of the money poured down the colony is lost in corruption and flow right back to Britain, there is no such thing as nonprofit-colonialism"
8:00 the Italians just went nuts during the Renaissance
1800’s, the height of the renaissance
What if the Mongols Conquered Egypt
This sound weird thought
They probably would have expanded more if it wasn’t for their inheritance laws/rules. Like most pre 17th 18th century successions laws are quite flawed and lead to usurpers like in Imperial Rome with a general on a winning streak of battles could be proclaimed Emperor by his legions
@@thomasalvarez6456 that's pretty dumb to devide the empire between generals. Why wouldnt they chose one sucessor to rule the empire like 90% of the empires?
Egypt was ruled by a Mongolian slave-soldier in the thirteenth century surprisingly. The Mongol overlords and troops would probably mix into the local mamluk elite and Egypt would become independent again
@@wirelessbluestone5983 i don't think that's how it works. It is the population that represents the country, it is not because the elite is semi egyptian that the country would become egyptian, it like the european royal families, they are often mixed but the kingdoms still independent from each other and that because the population is different from a kingdom to enother.
My favorite example of how people of old times being introspective and intelligent is some people can observe their blind spots in their eyes. With know understanding of how the eye work seeing an object disappear and re appear in your peripheral vision would be confusing at best and possibly terrifying. Explains a few folk tales of demons or spirits that disappear and re appear in front of you.
The eleven misconceptions:
11 - World War I commanders were idiots 1:01
10 - Oriental despotism 3:18
9 - Dialogue 4:41
8 - People in the past were stupid and immoral 7:00
7 - Industrialization was awful 8:58
6 - The Europeans exploited Africa 10:43
5 - Early civilizations were good places 12:58
4 - The Dark Ages were terrible 14:58
3 - The Middle Ages were primitive 16:26
2 - Migrations never occurred 18:04
1 - The Native Americans were hippies 19:48
#13: People still say dogs are "man's best friend" when it is OBVIOUSLY the horse that is the true MVP.
Man, number 6 seems a bit misleading. It's true that Africa was poor compared to Europe, and it's true that sometimes European used Africa as a relief valve to avoid conflict on the Continent, but they really interested in African resources, unexploited by Africans. Furthermore, they depicted themselves as "civilizer" but they only did little investments in their colonies, all made to favour white minority. Africa isn't poor only for Europeans but colonization really damaged African economy. Sorry for possible grammatical errors but I'm not a native speaker.
Corrupted African presidents were also the fault after independence they ate all the money.Look at South Africa for example.
White men try to defend colonization a lot we gotta get used to it
@Pecu Alex Not it wasnt, Colonization was not a dick-measuring contest, this is very wrong, and very false. Africa's resources were exploited, Rubber, Diamond, Coal, iron, anything that could be exploited, was exploited, railroads were only built in CERTAIN areas to tax the goods more and to carry the goods faster, they didnt build railroads in the heart of the continent for no reason. "Railroadism" is a gross but prevalent ideaology that praises European colonization, trying to pawn it off as a dick-measuring contest.
@Gregory Johnson that is an extremely false lie and you know it, African states were very advanced, not specifically technolagically, though that would have come from the North African States (which where on par to European states). Africa was not a backwater, and it had a very complex economy, they had rich cultures, complex societies, and had invented countless great inventions which the world has come to use. Please stop spreading your bullshit Eurocentric views.
@Gregory Johnson Who are you to say backwards? Also it WAS the same everywhere. Kingdoms. Empires. Etc. That is a gross statement
Something you could add to a part 2:
The Renaissance is a separate era that follows the Medieval era. The Late Medieval era is considered to be from mid 1200s to around 1500. The Italian Renaissance happened from the 1300s to 1500s. Donatello died the same year the War of the Roses ended. The period that involves European exploration and early colonization is the Early Modern era.
Point of note: a lot of modern Medieval fantasy stories are set in the Renaissance. Organized armies, crossbows and realistic paintings
Crossbows are much older than the Renaissance though
The wheel was first found in modern day Romania, county of Iasi. But we don't know if it was invented there
14:54
The oldest wheel currently was found in Slovenia, but yes we cant know where it came from, besides we dont know what else my lie underground somewhere, considering most finds are accidental
@@gajmlinar6950 i believe the idea that it was invented in modern day ukraine comes from indo-european invasions, which we know spread the wheel. although that doesn't mean they invented it.
I'm Asian (Indian) British. I'm sure many Indians will hate on Churchill - and have legitimate reasons. Personally I consider him the perfect (wartime) leader.
What if the Maori never landed in New Zealand, and the Haast's eagle and the Moa still existed?
...then the Haast eagle and Moa still exist. lol. What else could come of that? It'd be exactly like you say.
...but, it would be amazing. It's mind blowing that one of the world's largest sky-bird preyed on the world's largest land-bird, in the land of the world's smallest land-birds.
I doubt that was possible, considering how tenacious the polynesians were at exploring, I'm surprised they hadn't made it to the moon by now.
@@a_m5115 are you Australian? Do you know who is responsible for the thylacines extinction on the mainland? Cheers, come back and tell me plz.
@@a_m5115 while you're at it, tell me who is responsible for the rest of Australia's megafauna extinction.
British colonialism overall was extremely profitable, and the British control over their colonies was brutal. I think what's got you confused was that a lot of the profit was realised in the British ruling class, in a classic set-up where the state covers costs and private enterprise reaps the profits.
It wasn’t that brutal compared to pretty much every other empire. Much of the control was given to the people living there rather than London.
Compared to most empires, the British and the French were in some ways pretty merciful. Belgium obviously had the absolutely cruel Congo Free state, the Japanese committed atrocities that defy all imagination, the Spanish often annihilated tribes or literally tortured them to change faiths, the Romans committed massacres on a routine basis, Alexander the Great had nearly all his subjugated forced to become more Greek, I could go on and on. I will not defend whatever atrocities Britain and France committed, but I'd much rather have to live under them than 85% of all other empires in history.
@@thunderbird1921 Except the Spanish were actually relatively nice to the Natives compared to the English who wanted to annihilate them in many areas. The idea that the Spanish were particularly vicious and cruel is ironically a misconception, stemming from English propaganda called the Black Legend.
Nope, it was only profitable for a decade
@@ShivJ16 why did the natives turn Christian and whole empires fall due to the Spanish? Populations in colonies don’t just change their major religion because of the main country.
I wanna clarify something with the first myth, the way WW1 was fought was not new. In fact you could see mirrors in the American Civil War, especially towards the end. The technologies had advanced between the two, and WW1, was much more brutal, but in almost every way, the American Civil War was very much a proto-WW1.
Point 1: Massive stalemat, with the exception of the Mississippi, no side was able to gain or lose much ground until the end of the war, especially in the main hotspots. When we are taught about the Civil War, we are taught about many offenses on both sides ultimately going nowhere for the better part of the war, such as the many attacks into the north, usually perpetrated by General Lee, or the initial failed attacks on Richmond.
2: Technological advancement, while not as extensive as WW1, the ACW used many new inventions or is one if not the earliest use of a preexisting invention in warfare, such as the repeater rifle, modern bullets, the ironclad, railways, gatling gun, and early submarines. There are a few other inventions that were new or untested in war at that point.
3: Shift in tactics, the Battle of Bull Run is famous for this combination of tactics that were slowly being dated and citizen naivety, but by 1864 with the Siege of Petersburg we start to see a full on trench warfare in the fashion of early to mid WW1
So, simply put, a precedent did exist, but everyone thought it would end up like the Franco-Prussian war, not the US Civil War
The Russo-Japanese war was even closer to WW1, being only 10 years before. Europeans watched it keenly (mostly because they were worried about possible Russian agression, and also because Japan had a "British" navy and "German" army so they could see tactics and ships in actual action), but don't seem to have noticed how grim the land campaign got (and how much worse it might be if, say, both countries had the majority of their armies on either side of a land border...)
I don’t buy this Petersberg-WW1 trench warfare statement. Armies have been fighting in trenches during sieges for hundreds of years. Nothing about Petersberg wasn’t seen in the second siege of Vienna, for instance.
I kinda feel the use of exploitation as synonymous with stealing of physichal resources for monetary gain is misleading. I understand the argument of europeans not having gained much monetary advantage from colonizing Africa, but there was clearly some form of resource that they were looking for - you even mention it actually: relative political power compared to other european rivals. Would you still argue that taking political and geographical power from the native population of Africa is not exploitative? It also seems like you are arguing that the europeans taking control over african geographical areas and implementing their governace (whether directly or not) has had an insignificant impact on history - which might be me misunderstanding your intentions, or might be a statement with which I cannot agree based on my understanding of our history.
In either case, I still appreciate you having made this video. It is a good thing to challenge persistent ideas not based in the reality of history. Thank you!
I think his point was refuting the general idea Africa is poor because Europe ravaged it of all resources. In reality European colonialism in the late 18th & early 19th century introduced technology Africans wouldn't have acquired otherwise.
@@Pan_Z But taking away political power from the people there and creating an unstable geopolitical climate won’t affect wealth ?
@@imoyabrax450 which political power? They had no states
@@imoyabrax450 lol what geopolitical condition, every single African government before colonization is a joke and people lived like savages like Incas and they are real primitive compared to the average technology and considering that Europeans have actually modernized most of Africa, I don't see how it is wrong or a disadvantage to Africans, the governments which came after colonization are the ones that caused massive resource plundering for their own good and left people like slaves
@Tetramoriam 474 They were not modern states that we would recognize, but rather tribal chiefdoms to iron age kingdoms.
17:15 In Sicily, under Frederick II of Staufen, they even had environmental laws that resemble our modern laws on environment quite a bit.
Even if you're a Churchill defender (yikes), putting Indian grievances against him on the same level as holocaust denial and denial of the Armenian genocide is at best in very poor taste.
@@alexanderishere6205 Like the Armenian famine. Right? I am aware of the context. Listen even my comment made room for reasonable disagreement but I hope you can see that Indian historical perspectives on being colonised should not be equated to holocaust denial.
@@alexanderishere6205 thanks for the history lesson I guess all of British colonialism was just a huge whoopsie then
The Bengal famine is a very controversial historical event, both in terms of the involvement of Churchill and that of the British Raj. I always cringe when I see British or Indian nationalists fight over it, is a debate best left for historical researchers. As a historian who isn’t specialized in that field, I will only say that from what I know of British government correspondence regarding the famine, it seems unlikely they worsened the famine on purpose (while Churchill did not like Indians in the slightest, he was always advocating for non-lethal means of colonial repression and even supported a path to Indian independence) but they may still very well have worsened it by callous disregard for civilian Indian life. That’s all I’ll say on the matter though, I am no expert.
@@luxborealis That is exactly the perspective I was trying to get at. The holocaust and the Armenian genocide are historical facts that are not in dispute except by governments and groups who stand to gain from questioning them. That cannot fairly be said about the Bengal famine, and doing so strongly undermines the point of this introduction.
Hey man I just wanted to say I love your videos, and I love how balanced you are, but I have to disagree with the how Europe didn't exploit Africa, I'm surprised you didn't bring up king Kongo, or what's Germany did in Namibia, or Cecil rose using badly treated African to mine gold, and the destruction of the city of Benin, all the capital of the Ashanti empire, Africa was not perfect but what Europe did was not the most constructive, thing they could have done.
I'm Italian. Italian colonizers have done horrible things to the Ethiopians, but in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia they still have and use some of the infrastructures (streets, railways, schools, places of entertainment, etc.) that the Italians built there. We didn't expolit our colonies that much also because Italy had a very short colonial history compared to other European countries.
The destruction of Benin and the Ashanti capital were due to them being at war with the British also it is very clear that African colonies were far more costly than beneficial to European powers. Therefore Europe recieved very little if any actual benefit for colonial rule in Africa. Also the fact that non-colonial European nations such as Switzerland, Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Austria are just as wealthy per capita as the colonial nations such as Britain, France and Germany shows that the western world was not enriched by their Empires like some people like to believe in order to push a reparations narrative.
@@oreroundpvp896 combine that with some of there history..aka Ireland and Finland both being treated like shit
@@oreroundpvp896 That's ridiculus, you seem to forget that having a rich market with high population and high demands tends to make you have much more posibilities to make money. Just take a look to the way those countries make money, and those are by selling goods to the european markets. With the added benefit that not being a colony so they could put the price
I think he meant they didn't benefit from it, or at least not as much as it's commonly believed.
A common misconception, especially in the USA is that Columbus reached America, as in their country. He, of course, never set foot in North America. The only part of mainland Americas that he set foot on is what is modern day Panama (hence the city of Colon, Christopher Columbus in Spanish is Cristobal Colon) and what is modern day Venezuela.
Is there version for german speakers even tho this has made my English better- I’m from Namibia I live in Frankfurt Germany
Interesting. Are you descendent from the German settlers or are you a black Namibian immigrant into Germany. What's Namibia like?
I’m near Namibia in South Africa
Whatifalthist I’m Afro-german it’s huge in some tribes they speak a Germanic dialect similar Dutch. Namibia is great just don’t call is South African because we hate we people do that.
Wow that's pretty cool!
apple's lover my dad is Namibian American he works for Mercedes in Frankfurt my mom is a was born in Wolfenbüttel germany
I mostly agree but some point of disagreement:
-While Middle Ages were not as bad as people think, if for no other reason than people trying to improve their lives and rejecting misery when possible. You go so far as to shortchange the Classical Era. It had some massive advantages over what came after, you mention bureaucracy but they had that in spades, ERE kept it up for the most part. They had professional armies the likes of which would not be seen for a thousand years after. Literacy and intellectualism was far higher, as was urbanization which I'd say is a plus even if it was somewhat hard to maintain. There were technological marvels that were lost even if they were being underutilized. The empire that fell was massive and orderly and in short people lived closer to modern times in it than they did in the result barbaric chiefdoms that came after.
-Ottomans were at the very least abysmal given their various practices of slavery (for soldiers, concubines, eunuchs, workers...). Very brutal feudalism at least over Christians, which included besides the afore mentioned slave taking (so called tithe in blood), harsh forced labor, extremely onerous taxes and just general cruelty of Turkish lords. Extremely brutal and unfree to minority populations, and including horrific execution methods (impalement) and tortures. And they were encroaching on Europe and preying on Europeans, so at the very least from a European standpoint they were despotic.
-Lastly I'd mention a more general one where you overstate your case a lot in a few myths. Maybe it is a pet peeve thing or maybe you wanted more myths on the list. WW1 generals were pretty terrible, if charging into machine guns doesn't work once then maybe try to avoid doing it twice and seek a different avenue of attack or a new way to do it. They did try this ofc but not enough, they sacrificed too many lives and were slow to learn lessons of past wars or battles fought. Industrialization pretty definitively helped things in the long run but in the short run it was horrible. Blacklung, kids workers shredded by machinery, insane work hours just some horrors that happened. Meanwhile many and probably most of those people did not go to towns joyfully, they were evicted from commons by enclosures, expelled as excessive due to new agricultural machinery and otherwise very desperate, easily exploited by nascent capitalists. No one gave a damn about you, you were a wage slave, easily replaceable cog it was in an odd way more alienating than feudalism and even slavery. Not saying those modes are better mind, but neither are they strictly worse. And finally ancient agricultural societies were harsh on the underclasses but living in a tribe was even harsher if you were the odd man out. In some ways choosing to be "uncivilized" was not a bad choice, for those non-bottom tier individuals. But it would have also probably kept humanity from progressing very far if it continued indefinitely.
The Ottomans weren't perfect, he never claimed that. but they were not that horrible either, just compare it with the the treatment of the Jews or other religious minorities in many European states. Hell Ottomans actually accepted Jews who were banished from Spain alongside Spanish Muslims, and those Jews only left the Middle East when the Arab regimes forced them out after the establishment of Israel.
There were definitely a few of these 11 myths where you could see his own biases coming through. The industrialism one is a good example of this.
I love number 8. It irks me so much that people think like that. And even worse when they assume that merely vilifying the past is learning from it.
your intro including "Indians will continue to hate Churchhill" alongside 2 examples of genocide denialism is just WEIRD man. Churchhill gave India (and many other places) PLENTY of valid reasons to hate him.
yeah, he also does it with the Industrialization "myth" to dunk on Marxists, and goes on to claim (in spite of the mountains of evidence that pre-industrial societies labored fewer hours not more) that the poor loved slaving away in factories prior to unionization and labor laws.
pre-industrial societies averaged about 10-20 hours per week in production activities compared to the 40+ in modernity.
It's a pretty dishonest take.
@@E.J.Crunkleton The work in agriculture was extremely unevenly distributed throughout the year. During sowing and harvesting, they work almost around the clock. But at other times of the year they did other things because there was nothing to do in agriculture. Yield / wage for agriculture was very uncertain and famine was common. So there was a great interest in getting to the city and working in industry, especially for those who had poor soil to cultivate in.
@@niklasmolen4753 No ones going to mentioned the Inclosure Acts and how they managed to take common land away from a lot of the rural folk, thereby forcing them into the cities? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts#List_of_acts
@@annoydivision There have been similar ones in several countries and they have helped to make agriculture more efficient. But as usual, some were probably cheated on their land.
They were a prerequisite for having a more productive agriculture. Which enabled more people to work in more than just agriculture.
I feel like the Native American one is pretty misleading. While yes plains Indians where extremely warlike, a good portion of woodlands Indians where relatively peaceful (aside from the Iroquois). I also think to dismiss the idea that they werent in tune with their environment is extremely ignorant. The amazon rainforest was literally bred by natives to be more productive, and controlled burns by American Indians (that you called burning down forests) where done to prevent uncontrollable fires and made them more productive later on... that is literally being in control of the environment and understanding it, I think you are mistaking it as a problem because the way these things are done now and are unsustainable / unsuccessful with how modern ppl do them.
The part you skipped over with the colonization of Africa was when they drew lines, the longest lasting harm to Africa was when they actually created countries without any understanding of the pre-existing cultural lines or the fact that all of them were accustomed to moving around and not staying within permanent settlements. That certainly created long term negative affects upon Africa
Hard to draw borders when much of Africa literally had no borders before the Europeans.
Gancio The Ranter true
@@thedripkingofangmar6778 Africa is a giant continent, lots of regions were developed, not all Africans lived in small tribes before Europeans came
6:01 this is not entirely true. People did of course swear in the past, just not in the same way we do. Words and their meanings change over time and common words back in history might have a more serious meaning today. If you want to learn more about this watch this video by Simon Roper, an excellent anthropologist and historical linguist.
ruclips.net/video/ARgGguQlQ0w/видео.html
It's also important to note that more formal language was used in the literature from the past, and thus isn't truly representative of how people commonly spoke, meaning that we aren't getting what was actually spoken, but instead a formalization of it. It's not hard to realize that people didn't really speak like they do in Shakespeare.
Another note is the inaccuracy of the point made at 6:30. Old English and Southern English are not incredibly close, they just share a few pronunciations. Simon Roper also has a video discussing this.
ruclips.net/video/4rb0HPDnc8Y/видео.html
Not Very Good With This Stuff
But I'm Decently Sure He Said They Swore In Different Ways. Like God's Bones Etc
Thank you, Nowhere Man! I was wondering when somebody would cite that video (which I was thinking of). How's your 19th book coming?
Interestingly enough in my language we still swear sometimes like people from medieval times. Ok, even in english there is "damn" and "in god's name", swears with a more religious context. But we swear on words like "sacrament", "cross- crucifix", "cross- cruzifiction" and so on. Even some class/caste related swear words like "one who got shorn up from behind" (i really have no clue how i should translate this), which describes the style of hair serfs had to have in medieval times, so you basically call him a serf, a rightless man on the lowest social level, even though this class system died in our society around 500 years ago.
Another one is "crucify the turks", even though the thing you are swearing about has nothing to do with them or generally any person. Maybe because my ancestors saw the invading turks as kind of dark wizards who could hex people.
@@valentinmitterbauer4196 out of curiosity, what is your language?
@Luís Filipe Andrade I speak a very rural dialect of bavarian.
1:30 - The Prussians did send observers to the American Civil War, but they looked down upon the American armies as undisciplined rabbles (in the first months of the war they were probably right if Mark Twain's account is any indication) so they probably didn't learn much.
What if the Agadir crisis started WW1 or the Qing conquest of China never happened or if Italy never unified
If Italy didn't unify the North would have been taken by Austria and the south by Spain. The Pope would have been kn a better situation between 2 of his besties rather than cover by the Savoys.
I like the thought of one of the Moroccan crisies starting off WW1 as very nearly happened. Mainly because in that war Serbia would not bleed nearly as much, and would probably only join war late for spoils like Romania/Italy instead of having to bear the brunt of the war and massacres as in OTL (25% of all people died in the war, more if only counting men, and there were massacres of Serbs in Austria-Hungary too which don't count to this dark score).
Bulgaria might even join Entente with no easy DoW on Serbia while they could instead try and take Constantinople from Ottomans.
OTOH Austria and eventually Germany had to commit many troops to Serbian front, these would go elsewhere and potential be enough to win or at least knock out Russia a bit sooner.
I’m going to talk about if the Qing never existed.
All of this would account for if the Ming did industrialised and modernised.
1. The Ming encounters the Opium Wars with Britain and wins it so it drives the colonial powers out of China instead of a longer war.
2. China builds up the military response to Japan modernising & trading with western powers.
3. Japan tried to invade Korea but failed to do so because of China advanced navy and army so then Japan will suffer a revolution & isolation after it.
4. The Ming dynasty supports the anti-communists Russians so therefore the Soviet Union will lose the civil war more likely and gained support of western powers.
5. The Ming send troops so the axis is defeated very early by 1943 and with Japan being isolated, the US would not intervene. Major powers would be British, French, Russians, and the Ming dynasty during the 1940s.
6. Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Ming dynasty would be an alliance. British empire, French empire, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and occupied Germany would be an alliance sort of like NATO. The US, Japan, Mexico, Central America, and South America would be an alliance.
7. With Russia and China having inferior economies compared to the western colonial powers still then Russia will end up in a economic and political crisis and will make concessions.
8. With the Qing not invading, then China will be in a much smaller area size that will exclude Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, and Guangxi probably and leaves with about 1,910,000 square miles of Chinese land as modern Chinese territory.
9. China in the alternate timeline would not include Dalai Lama as part of the Chinese nation.
I know some other people also speculate that later Tang would exist with the Ming falling, Ming dynasty having a huge wealth gap that leads to rebellions probably, potentially Ming could have bad emperors that lead to lost of the Opium Wars, and Ming could reform its economy based on capitalism by 1700s and become a dominating capitalist empire by 1800s and 1900s. With all this said, anything could possibly happen had the Qing conquest didn’t happen.
X1 Gen KaneshiroX The Ming couldn't industrialize or modernize. It was practically intellectually, socially, and technologically stagnant for its duration, especially when compared to the dynamism of the Song. Part (certainly not all, but part) of why the Qing failed to modernize was their arrogance, which might be even worse under a dynasty not ruled by “barbarians”.
But to answer your question, OP, I think the Ming probably would've been overthrown by the Shun dynasty (which probably wouldn't last very long) or gone into a period of civil strife before being reunited by some warlord.
That sudden mention of Quebec French swears at 6:15 always gets me.
Really wish I could explain to this guy how difficult it is to read multiple paragraphs while also listening to him talk
Its better this way than making the videos longer. I dont read all of them, only what interests me.
Pausing the video works for me.
The Europeans, as a whole, didn't benefit from colonizing Africa, but the citizens of the Congo Free State, in the 1800s, would disagree. The Belgians, in particular King Leopold ii, benefited greatly.
i agree with the sentiment but really this was pretty subjective from your part too.
Yeah, I was expecting something overall better. I am now thinking that I was simply not the target audience of this video and my expectations were a mistake.
@@Onlinerando Yeah, this was my second. I was impressed with his Timur video and instantly subscribed to Al Muqaddimah who assisted with it, then I watched this one which left me 'not wanting more'.
Even though the main point seems right imho, I too feel like this was quite a subjective . And found quite interesting that your view of europe was so foccused on the source nations of the northamerican colonizers.
I think it was quite objective, but nobody is perfect.
@@Onlinerando Out of curiosity, what was the bias you saw here that upset you?
Glad you mentioned the golden age of the islamic world, that area of history is somewhat always overlooked . Amazing video
ruclips.net/video/t_Qpy0mXg8Y/видео.html
Most realistic say the golden age of Arab empire. The Islam is the cause of the current state of this countries.
@@christiano9693 good joke christian
@@christiano9693 not really. The biggest misconception is that today's Islamic countries actually practice sharia law. That's total bullshit. Iran and Saudi Arabia only enforce the laws that suite their regimes and call them Sharia Law. Many of those laws are actually way too far and sometimes false.
Back in the day Islam really was present in the Umayyad and Abbassid caliphates, and the other states during theor time. Of course, not everyone was extremely religious and all, but real sharia law was actually there and many people were religious.
We can't call them Arab empires either because they were dominated by races that weren't Arabs like Berbers, Persians and Turks. The Arabas were the majority only until around 710. Once the Caliphate expanded to other cultures, those cultures slowly started to mix with the Arab culture, with many elites preferring the Persian way of life for example as opposed to the ancient Arabian way. Caliphes and Sultans started trusting foreign races instead of Arabs, with the Abbassids giving huge influence and power to Persians later on, only to replace them with Turks some century later. Eventually, more and more cultures blended with the Arabian one. The last time the Caliphates were truly Arab was probably around 800-900.
@@alidokadri we are agree. I say that talk about islamic golden age or similar is like say the islam is the cause of that knowledge accumulation (the cause is the empire, Islam is just a tool of the imperial expansion and justification) when in fact Islam consensus reject the follow of the observable truth in order to find truth nature of God and world (christians do the opposite and this contribute to western successfull).
Passed this imperial sweet moment, Islamic countries are the nothingness in knowledge accumulation and development. And when I say that Islam is the cause of almost all social and political problems in muslim countries, just look at them, religious civil wars is the most obvious, all the crimes in the name of "God's law" implementation other, tech kids more religion than useful things for countrie success, the high inbreeding marriages for sexual repression, the low incorporation of women to work (I know a man prefers just work him but if you are I competition with countries that both sex work you have a problem), the incapacity of have a democracy because if a religious party win eventually this subvert democracy, the absence of human rights recognition (because Islamic countries have their own vision of human rights based on sharia)...etc
I'm not sure you will mention this but here:
Alot of people assume the great War
was ended with a march on berlin thus destroying infrastructure etc,
when in reality Germany was untouched and the Entente armies didn't even touch German soil until after the armistice.
True, it's why the Germans didn't see the reperations and punishments as justified as the propaganda just a week earlier would be saying Germany was doing good/winning.
For real? I can't recall ever hearing such a thing from anyone ever. Maybe it's a pop idea in the US 🤷🏻♂️
It'd be interesting to know if the allies did march on Berlin, if WW2 would have happened as the people would know the Treaty of Versailles was justified and they might've known the land lost to Poland was through conquest and not just a part of the treaty. Also Hitler might have died or have been traumatised in the fighting if we were lucky.
Really? I've never heard anyone suggest this before. In fact it's typically the opposite. Because the Entente powers DIDN'T invade and conquer Germany much of the German populace did not believe that they had been defeated. A position aided by wartime propaganda ensuring them that victory was close right up until the point they lost. This underlying suspicion led to the "stab in the back" theory propounded by Hitler (and others). That Germany hadn't actually been defeated but had instead been stabbed in the back by (insert appropriate target here). For Hitler that was the Jews, of course. But others had their own targets too.
And which is also the reason why the treaty of Versailles was considered injust by Germans, even though ........... it was extremely lenient when you compare it to say the treaties of Lausanne, Saint-Germain, Trianon and Brest-Litovsk. Had the war been prolonged for a few weeks and had the entente marched into Germany, the Germans probably wouldn't have seen this treaty as harshly (but they would have realised that the reason for the post war hardship wasn't so much the reparations, their cost was offset by the fact they didn't need to spend a large percentage of their gdp on the military, but because their government was incompetent and thought that "money printer go brrrrr" was a solid economic plan, so the Weimar Republic probably wouldn't have been liked either way)
Another misconception I'd like to bring up is the idea that European line infantry tactics in the 1700s were insane and that the Americans won the revolution because the Native Americans taught them how to hide behind rocks. I was even taught this idea in a college course and it's just so blatantly idiotic.
US won because of French and Spanish economical and Military support lol.
As an aspiring historical fiction author, I thank you so much for this list! I do think that more people should go and look into the past.
The mythology behind the native American peoples is one of the most important things you mention here. People believe they were saints, in part to demonize the westerners who came after them. They did indeed fight wars of genocide and conquest, deforest their lands, and engage in slavery on a wide scale. Brave of you, frankly, to include this in the list!
This is also done with Africans during the Atlantic slave trade. It’s usually portrayed that Westerners came into Africa and enslaved the population themselves directly. In reality, the slave trade was started by African tribes and countries who had conquered other regions and taken them captive, then traded those captives with Westerners.
Modern people tend to worship the poor innocent African tribals who were just going about their peaceful Stone Age lives before the Europeans stormed in and enslaved them all. Africa was a thriving part of the world for centuries, and a lot of that was due to slavery in some form or another.
That was amazing. You managed to challenge a couple of my presumptions; I’m going to have to rethink my stance on the Middle Ages and their relationship to the Dark Ages.
"Indians will continue to hate on Churchill" is not in the same category as genocide deniers. Genocide deniers ignore evidence and invent fake evidence out of hate and to protect their interests. Indians hate Churchill because he represented the British Empire and was taking active measures to ensure they never saw independence, and he didn't value their interests. Saying they have a "special interest" is like saying we have a "special interest" in the politics of our own countries. Yes, it is correct, but it is also a redundant statement.
Also lol, European colonisers were sending expeditions out searching for rare earth minerals literal days before African nations were granted independence. How do you think that would have gone if they found any?
Colonization was, and never could have been, a good thing for the colonized. They most often replaced local warlords and kings with an external power which was even less likely to care about the people they ruled over. What incentive would an European governor have to consider the well-being of a group they didn't identify with, who they most-likely considered savages, to consider what they wanted?
Even discounting the intellectual and economic theft that occurred throughout the existence of colonial Europe, you can't discard the colonization process by saying it was not profitable and 'a matter of pride'. Colonization brought vast spheres of influence and control to the colonial powers, and the ability to wage wars and concentrate their powers without their power centers being disrupted or their populations killed. And the colonies paid for all of that, be it by manpower or resources.
While there was a lot of oppression and subjugation, there were plenty of attempts at coexistence.
Take 2 examples from Britain
1. The reason that the 13 colonies didnt expand its territory until after the american revolutionary war was because the British Government banned the colonies from expanding past the Appalachian mountains, this was because the British had a deal with the native americans.
2. The british made a deal with the Zulus that the Zulus could keep their land, and the british took and converted the wasteland
@@iowsiam492 Being from a country that was absorbed into the British Empire by means of conspiracy of nobles, I have to disagree. Sri Lanka was absorbed after repelling British invasion for years by means of an agreement with traitorous nobles in 1815. The nobles involved were swiftly exiled or otherwise contained to consolidate their power , and the locals were suppressed and taxed while our local customs and knowledge were suppressed. The British committed innumerable atrocities during their period of rule, and the effects of their high-handed and ignorant rule still shadows the country, as it does in the entire Indian subcontinent.
No matter which way you look at it, the lands under colonialism suffered. The British were so thorough in their extermination of the indigenous cultures that scholars are still trying to recreate them. And this is in a country with a strong written tradition dating back thousands of years.
A railroad and a culture they forcibly implanted doesn't make up for the fact that colonial powers used and destroyed the colonies they ruled over in their ignorance and greed. They stripped my country, as with every country they conquered, of everything that wasn't nailed down; the British museum still regularly 'loans' our own artefacts and treasures back to us for study.
So this attempt to say that the colonies weren't profitable and it was a matter of pride and it wasn't that bad, really, is just another attempt at a narrative where the countries belonging to the powers that did the oppressing can deny guilt for their acts.
@@iowsiam492 also, coexistence has to come from a place of equality. Pretty hard to do that when you consider everyone without white skin as subhuman. Any and all deals colonial powers made with locals they broke or perverted as soon as the agreement didn't serve their purposes any longer.
@@nobodyspecial9 im not trying to deny that the British did horrendous things
And being from Bulgaria i know what its like to grow up in a country that was invaded and taken over by an oppressive empire, 2 in fact.
But its just a bit ignorant to deny that colonisation did have benefits to the countries colonised as well has negatives.
The negatives may outweigh the benefits, but the benefits are still there.
Africa in the early 1900s was in the same place that China was. Warlords and tribes, with only the northernmost areas being proper countries.
Without colonisation those african countries would only be going through an industrial revolution now, like China is.
@@iowsiam492 assumptions are just that, assumptions. Europe went through a similar situation in the dark ages, and yet they recovered remarkably quickly. Africa and China both had thriving civilizations before their decline in the periods you mention. You could also argue that the colonization disrupted that circle right when it was recovering and thus delayed the establishment of civilization and government. Colonization caused a cultural disconnect that is a major reason for the political and social unrest in those countries to date.
Number 6 neglects the artificial drawing of borders and also the playing off of tribes against each other.
A) The drawing of borders was done with some help from the Africans, since Europeans literally created governments for these countries when they left. Yes it had an insane amount of issues, but that doesn't completely lie on Europeans, especially since massive public opinion throughout the whole world, as well as the USA and USSR encouraging decolonization, as well as unrest in the colonies, put extreme pressure on the process, forcing it to become an unnatural escape from Africa, instead of a natural lay of the colonies with consideration, at the cost of them being colonies for longer.
B) Tribes always fought each other anyway. Like mini nations they conquered land from each other and like nations they allied with other nations to destroy.
Also he only mentioned the economic viability and exploitation, even mentioning that what the Europeans did was wrong.
What if humans never settled the America’s during the ice age?
Interesting idea. I had made a video about this if you're interested:
ruclips.net/video/IZenQNG7Zd4/видео.html
@@scholaroftheworldalternatehist Cool video. Thanks for the share.
Much smaller human population do to no potatoes, corn, sweet potatoes, beans, ect. Russia isn't a great power without potatoes giving them a population boost. Africa is less populated without corn, beans, and cassava. More extensive slave trade. Spain is never turbocharged by American gold and silver. Probably more isolated European settlers and runaway slaves making little maroon communities in the interior. For instance possibly Spanish or French nomads herding cattle on the plains.
It would have been found eventually, either Vikings, Chinese/Russian, Europeans or perhaps Pacific islanders.
When the first christian explorers arrive the whole east coast is already settled by viking descendants that never had to fight the natives when they first arrived.
Finding land across the sea that "encircles the whole world" was part of the Norse world view. So they might have explored the coastline quite far.
It's funny how people think industrialization is awful but are quick to donate charity funds for poor africans and they don't realize what they lack is industrialization
Finally! Somebody acknowledges that metalworking was invented in the Caucasus!
You should do what if Ottomamans didn't manage to expand into Europe, good start for this would probably be Serbs winning battle of Maritsa and besieging Edrine (which was actually more likely than what happened). That would be very interesting.
Or victory of the 1395 battle of Nicopolis between the Crusaders and the Ottomans with their pet Lazarevic?
Nothing much would change. Timurids beating and nearly destroying Ottomans only delayed Ottoman expansion for a few decades. Serbia and other Balkan states would begin fighting each other for power while Ottomans were recovering and strengthening their positions in Anatolia only to come back stronger to Balkans.
The last point was extremely poignant for me. I’m an Australian and I am sick to death of having this ridiculous progressive-hippy myth shoved down my throat that the native aboriginals were some kind of virtuous communist utopia until big bad Britain came along and ruined everything. The narrative we’re force-fed in school is totally one sided against colonial Britain and completely ignores the fact that the aboriginals were humans just like everyone else: they fought wars, committed crimes, wiped out native flora and fauna, etc. The impression you get from ‘education’ was that the British rocked up and just started indiscriminately slaughtering the aboriginals. Which is utterly farcical.
The same is here in Canada. Tribal confederations like the Iroquois and the Mikmaq had wiped out/ displaced most tribes around the Great Lakes and St.Lawrence for beaver furs. While French and English settlement in the region was mostly peaceful and cooperative until confederation
No different in the American school system, from what I understand.
The "black europeans" part is very wrong. They all had blue eyes, European hair and bone structure and while they do lack the mutations for modern European type fair skin, no evidence for dark skin has been found either. The reconstruction you showed is known as "Cheddar man" and was almost certainly a politically motivated one. Saying that these populations have no descendants is also incorrect, as these ancient Europeans(real name is Western Hunter-Gatherers) constitute genetically around 40% of the gene pool in many Northern European populations.
Well the article mentioned they had found genes for melanine that showed that the skin was either black or brown.
In fact there have been found paleolitic europeans with haplogroup C, as australoids or mogols.
@@adamnesicoCool, so now we get to say the n-word(God that is so infantilising)!
I absolutely love your videos. With that said,
I wholeheartedly disagree with your views on African colonization. I think you completely downplayed the atrocities that were committed by Europeans, and it is untrue to say that Europeans didn't exploit the continent. The Belgian Congo is a perfect example of complete economic exploitation combined with atrocities on a genocidal scale, and it resulted in an immense amount of wealth pouring into Belgium. Similar exploitation occurred all of africa by numerous European powers, another good example being the lucrative slave trade. Whether or not their exploitation overall was successful is up for debate, like you said many colonies cost more than they were worth. But the only thing that matters is that they tried, oftentimes successfully and sometimes not, and the results were devastating.
The US has an incredibly weak class structure:
*Jeff Bezos has entered the chat*
(Ftr, I know class is more than just wealth status, I just think it’s important to critically examine the ‘egalitarianism’ of modern liberal democracies)
Yeah I don't know where he got that one from. The property-owning and working classes are extremely entrenched in the US
@@treyebillups8602 depends on how you look at it, the us is the country in wich the most individuals go up in the social ladder based on population
Capitalism has entered the chat
It's not that the US is a classless society or class doesn't matter.
It's that in many countries there is a huge class distinction and one that isn't even based on wealth.
For example, there have been countries and societies where you can be one of the wealthiest people in there are and still not accepted by the upper-classes if you were not born into wealth. Your children might not even be accepted, it would take several generations of continued wealth before anyone in your family would have the ear of the powerful or access to prestigious schools and clubs or be allowed to live in certain areas.
Likewise, you can come from the aristocracy or have prominent ancestor several centuries back and be considered part of the elite even though you're hugging the poverty line.
This type of class system was common in Britain up until very recently (and still exists to some extent) and it was certainly the way Ancient Rome worked for most its history.
Belgium. 🇧🇪 was an absolute horror story. Glossing the rubber trade over seems a bit disingenuous.
Fun fact: Africa was such an easy conquest for Europe because they (the british in particular) often had numerical superiority and Africa went into a dark age before colonization after the fall of their empires.
Another interesting fact: from what I've read, during the Opium Wars (even the Second one in the 1850s), a number of the British were expecting a VERY hardfought and grueling war with the Chinese (remember that they were still considered an empire before then). The fact that it ended up being so lopsided was incredibly surprising to many Europeans (as the Chinese were thought to be much more advanced than other powers of the region and most nations around the world, which they were to some extent). The exploitation of China really got started after 1860, when China accepted nearly unconditional surrender to the British and French forces.
No. All this is incorrect.
@@luchamiomaridekakio6429 really? the british didn't often have numerical superiority when conquering africa? interesting of you to say that
While I absolutely agree that the number 1 misconception has to do with Indigenous American societies, and characterizing them as either Noble or barbaric savages, as somebody into Aztec history I've got some issues with some of the info you list in that part of the video. While i'm not able to speak for the Inca, I'm not aware of any sort of widespread environmental/agricultural sustainability issues the Aztec (I assume by "Aztec" here you mean Mexica, the specific subgroup of the Nahua civilization who lived in Tenochtitlan that the term "Aztec" is most associated with, with the Nahuas being the broader "Aztec culture" and the Aztec Empire being an alliance between Tenochtitlan and 2 other cities and their various subject states) had.
I could just be not be informed on the topic of it being unsustainable (My interest is on Mesoamerica generally, not Chinampas speffically) but my understanding is that the Chinampa (artificial islands made in shallow lakebed via filling a staked out plot of lake with soil and then planting trees to anchor it, which were the primary farming method used in Tenochtitlan and one of the major methods used in the Valley of Mexico, which was where the Nahuas were centered in and was the political core of the Aztec Empire) agricultural model was very sustainable and agriculturally productive. In fact pretty much everything i've read on them stresses that fact: That it retains much of the elements of the areas's existing ecosystem and uses local soil, crops, and trees (the trees themselves also acting as wind breakage); that it re-uses human waste for fertilizers, that the existing lake irrigates the soil, and can produce as many as 7 harvests a year. In fact, I've even read that even using the traditional population estimate of 200,000 people in Tenochtitlan and 1.5 million people across the whole valley (which would have made it one of the most densely populated areas on the planet) in 1519, which resulted from a massive population explosion over a few centuries, it was still was far from it's total carrying capacity.
I've also got some disagreements with what you state regarding the Mexica's institutionalized warfare. While the Mexica (and by extension the Aztrec Empire) absolutely had annual offensive military campaigns as an institutionalized practice, they did NOT systemically wage war against existing subject states. In fact, subject states in the Aztec Empire were generally left very hands off, keeping their rulers, laws, and customs; typically only having tax ("Tribute") burdens of economic goods, and/or burdens of supplying services, usually aid on military campaigns or for public construction projects in Tenochtitlan, along with at times having to put up a shrine to Huitzlipotchli. I think the misconception that their conquered subjects had war waged on them for captives originates from a misunderstanding of what Xochiyaoyotl (Flower Wars) were and how they were used. Flower Wars were ritualistic, usually pre-arranged conflicts between Nahua cities/towns that were smaller in scale compared to normal wars (Yaoyototl) and were more focused around collecting enemy soldiers as captives rather then trying to conquer urban centers; and were usually waged between two agreeing parties for various reasons, sometimes even cementing alliances, or against a target of conquest which would be costly or ineffective to try to conquer outright, and where Flower Wars could act as a way to feel each other out or to gradually wear the other side down (as their smaller scale nature meant they could be done throughout the year, vs large scale invasions needing to be seasonal).
In fact, glancing through Hassig's "Aztec Warfare: Imperial Expansion and Political Control" to double check things, I see NO mentions of Flower Wars being used against existing subjects (contrary to what I remeber hearing about it being used on them occasionally via mutual consent to cement alliances and the like), and rather exclusively in the more pragmatic "testing each other/wearing them down" context. It even notes that in the early Flower Wars the Mexica had against Chalco under the rule of Acamapichtli starting in 1375, that many of the initial Flower Wars had NO causalities, and only over time as both sides felt each other out did it shift to be involve taking captives and then stopped before escalating further into actual, non-flower wars wars. His lack of mention of the pre-arranged, "friendly" flower wars could just be because that book is focused on a pragmatic view of Aztec militarism in contrastto the ritualistic view a lot of other texts take, so he may have saw covering them outside the scope of the book. Regardless, forced raids or flower wars against subjects wasn't a thing on any widespread basis.
I'm also not sure where you are drawing the 2 million figure from or what length of time or what geographic expanse it is meant to encompass, but even if it's meant to be all sacrifices in Tenochtitlan from it's founding in the 1320's to 1521, or all of the states and towns the Aztec Empire contained from it's founding in the late 1420's (when Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan allied together to overthrow Azcapotzalco, the then most dominant city-state in the Valley of Mexico) to 1521; I would say that's a pretty, arguably unreasonably high estimate, for a few reasons. The first being that the Mexica were the only Mesoamerican group to really practice mass-scale sacrifices, as a result of religious reforms made by the Tlatoani (King) of Tenochtitlan, Itzcoatl, and the Cihuacoatl ("Woman-Snake"; a head adminstrative, religious, and judicial office underneath the Tlatoani to handle internal domestic affairs, especially when the Tlatoani was handling external diplomacy and warfare) Tlacaelel shortly after the formation of the Aztec Empire, with Itzcoatl ordering the burning of existing religious and historical texts in Tenochtitlan and Tlacaelel devising a new state-sponsored history and creation myth to glorify the Mexica's origins and place an increased emphasis on the need of the blood of enemy soldiers to sustain Huitzlipotchli as a way to provide a cosmological justification/rationalization for military campaigns.
So the amount of sacrifices other towns and cities, even other Nahua ones, would be doing would likely be a fraction of that as Tenochtitlan, and even Tenochtitlan was probably not sacrificing many thousands of people a year, let alone tens or hundreds of thousands: The recent excavations as the Tzompantli (Skull Rack) in Tenochtitlan's ceremonial district/downtown Mexico City have, per the media reports I can find (sadly I haven't found published papers on it yet),found that it held "Thousands" of skulls at it's "maximum extent". Now, the rack WAS cleared at times and then refilled, and sacrifices did occur in other temples in the city and not all sacrifices had their skulls put on the rack, but based on that wording and some numbers I crunched, I think it's pretty likely that the actual amount of annual sacrifices was probably in the hundreds, if not dozens, MAYBE between 1 and 2 thousand, most of which (up to 75% per the Tzompantli findings) would have been enemy soldiers, not civilians. Even if we take Cortes's estimate of 3000 a year at face value in Tenochtitlan, across the roughly 200 years the Tenochtitlan would be around, that would still be only 600,000, not 2 million, and, again, the Mexica only even really ramped up their sacrifices 100 years after Tenochtitlan was founded, so even that's being pretty charitable. To shift to the "All of the Aztec empire from the 1420's to 1520's" model for the 2M estimate, using Cortes's likely already inflated 3000 a year figure again, and say that the rest of the Aztec Empire's cities/towns sacrificed 3x that combined abnnually (which I would find unlikely, since, again, others didn't do mass scale sacrifices), so 3000 + 9000 = 12,000 a year, across 1000 years that'd be 1.2m sacrifices, still only a bit over half the 2M figure. None of these are meant to be accurate estimates, but are rather numbers I'm relatively sure are *higher* then what would be accurate as to show you that even when using those you wouldn't reach 2 million.
Anyways, with corrections/nitpicks out of the way, I wanna talk about some further/additional/related misconceptions regarding Indigenous American history and societies, but I ran out of space, so...
CONTINUED IN A FOLLOW UP REPLY
That's an absolutelly huge comment
CONTINUED: So, now with those corrections done, here's some more misconceptions I want to tackle................
1.That the Mesoamericans and the Andeans were "Stone Age". On an easy surface level, this is wrong because both Mesoamerica (the Cultural area incluiding the Aztec, Maya, Olmec, etc; usually defined as roughly the bottom half of Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize, and bits of Hondouras and el Salvador), Central America below it, and the Andes (the Inca, Nazca, Moche, etc; so Peru and bits of adjacent countries like Bolvia and Ecuador) all had metallurgy, smelting both soft metals like gold, silver, and copper, as well as Bronze. You can quite litterally google images of copper and bronze Inca weapons and armor or Aztec Axe-monies or tweezers with little effort. Beyond that, though, it's just a bad premise: the whole Stone/Bronze/Iron age model isn't meant to be a measure of technological progression, but rather just specific periods of European and Near-Eastern history since the widespread shift from/to each material makes a convenient set of Milestones. Metallurgical technology is just one of many facets of society and technology, and trying to make any sort of broader assessment of complexity just based on it is, frankly, silly:
Let's look at Mesoamerica again. Teotihuacan was a massive metropolis with 150,000 denizens across 37 square kilometers, 22 sq.km. of which was a dense urban grid of fancy stone temples, plazas, villas, etc. Almost the entire city's population was living in opulent housing complex/villas with dozens of rooms, large open air courtyards, rich painted frescos on walls, and fine ceramics and stuatary. Some complexes had toilets, and like a lot of other large Mesoamerican cities it had a complex water mangement system that included canals, resvoirs, and drainage systems/plumbing. It could even flood the Plaza outside the Temple of the Feathered Serpent for rituals like the Roman Colosseum could be flooded..... and Teotihuacan's apex passed BEFORE Mesoamerica had ANY metallurgy, even of soft metals like Gold. The Mesoamericans might not have worked Iron or made Steel, but rest assured they were more comparable to Iron age, Classical and Medieval Old World socities then they were Bronze age ones in quite a few respects, and almost all respects vs Stone age ones. Medicine, Sanitation, and Botanical science in particular the Aztec I'd argue were cutting-edge with even by global standards.
2. That the Native Americans outside of Mesoamerica and the Andes were simple hunter-gatherers. This is sort of an extension of the 1st point I just split up because I didn't want the paragraph to go on for too long, and Whatifist actually covers this briefly in the video; but there was a suprising amount of complexity in many socities in what's now the US and Canada (and the rest of Central and South America), even if not as much in Mesoamerica in the Andes by traditional Western standards : As noted in the video, even for the non-sendatary socities, there was often a notable degree of environmental modification, such as agroforestry where the brush of forests were managed with fire and crops were planted and then then the whole forests would be used as "farms" for said crops and animals were hunted. A large amount, perhaps even a majority, of Native Americans north of Mexico were in fact agricultural, they just didn't practice "Western" style agriculture. And there were many that DID and had towns and even (albiet not of stone) cities: The Pueblo and related Oasisamerican cultures in New Mexico, Arizona, etc, or the Mississipians in the Eastern US who were basically their own Cradle of Civilization: Cahokia, located in what's St Louis, had 30,000 to 40,000 denizens. Down in the Amazon, LIDAR has found huge networks of earthenwork complexes, towns, and irrigration from a former culture there, (probably closer to the Missiissipians then the Mesoamericans, for the sake of your mental image), with a notable amount of the Amazon rainforest really being an overgrown human-made ecosystem. In reality a fair amount of cultures across the Americas even outside of Mesoamerica and the Andes were sedentary, but collapsed from European diseases spread by the Spanish before the British, French, and American colonists spread throughout the Continent: They were seeing what was already a post-apocalyptic landscape.
3. That the only heavily urbanized, complex civilizations in the Americas were the Aztec, Inca, and Maya: Even putting aside the cultures I mention in point 2, and looking at what we'd consider full, complex civilizations (as arbitrary as that can be at times), there's DOZENS more then just those 3: stuff like monumental archtecture, rulership, class systems, etc goes back in Mesoamerica almost 3000 years prior to Europeans arriving in the late 15th/early 16th century, and around 2000 years in the Andes (some will say as far as 9000 years due to sites like Caral, but my understanding is these were more akin to stuff like Gobekli Tepe or stonehenge, being large monumental sites visited seasonally rather then cities). There's so many other civilizations, city-states, kingdoms, empires, etc. I already mentioned Teotihuacan as another Mesoamerican one, but there's also the Olmec (probably the next most well known, thanks to their giant stone head sculptures), the Zapotec and Mixtec (two major ones in what's now Oaxaca, the exploits of the Mixtec warlord 8-Deer-Jaguar-Claw matches the most thrilling tales of great conquerers from Europe and Asia, going from a noble working for a general of other cities to making key alliances with influiential religious lords, to then conquering almost 100 cities in under 2 decades and finally dying in an ironic twist when the one boy he left alive from his arch-rivals family grew up to overthrow him), the Purepecha/Tarascans (the second largest Empire in Mesoamerica after the Aztec, who repelled numerpous invasions from them and built a series of forts and watchtowers along their border) etc'; or down in the Andes, the Moche (who built giant, impressive temple complexes called Huacas a bit like Mesopotamian ziggurats, google some of the well preserved bits of Huaca de la Luna or Huaca Cao Viejo), the Chimor Kingdom (The largest state in late Andean history before the Kingdom of Cusco conquered them and then swallowed up the rest of the region as the Inca Empire; The Chimu captial, Chan Chan, was the largest city in Prehispanic South American history, with 60,000 denizens), etc.
I was going to do a 4th one, which is the myth that the Conquest of Mexico and Peru or the collapse of Mesoamerican and Andean civilization and the complete colonization of the Americas was inevitable, but I already left an even more massive comment(s) on the "What if the Aztec Empire survived?" Whatifist video you can see here: ruclips.net/video/52yu6hA_k2Y/видео.html&lc=Ugz9cPOGU-Iwg802o2l4AaABAg which goes into that, and frankly I have other stuff to do, so I'll leave it at that.
@@MajoraZ do know RUclipsr who makes mesoamerican video called azlan?
@@ronjayrose9706 You mean Aztlanhistorian? He makes good content, i'm in his discord server.
@@MajoraZ yep😊😊😊
I know this video was posted two months ago, but I only discovered this channel recently (although I wish I'd learned of it sooner).
I really like the way it works to present history with an authentisity-based, non-dogmatic lens--trying to speak the facts for the sake of speaking the facts. I really look forward to seeing more videos in the library.
Hey kid want some history Watchmojo?
Sure.
I wasn't disappointed
I as a Latin American confirm.
Educational systems sell us a totally idealized and idyllic idea of pre-Columbian cultures and empires.
As if they were almost the very Garden of Eden until the Spanish came to "Kill and Steal Everything" and not as if they were like any other civilization of the time that fell into the same dynamics of subjugation and slavery.
Even though Hispanism seems extremely autistic to me at times, I can almost justify it as an ideology in view of Indigenism that is sold from the educational system and many political formations.
All too many, even historians, have fully embraced Rousseau's and Jefferson's "Noble Savage". Humans don't vary that much in their tribalism and cruelty in comparison to recent times. It is just that literate societies wrote their atrocities down. Most of Rousseau's and Marx's concepts really are derived from the middle eastern myths of the "Garden of Eden" and the Greek myths of the "Golden Age." I point to the Tasadays, Samoans, even chimps, etc. as many a failed attempt for this quest to see how the world fell from grace and became evil instead of by many measures, with many waves of progress and decline, the world is improving.
The Tasaday is just a made-up tribe by the Ferdinand Marcos government.
@@madmarvshighwaywarrior2870 I know. That is my point. People will fill the need for this "lost innocence age" even fooling National Geographic.
12: Italy is an "artificial" nation which didn't exist before 1861 and it was better when divided, the South in particular
(SPOILER: it was the other way around)
We had 15 different types of meatballs and fought wars between ourselves to figure out which was best
Exactly
I rather have war outside Italy than going fighting Milan or Venice with my city
@@krimzonkamikaze8524 Rainy with a slight chance of meatballs
The Middle Ages were also an incredibly creative period in China thanks to the Song Dynasty, as well as in India; and the "Dark Ages" coincided with the "Golden Age" of Islam, in which that particular group of civilizations developed high standards of living and technology, but due to the rise of Sunni "Orthodoxy" and clericalism, it died.
I wouldn’t say it “died” per se. I would say Islamic civilization just recessed
@@ahmm9629 yeah maybe it was in life support.
That’s actually really interesting,why did the golden age regress?civil wars like most civilizations?
@@StickWithTrigger not really. It was a combination of factors, which included the rise of conservative Sunni clerics, the Mongol sack of Baghdad, the conquest of Al-Andalus by the Christians, and the mass killings of people who had other more progressive and rational religious ideas like the Kharijites and the Mutazila.
There are a wealth of resources written by many contemporaries who weren't Marxists who express how truly awful life during the early-mid industrial revolution was. I'm going to do the same and focus my comment on Britain in the industrial revolution here. People didn't move to the cities because life was better there, they moved to the cities because of bad harvests. The Hungry Forties (1840s) were called that for a reason. Not only that, but before and after that decade food was much cheaper due to the establishment of colonial empires and so farmers were losing their jobs anyway. Average life expectancy in Liverpool during the mid 1800s was 17! Marxism and Socialism didn't emerge because people were whining about issues they should have just dealt with, there were serious problems that Socialism offered viable solutions to and things got better (in Britain at least) throughout the 1800s not because rich industrial oligarchs thought "Hey, maybe we should make life for workers easier" but because of massive social movements and unrest; even the old aristocracy started backing some of the workers movements because of how bad things were! I feel like your points on industrialisation come from your political views of anti-socialism rather than actual historical accounts.
Thank you! I found it odd for urbanization to happen because people at the time wants to, They need to.