Why didn't Africa Colonise Europe?
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- Опубликовано: 26 июл 2024
- Racism DESTROYED with this ONE SIMPLE QUESTION
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Sources:
A. Maddison - "The World Economy Volume 1: A Millennial Perspective Volume 2: Historical Statistics"
Adam Smith - "The Wealth Of Nations"
C. K. Maisels - "The Emergence of Civilisation"
Chris Harman - "A People's History of the World"
D. O. Henry - "From Foraging to Agriculture
Gregory Clark - “A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World”
K. Sadr - "The Neolithic of Southern Africa"
Karl Marx - "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy"
Karl Marx - "Capital" vol. 1
Kasja Norman - "Bridge Over Blood River: The Rise and Fall of the Afrikaners”
Kenneth Pomeranz - "The Great Divergence"
Max Weber - "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism"
P. Beaumont - www.theguardian.com/science/2...
P. Ranlet - "The British, the Indians, and Smallpox: What Actually Happened at Fort Pitt in 1763?"
www.jstor.org/stable/27774278...
Renima, A. Tiliouine, H. Estes, R.J. - The Islamic Golden Age: A Story of the Triumph of the Islamic Civilisation link.springer.com/chapter/10....
Stephen Clarke - "The Industrial Revolution: Why Britain Got There First" www.historytoday.com/industri...
Thomas Carlyle - "On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History"
W. Frost - "European Farming, Australian Pests: Agricultural Settlement and Environmental Disruption in Australia, 1800-1920"
www.jstor.org/stable/20723068...
Yanis Varoufakis - "Talking to my Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism"
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Mozart - Dies Irae (acepella) arranged and performed by LonerBox
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Hello there,
It's only been a couple of hours and I'm already overwhelemed by your very big-brain contributions (and criticisms!) in the comment section.
I'm aware that condensing over 12,000 years of history into a 25 minute video inevitably means missing out or simplifying a few things, especially when you're answering an essentially racist question which ignores the fact that Europe had been colonised by Africans several times in history - the 8th century conquest of Iberia by the North African Moors to name just one.
I very briefly mentioned the existence of agriculture in Zimbabwe but didn't go any further with it as I felt it was a little separate from the main argument which was to show the value of environmental factors over cultural and genetic explanations. I've often noticed that the example of European colonialism is a very good foot-in-the-door argument for people who struggle with the concept of sociological explantions for social patterns. Consequently I might have downplayed the development of pre-colonial empires in Africa (of which there were quite a few).
For anyone who is interested in digging into the myth around Africa as a 'savage' continent, here is a brilliant video by satenmadpun that came out a few months ago: ruclips.net/video/cEYw5utsQs4/видео.html
In any case, I never thought I'd learn so much from reading a comment section so I appreciate any additional points or corrections anyone has to offer. Thanks for stopping by!
The internet is full of assholes with nothing positive to contribute to the world. Ignore them and keep doing what you're doing. It's needed.
A good fix would be changing the title to say Sub-Saharan Africa. I really love your videos, but as a Moroccan, it was jarring seeing the title and then watching the first few minutes where you asserted that no African civilization had colonized Europe.
Why is the British empire, from an island of swamps, bad soils and weather managed to conquer the globe? One overarching answer. Markets, Property rights and rule of law that were unmet in most of the world for some time. If your African tribal chief said to distribute your cattle to his sons and himself your incentive to grow cattle is pretty f£cking low honestly. But also entire civilisations prospects and success could be based on how close they were to the silk road which the British weren't to close to! But in all seriousness it's all about the incentives that propel the malnourished man out if his hole and build a farm, start a family and try out breeding horses to make stronger mules and shit. Some civilisations were just unlucky that they got stuck to tribalistic or feudal systems that turned them into repetitively thinking bees and ants while others were copying homework from other nations. It's not tied to race, as you mentioned one book that proposed China had a much more freer, market economy than most of Europe who were trying out Feudalism and were doing quite well off. Just maybe one point that you didn't point out to or mention which would make your video more educational if you're into something like that. Overall a good video and I wish you a good day/night depending on your location. Bye.
@LonerBox Found your video as better than the alternative who racial hypothesis,but I am sorry to say man it fails in answering the question part due to the hypothesis itself,that being the environment being the key role in the divergence and also you fail to understand Africa’s technological and societal history not just in the north but in the Sub Saharan region.
I first and foremost recommend this video : ruclips.net/video/2OQmvRUdr3U/видео.html
But to summarize why this video has problems.
1.It sees sub Saharan Africa as a bunch of small tribal societies with no major civilization,you spend like 4 points and only by the 5th do you mention that Sub Saharan Africa(I will just refer to it as Africa) actually had at least Agriculture.In actuality Africa had a bunch of different societies with complex religious hierchies,from the Mali,to the Chadian Empires,the various empires of The Horn of Africa and my favorite the Empire of Benin.The fact is that Africa had discovered writing,skipped the Bronze Age to go to Iron dirrectly,buit massive and complex civilizations and structures,etc.For example the Portuguese wrote of Benin that it was a planned city with light streets,unheard in Europe in 1500’s,no crime,paved roads,etc.And today Benin’s walls stand as one of the longest recorded in history.You should have really just focused the video on the great divergence,and not on how societies emerge as it feels weird doing this whole lecture when Sub Saharan Africa went through all these in various regions.The only thing it did not of course was Industrialization.
2.Is environmental determinism,the idea that the environment determines human progress and is almost the sole desider in human development.There is huge problems with this whole theory,in the video you even use the pseudo geographical example used in Gun Germs and Steel of the whole continental axis theory.In reality Africa’s Northern and Southern and Western and Eastern Axis are not so disimilar from those of Eurasia,only being off by a few kilometers.And this is not enough to say that this is what lead Europe to become the dominant world power 5000 years after.Also you mentioned the Mediterranean Sea being the key of why civilization developed in the Fertile Cresent,when in actuality the local fauna and rivers and people living there had a lot more to do with that.After all why only 4 major civilizations developed closed to the region broadly speaking(Only one of them was really one central civilization,that being Egypt)?Only Egypt,Mycenae Greece and Crete, Anatolian civilizations and those of Sumeria.But at the same and close to similar times the Indus River Valley developed,China and even South America had a major civilization (Norte Chico). None of these were anywhere close to the Mediterranean,and Sumeria the cradle was not as close as Phoenicia,so why was Phonesia so backwards in comparison despite being closer to the Mediterranean.
3.You were actually so close to finding why,you said it at first,time,over time things change and new oppurtunities and technologies are discovered and passed on.In the case of Europe the great divergence was down to colonialization of the America’s.At the time they arrived the people there were not inmune to the diseases and many of the ruling empires were long gone and replace by newer and less stable ones, one of them the Inca were even in a civil war by the time of European arrival.The easy conquest and exploitation of the region developed the engines of the capitalist European economy.It is no coincidence that Europe never colonized Africa and Asia until many years after they colonized the Americas,200 years in fact.
@Capitalist Crusader.1 Doubt,Britain was a feudal country for most of its early colonial history,and it dint conquer the globe by making good tea cups,it did so again via colonialism.They were able to conquer easy territory in North America and beat France to its land claims and later use this land in North America to expand to India and later Asia and Africa and discover Australia and also easily exploit that.And Britain had again a feudal and half slave economy for much of this early period and when they became more capitalist by the 1700’s they had a very protectionist economy.
www.jstor.org/stable/2123049
'Cause we are living in a material world and I am a material girl.
-Karl Marx
I first heard this line from NPCs in the Witcher 3
@@oghenerukevwekofi7976 I first heard it from Stranger Things Season 3 it was.... weird
Karl Marxonna
u a chillax man, Vogue
@u a name them.
Has anyone ever noticed how whenever people speak of the British navy they show paintings of Dutch ships?
Probably because the British Ship of the Line was based on the Dutch Man-of-war so the ships look similar in paintings.
Because we destroyed their fleet and stole the Royale Charles.
Whats the difference? (Sincere question)
Well the dutch were great too
Weren't those the Danes?
Ngl i didn’t expect the comment to be as non-racist as they are. maybe there is hope for the world. Thanks for not being idiots you guys.
Lowkey I came here looking for racist comments and on one hand I'm disappointed but on the other I'm pleased
Not to be racist, but Asian people BWAAAH.
@@beetzgaming5836 Ummm
BEETZGAMING 😐
@@beetzgaming5836 I suspect it to .be a joke but it sucks 🤢
Why do people expect technology to develop at exactly the same pace everywhere on the planet? It would be a bit of a coincidence if that happened considering humans have been here for 200,000 years. There's got to be at least enough chance that factors in for there to be a few centuries leeway, at minimum, even if you ignore environmental and geographical factors.
Why do people expect IQ to develop at exactly the same pace everywhere on the planet?
@@TSEliot1978 Technological development is a lot faster than evolution. All human populations are practically identical biologically and haven't changed that much in the past 5000 years. Genetic exchange throughout the human population happens at a faster pace than significant genetic changes occur, whereas the same can't be said about technology (at least until recently with the advent of more advanced communication technology). So we've historically seen more technological and cultural diversity than genetic due to the different timescales involved.
Evolution has been taking place gradually for tens of thousands of years, whereas things like agricultural revolutions and the development of writing have only happened sporadically and just a few times, before spreading before they have the chance to be developed independently in other places.
Because Egypt was so advanced..why wasn't the rest of Africa
@@andrewforrest3969 Open some books and do some researches on the subject. In the meantime, don't spread your biased ideas that can trigger racism, intolerance, hatred and violence. Thank you.
@@andrewforrest3969 Zanzibar was pretty advanced and not due to Arabic influence
Me in history class: *audible snoring*
Me watching YT video about history: 👁 👄 👁
Honestly
imagine if we learned history like this when we were kids
An education is something you give yourself after you get out of school.
👁 👃. 👁
👄
@Tyrelle Humphreys that's the point of the quote Tyrelle. School is just about information and conditioning humans into becoming workers.
The quote is Mark Twain, btw.
Also brain size is not indicative of Intelligence, anyone with an ounce of time to spend three seconds looking it up is that neuron density is what matters
Neanderthals had bigger brains but uhh they’re dead.
Body and Brain Mass ratios matter tho
Somebody tried to convince me that dogs are smarter than cats because of bigger brains. Cats have 4× the neuron density.
Bigger brains allow more room for neurons.
Brain size is highly correlated to intelligence a similar Google search will show you numerous studies that that show this.
Didn’t the moors colonize Spain for like 700 years
Yep
He addresses that on his pinned comment
Then the Spanish got back in and ruined the land.
Sillies.
Still, Spain is much nicer than Morocco, Algeria or Tunisia.
@Esther A so u think
sub-Saharan Africans have no Neanderthal DNA. Thousands of years later Africans have yet to accomplish anything. No one is trying to immigrate into any non-white countries. It is what it is.
I always used to think of agriculture as an unambiguous leap forward in societal living standards, but now that I think about it it was a pretty garbage way to live for centuries until we developed better technologies to make it actually worthwhile. The loss of diversity in diet and facing starvation every time the weather, soil and pest conditions weren’t perfectly right for specific crops to grow would’ve left people with pretty bad health and life quality. Heck, my parents and grandparents were poor European farmers and their health was pretty shocking because of their limited diet. Humans evolved using a hunter gatherer lifestyle for their entire existence so it makes perfect sense why many cultures would instead choose to perfect their knowledge and ability in scavenging the land instead of making a radical shift towards agriculture.
I spent some time with a local Australian aboriginal community and the amount of collective knowledge they have on how to use the land is staggering, I think there are things we could learn from them instead of trying to force every environment to fit our very specific agricultural methods and often messing up the soil and climate as a result. I think it’s pretty arrogant to think we have nothing to learn from people who have survived on this land for 40,000 years.
If you consider the fact that humans originated in ethiopia, africa did colonize europe
That means europeans just want its land back
@@kaassaus4230 😂
It's funny how Ethiopia wasn't colonized up until before WW2 by Italy
Nakaya they weren’t colonized, they were occupied. The Italians invaded and fought for like 6 years but never got past the northern part of the country
@@NakayaAvarlina they had my country eritrea colonized but not ethiopia
So in other words:
“It’s the geography, stupid.”
But does geography affects culture?
Ie
Britain didn't start having a castle level civilization than rome. They were "barbarians" until rome forced the separated tribes into one.
So they borrowed the culture from rome then improved on it.
But why didn't they started it?
I guess different geography have different incentives/priorities for the people that live in it.
Ie
Mediterranean-like geography is good for rising civilization
While Britain is better for trades? (But harder on creating from scratch?)
Edit: Philippines for example have the muslim dominated culture in the south
Lots of islands/water
Got some crops (and rice terraces)
Got the trade routes with Japan/China/India
Still. I don't see preservation/cultural influences as famous as say the ming dynasty or whatnot
From my understanding. Pre-colonial Philippines have communal focused towns. Not individualistic (nuclear) family but communal which greatly reduces the growth rate since the mentality of "everyone's child, everyone's responsibility" is present (although I forgot if it's the whole Philippines or just that region)
So in this case it's culture that killed the ("colonial/civilization potential?") of the Philippines?
Or maybe the communal towns I just mentioned are a result of strong typhoons which requires community level cooperation to rebuild what they lost efficiently
We even got a unique word for it
bayanihan: community level cooperation
And why the houses are usually a kubo where they can relocate just by a bunch of the villagers helping to carry said house.
@Tejas Misra Sort of, not really. After Britannia was abandonned as a province by Rome around AD 410, Saxon Piracy became increasingly problematic, and various tribes hired other Saxons as mercenaries to protect the province. Some of these Mercenaries settled, and other Saxons came as conquerors.
Subsequently a series of petty kingdoms popped up, leading to a period known as the heptarchy in what is now England (this is where Game of Thrones gets the seven kingdoms from).
These seven kingdoms don't unify. The Northern kingdoms fall to Danes (Vikings). The Christian South is unified by the Kingdom of Wessex. After Alfred the great eventually veat the Great Heathen Army, England was unified. Wales was conquered later, and It would be centuries before the King of Scotland unified with England, and even longer before the union became solidified.
As for castles, they dont just pop up because theyre on a tech tree. Britain had forts and castles all the way back to the neolithic. But in the late Iron Age the Hill forts where mostly abandonned because they weren't needed.
If there isn't a need for fortifications, they'll not be built, or become abandoned.
@@NicitoStaAna Sorry dude but you're off on a few things here.
Britain has had fortifications since arguably the Neolithic, and certainly since the Iron Age. The Iron Age Britons had Hill Forts all over the island, built variously from stone, timber, and earthworks. These where abandonned over a century prior to the Roman conquest.
This was simply because they weren't useful at that point.
There is no such thing as a "castle level" society. You build castles when you need them, and you use what you have available.
When the Romans turnt up they built forts to subjugate the populace, and once the locals had started to Romanise, many of these forts attracted orbiting settlements (vicus).
You then see a period without much extensive fortification until the Saxon Pirates become an issue in the 2nd and 3rd centuries, and the Saxon Shore line of coastal defenses are built.
Now if you mean "why wasnt Britain building stone and mortar architecture before the Romans?" Then the answer is again, geography, and cultural ecology.
Britain is cold and wet. Masonry does not fare well in these conditions and is prone to damp, and is dificult to keep warm.
The Iron Age style Roundhouse persisted for many centuries after the Romans brought over the ideas and infrastructure to build stone houses and stone fortifications.
Why?
Because Roundhouses are fucking dope in British weather. The roof is easily kept waterproof with mimimal maintenance, which Tiled roofs aren't. They're cheaper, they easier to heat, theyre quicker to build and they naturally keep pests out of the roof simply by having the fire on.
And to focus more on fortified structures, 11th century onwards style classic castles are a shit load of effort and totally aren't worth it for a bunch of farmers whose enemies don't have siege engines. A steep ditch and a timber faced revetment are very good at keeping the bad men out unless they have technology from 1000 years in the future.
L Cincinnatus it’s not evolution. Evolution takes far longer to change biology than the scale we’re talking of
L Cincinnatus ugh, I hate dealing with fucking race realists. First of all, that’s not what ironic means. Secondly, no one here said that evolution stopped happening. We’re saying that the reason different cultures developed differently is because of geography and environment, not genetics. For genetics to be influenced by any significant amount, one needs a far longer time span than any human civilization has existed. This isn’t even a lefty argument, this is fucking rudimentary evolutionary biology.
The most persuasive argument I've heard for the great divergence is "the discovery of ignorance", ie the discovery that humans do not know the answers to the most important questions. The catalyst for this being the Colombian exchange, when Europeans were confronted with the existence of 2 massive continents that were neither mentioned nor predicted in any previously sacred texts.
Africa did have empires, states, cities, agriculture, technology etc.
Just wanted to put that out there.
Not strong ones tho
@@barbossa1384 Doesn't even make sense in this context but I'll just say they were plenty strong for their time
Splash The strongest of most civilisations actually
@@QUEEN-uh2hq they weren't stronger than Arab empires, search up battle of Yarmouk etc, how they took on 2 great empires of the time, Arabs defeated the mongols, the byzantines, the crusaders, the romans as examples
Splash Arabs were originally black Africans who had migrated and intermarried hence why a lot of black Africans claim that they come from Mesopotamia. The Egyptians inspired most of the modern day technology we have now and so did other groups and tribes: Nubian, Edo, Oduduwa, Zulu etc. African tribes have won and conquered many empires but we just don't hear about it in the history books because our history has basically been wiped out and that's why everyone takes us for granted, forgetting that we used to rule the world. We've had the richest and most prosperous civilisations (like the richest man to have ever lived was a African man) but we just didn't achieve that through war and bloodshed.
If the """"classical liberals"""" of the internet would read Adam Smith they would take him for a leftist
No dude im just a centrist who thinks the left has gone to far. Yes I think the white race is being exterminated by the third world, why do you ask?
@@lorenzoeli2939 I was meming. Im a leftist, calm down.
@@vezvez1152 gg, my bad thought you were serious
@@lorenzoeli2939 My fault if it was bad satire.
Vez Vez Satirising those views is near impossible these days lmao. I’ve seen people unironically saying pretty much exactly what you said. FeelsBadMan Nazis ruined satire
Historians have since argued it was because they have guns😆🤣
that wasnt for a while. and asia invented gunpowder
@@itherael117 What are you even talking about?
@@yerhing6406 the comment about guns what the fuck else?
yer hing They were saying that for the majority of Europe’s existence they did not have access to firearms.
@@itherael117 What 'wasn't for a while'? The guns? The Afrikaners clearly had guns and the Zulu not.
Would also like to mention the fact that Africa lacked the close extremity to other advanced civilizations like Europe and Asia.
It was much easier to travel across Europe and Asia and thus there was so much cultural exchanges between them.
For countries on the South of the Sahara, it was much harder to meet other people.
Other parts of Africa, especially those near the Mediterranean were substantially advanced because they were much closer to other advanced civilizations.
I've learned bits and pieces of this throughout the years. Thank you for explaining it all so cleanly!! This is my new favourite channel 🙌
Personally I think it was because of the fact that Europe, Asia, The Middle East, and North Africa were closer to each other, and so ideas and advancements that were invented in those regions were usually spread around by war and trade, and were built upon by the others. Basically having 4 smart kids trying to share with and compete with each other, is always more productive than having just one smart kid doing his own thing.
Also, the notion that African people are inherently more or less peaceful, however, is pretty dumb. Because ideologies like war, colonialism, and slavery were still heavily practiced among the various tribes in Sub-Saharan Africa, and are sadly even still being practiced today. Remember that most of the slaves in America were sold, and not stolen.
They were stolen during slave raids on neighbouring and or enemy lands/tribes or kingdoms for more info click here:https: //m.ruclips.net/video/dZDW17FEWMs/видео.html
@@angellos5552 Actually most of the slave raids were by the middle eastern nations, and other African tribes with an urge to dominate. Unfortunately most people aren't aware of the Arab-African colonisation and enslavement. I actually live in Nigeria. They teach the Transatlantic slave trade extensively here as it was a major point in our history, and it was a big boost for the economy of many African nations. If you go to a famous Old slave port region called Badagry, you'll see the places where the slaves were auctioned and sold. As well as the point of no return, where they were drugged to forget their way home. Not to mention the well documented fact that a lot of Africans kept slaves long before the arrival of the West. This is common knowledge where I live. In fact, a lot of slavery and human trafficking by other black Africans and Arabians, still goes on today in our part of the world. It's a very big problem here. But nobody seems to be doing anything about it.
Basically we humans are all the same ,bunch of cunts swinging our dicks around.
@@chlorine5795 yep
Cognitive Dissonance not wrong
I've been researching this question for 4 years. Being biracial I was constantly trying to search for answers and I was always confused by this question. Thank you so much for the video. And I love the Bach in the background!
Thank you sooo much for doing these videos- they are amazing and very appreciated!!!! 💗
The answer was so obvious that you’d have to have an ideological bias to miss it.
I love this comment
Right, they didn't have boats.
why didnt they have boats@@maximus4765
Just a heads up, but Aboriginal societies were not hunter-gatherers, this perception was a deliberate attempt to make the European claims of Terra nullius more believable.
The book "Dark Emu" has more information on it if you're interested.
I really hope that within our lifetimes the narrative that even well educated, liberal people have about indigenous people is corrected. The notion that the way they interact with their environment might be a form of high technology (which is exactly how they usually think of it) that we have no analog for in the west will get you laughed at by almost anyone regardless of their politics.
@@methyod absolutely, even as we face a global crisis which can only be solved by embracing the sociology, technology and science of indigenous peoples.
@@AmbivalentDreams I honestly haven't heard this idea yet. What do you mean?
@@lockdownudein simply that indigenous groups often interacted with their environment in deliberate ways to produce certain outcomes, sometimes of great complexity; they weren't living in a state of nature. They engineered their environments.
methyod is there anything in specific that would be useful for us today?
My favourite explanation of the phenomenon is that people in Africa had everything they could ever need. There was no need to conquer other lands because they already had everything. Europeans didn't have this luxury and so it becomes our history.
That is historically inaccurate.
@@dantetempest9585 Iceland and the Northern European countries would gleefully disagree
Wow cool that its your favourite explanation but it has nothing to do with the truth, did u even watch the video?
AiyameXi I think they would according to my European history books because I live in Europe and I have studied history for enough years of my life, the beginning of industrialization led to most of the colonialism because they needed a lot of raw materials that they didn’t have
@@Happymind-happyworld. even before industrialization, Europeans were explorers because they had to find resources. They first set foot in Africa during the 1500 as traders to buy farm produce, whereas Africans didn't see any need for intercontinental trades, as they thought they had all they needed
I was wondering about this for a while. Thanks for doing the research and informing me.
9:45
Adam Smith wrote that 85 years before Marx penned his quote. Marx was taking Smith's side, not vice verse.
What's funny is Adam Smith and Karl Marx had a lot in common on their views of capital and the nature of economies if their work is actually read. But nobody actually reads the foundational texts of global ideologies, just like the people who don't read the Bible or Koran and argue about them.
Quick Fact:
Berbers and arabs technically did colonize iberia.
Berber is a slur, just fyi
@@poppyappletree1400 Forgot about that, my bad. I meant the Amazigh.
@@poppyappletree1400 Wait, really? Is it because it sounds too close to "barbarian", or is there something I'm missing? Anyways, today I learned
@@user-gc1ee2rw1o The amazigh is a slur since its associated with the word berber.
@ThisIsMyRealName Amazigh are indigenous to africa though. Also the same cultural differences between themand "black" africans are literally just as drastic as those amongst "black" africans.
thanks for the sources, looking forward to reading these
Thank you for telling this story
Jesus ! You are everywhere ! Lol
Go away plz
Or maybe you guys are everywhere!
You are EVERYWHERE!!!!!
He's one of the owners of utube
Trick question - our ancient ancestors migrated from Africa to the rest of the world.
The game was rigged from the start.
A man of culture I see
Lol dang
Lol😂
Which basically means one of two things:
1. Some Africans made the decision to stay put instead of taking the risk of migrating and that decision came to bite them in the ass generations later.
2. The Africans that stayed were physically superior and forced the weaker Africans to migrate and generations later their descendents came to even the score.
In both cases they became complacent.
Conclusion: complacency = inferiority, progress is only achieved by surviving strife. So much for equality being good.
NumbersGame good point
I love this video! I'm African American and it pains me that no one tries to use logic before jumping into extreme assumptions!
EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW THIS!
I don't understand... Do you originate in Africa or in America?
@@thegreatafrican3367 They're African American ie: it's not likely that they're Carribean and a descendant of slaves.
@@waqasahmed939 Correction: descendants of indigenous enslaved people. The people did not begin historically as slaves, they were enslaved. Please understand the difference in your limited speech.
@@skyk2005 Except they're not "indigenous" If they were they'd be native American.
If however you're suggesting that they're descendants of people who are indigenous to the African continent, then that's a moot point because that's pretty obvious.
@@waqasahmed939 it is not a "moot point" when you refer to indigenous people of the planet as slaves. The people were enslaved. The oppressors such as Arabs and Europeans targeted indigenous people of the planet to fulfil their own selfish desires. These people were not slaves, they were scientist, doctors, engineers, etc. prior to enslavement. Thus, when you refer to an African American as a descendant of a "slave" it is incorrect and insensitive. Enslavement was not the beginning of African history/ancestry, enslavement interrupted the history. Language can also be used as a weapon which is the less obvious point being made.
Hi comrade! I watched this back in the summer but I was signed out when I watched so I never commented, but I'm signed in now and the video just came up in my recommendeds, so here's my algorithm comment! Also I'm reminded of how good this video is, gonna go share it.
This is a low quality tl;dr of Jared Diamond’s Guns Germs and Steel.
Agree. Quite a bit of plagiarism here.
ruclips.net/video/kq6EuZj4axA/видео.html
Id argue the great divergence happened mainly due to the fact that Europe, while a fertile area of land, also had many geographical boundaries like the Alps and many rivers and seas, which made it virtually impossible to create a stable empire which stretched across most of the continent for more than a few years/decades. In places like China or even the Middle East, you had empires which controlled extremely large territories which lasted for many centuries and were relatively stable for most of that time.
What this changes is that in Europe, rulers constantly had to keep innovating and outdoing their neighbours in terms of military and production capabilities just to survive, creating a very Darwinist geopolitical reality. Meanwhile in China or the Middle East, you had massive empires like the Qing and the Ottomans, which survived for centuries without having to do much in terms of advancement or economic competition.
My final argument comes from a more social one, being that following the High Middle Ages, which were almost universally known as a time for prosperity and stability across most major civilisations, the combination of the Mongols and the Plague had ravaged many cultures and civilisations. The dominant social order in most civilisations which succeeded the High Middle Ages were either a strong priest ruling class like in India or the Middle East, a strong bureaucratic order in China/Asia, however in Europe became a strong relationship with the burgher class and the crown, which led to Europe becoming a strong center of trade and innovation as the burger/capitalist class slowly outgrew the other feudal classes which created the conditions for pre industrial capitalism, which also paved the way for industrialisation. Another thing which could also be observed is that the places which eventually formed out of the aftermath of the Mongol invasions like China and Russia, both seemed to fall back into a strong flavour Conservatism, although the cause of why countries naturally become heavily conservative after beating back a foreign ruling nations is unknown to me, although it is known to happen quite often.
I agree with this the political climate in Europe is significantly different to china for example while china was pretty isolated and massive with the only threat being nomads and the mandate of heaven, europe in contrast is a small continent filled with several nations who always needed a leg up on each other resulting in exploration & colonization. I would also say that spices and the ottomans influenced the europeans to go west to the americas and south to africa to find another way to the spices for cheaper prices cutting the middle man. To add to this european mercantilism gave a focus on maximizing exports promoting tariffs and imperialism
If that was the case where Kingdoms got stronger because of the competition, The kingdoms in India would have become more advanced than the west . They had much more of a competitive environment. so I dont think that's the case
Crazy cow india for most of recorded history was ruled my a strong priest class, essentially draining the subcontinent of technological and cultural innovation. Strong religious classes rarely tend to innovate much, and not to mention india doesnt have the same level of inland seas and peninsulas going through them as Europe does.
@@broly425 Maybe the answer is that, for most of history, that was true, India was more advanced than Europe. I'd also argue that the idea of constantly stable, unified China is a myth that serves China's current rulers but is just not correct. China was ripe with national competition and it too was more advanced than the west. Most of Europe was a complete backwater until literally right after the High Middle Ages. Not to overlook the rich culture of Medieval Europe or anything (I, too, love Beowulf), but comparing them to India, China, the Muslim World, and parts of Africa, it's not even fair.
I feel like our sense of Europe as developed during the Middle Ages is more historical revisionism than anything else: Europe didn't destroy their own historical documents and heritage and had a massive, supra-national religious institution who kept good records. But as a whole, it was a completely fucked place to live. The Europeans were still in the Viking Age when China invented gunpowder. And we consider the Romans "European" now because they play heavily into European's view of themselves, but for most of Roman history, they had as much if not more to do with the greater Mediterranean and North Africa than "Europe," which to them was near mythological.
In my opinion, societal competition is valuable in making successful expansionist empires (as if that's some kind of good thing?). But only to a point. Complete societal collapse has never been good for empire building. The problem that China and India faced in the bad 13th and 14th centuries was complete societal collapse caused by the Mongol conquests, the scale of which can hardly be comprehended. Europe had the Black Death, sure, but it's effects were not nearly as devastating as the horror of the Mongols, even if the Yuan dynasty and Mugal empire eventually assimilated into their local cultures. Some might even argue that the Black Death's decimation of the lower class population increased the value (and therefore the bargaining power) of labor to the point where serfdom was completely broken, making way for the capitalist economies that drove the technological and economic conditions necessary for European colonialism. By the point when things in the East had mostly reset, the damage was done. Europe was a steam train (with steam trains) that was impossible to stop except by copying them.
Oh, and another point, Europe just so happened to stumble upon two continents of land and valuable resources occupied by a population who promptly, and horrifically, died to the diseases the Europeans brought with them (90% in 100 years by some estimates, and not to downplay the role of European atrocities either). That's a stroke of "good luck" (if one must call it that) that no other would-be colonial power had ever had before. Combined with everything else going on at the time that's a recipe for conquering the world. It feels stupid and reductionist to say "right time, right place," but in my opinion, that's the long and short of it. Had but a couple of variables changed, we might be complaining about the horrific atrocities committed by Imperial China when conquering England and the new world (or something like that).
@@Dahras1 Don't over simplify the fact that the Huns basically did to the European interior and the Western Roman world what the Mongols had done to China and the Middle East 1000 years later. The entire European Middle Ages was a direct result of Asian plagues and successive waves of ever more terrible Nomadic Stepp tribes pushing, burning and collapsing all social systems as they came. Europeans were plugged into the Asian trade routes, the Spice Road and the Silk Road in Antiquity. And had contributed goods into this economic ecosystem. Amber from Scandinavian lands worked their way down to Rome, Byzantium, and beyond. Timbers, furs, white slaves, jewelry, technical expertise of various sorts all were European exports before the Stepp invasions. And many of those things were returning slowly. Not to mention after the fall of Rome a great deal of highly skilled and educated people from the western Roman world immigrated to Byzantium in a giant brain drain, serving the Near East for another 1000 years. And those class of people again wandered West after the fall of Byzantium, germinating much of the Renaissance of the West.
Wtf this is so high quality. It's a shame it doesn't have more likes and views. Keep up the good work, comrade.
because you commented about 5 seconds after it was posted
@@antqueen2437 my bad
Comrade... larp cringe at its finest
@@Naalders How is that larp lmfao
K P liking your own comment is cringe
We learned printing and gun powder from Chinese as well as other things.
So what you're saying is 90% of inventions come from Europeans not 100%?
@@leifkhas7425 bruh tell me you're joking
@@leifkhas7425 this man is desperately clinging on to the idea that Europeans invented most things
@@ES-zk2so imbuzi lomjida
@@leifkhas7425 most of European civilization came from Asia
"Whatever happens,
we have got
The Maxim gun,
and they have not"
Keep up the content it’s been really good recently
Africa did colonize Europe, and Asia, and Australia, and the Americas starting about half a million years ago or so.
@@cringebleach905 Awesome, I love it when science overturns long accepted beliefs. Can you please post a link to the peer reviewed papers on the subject? I would love to get caught up on the latest information.
@@cringebleach905 big brain answer right here
@Õ_Õ Shy Guy it just depends on how far back you wanna go, this link says asia nearly 40 mya
www.sciencemag.org/news/2012/06/asian-origin-human-ancestors
@@redsie1 Thanks, and that is interesting. But while Afrotarsius may have been an ancestor of humans, they were not even remotely human, or even apes, They lived something like 38 million years ago. So this can't really be said to be colonization by humans, or even near humans.
while watching this I had to repeat the words he was saying twice in my head. Just so my dumb ass gets it lmao
same
Good stuff. You're an awesome content creator and I hope it grows!
Just a side note: You're using the British forces to portray the Afrikaners at the start of the video who also fought the Zulu's and Afrikaners. Not a big deal but thought I should mention it. Probably the lack of footage for battles against Zulus?
I was thinking the same thing. lol. Like, how long has Michael Cain been a Dutchman?
wait, I thought those were the Zulu's?
Oh no that's deliberate. A subtle way to blame the British.
...or maybe he's just an ignoramus who makes up half-baked theories and supports them with false or half-true evidence, out context, and thinks that sprinkling in unfunny boring jokes can save the audience from complete boredom... and fails.
I mean the afrikaners fought in the army too i think.
Although I never had any of the especially, um, reactionary ideas about this topic... I had always just naively assumed that maybe it had to do with Europe being more iron rich than a lot of other parts of the world or something, which is why they were pulled towards industrialization. This video was very informative though, and I feel like I learned a lot more about human history now.
Certainly in Britain there is/was (not sure if it’s still here) a huge disproportionate amount of coal which is why it started there and not say France.
That's specifically Birmingham where there's large deposits of coal and iron which makes different alloys of steel (and also nearby towns with different metals and mineral deposits). With that, there's also the Tame River which could be used for water power and combining them all together, you get a serious industrial center that's still going today.
@@lloydcoe9680 yeah although the infrastructure to allow such industrialization was in part due to its already established colonies
I would also say: Romans. They build a huge amount of infrastructure in form of good old roads. Damn, we still have alot of churches in europe which are older than most nations. I´d call that an advantage.
It's really a shame he mentioned water and ignored 16th century Flanders and 17th century Dutch Republic. That's were the 'protestant work ethic' blossomed, where mercantilism became modern capitalism, were freedom of thought and social mobility developped with all of it's effects on economic power, while guns were still not of the quality to overpower any opposition.
Both are also a great example of how unfavourable environmental conditions turn into an advantage. The swamps were only fit for sheep but there was water enough to transport the cloth produced by the sheep, so it became trade based rather than feudal. Besides the lack of desire to conquer these dire lands, they were also very unfit for authoritarian rule because a group of soldiers in armer are very vulnerable in such wet terrain. You also had a lot of land owning peasants because if you made it dry you owned it. A king telling 'you got this land from god together with me to rule you' didn't really go down well there, so the people were more free spirited which resulted in economic strength and protestantism getting a fighting chance.
The graph at 18.52 shows the enormous difference in GDP per capita in the Dutch Republic compared to the other countries, and allthough there was a lot of windmill powered industry, this was before the industrial revolution and must be down to capitalism and freedom rather than industrialization.
Wasn’t there something in the Bible that says don’t store food, only pick what you can eat straight away? Would that have been God trying to warn us about the evils of agriculture?
Gringa Maluca I think much of Genesis is the lamentation of the loss of the nomadic shepherding way of life to agriculture. God preferred Abel’s gift of meat over Cain’s gift of grain. Cities were places of evil, etc.
I think you’re referring to when the Jewish people feasted on mana from heaven, and God warned them not to store the food in order to prevent greed and gluttony.
To provide further context, God gave the Jewish people the manna because they were starving during their escape from Egypt.
An Artist Named Matthew that’s the one! I knew there’d be someone out there who could elaborate. I’ve never been much of a bible reader...or a reader of any sort, lol, but that part obviously stuck in my mind. So do you think there’s cryptic message there that relates?
Strawberry Shortcake hmm. I moved to a city and am now stuck here. I feel like it’s a place of evil.
There wasn't or isn't anything in Europe worth colonizing it. Never will be either.
Great. Keep thinking that.
Then why did they try?
@@vatoreflex477thinking what? Reality?
Purple lighting and skull and poured liquids: breadtube confirmed.
I was thinking that, but it wasn't a white liquid, like milk. So does that count as full breadtube?
@@willowarkan2263 HP sauce isn't white either...
@@Minihood31770 to be fair I don't know what HP sauce is.
Is davis a. A breadtuber??
@@markoboredguy6911 a as in aurini? I'm not sure I spell that right.
If only Hume was as fun to read as he was to look at
All looks, no talent.
They just didn’t feel like it
Bengenius Shapirium! I had to play that like 3 times just for the sheer brilliance! Epic!
Gotta disagree with the notion that Africa is longer that it is wide, that mostly comes from the Mercator projection: if you look on a globe Somalia and Liberia are as far apart as Egypt and South Africa. Now, having a huge desert, few rivers and less territories to exchange goods with explains your points nonetheless, so I agree with you anyway :)
but it is
It is longer than it is wide, just not as much as most people think
I checked, it's 8100 km long and 7400 km wide
Also natural barriers like rainforests and deserts (as you mentioned), played a major part in Africa being very disconnected.
Also in Europe what big forests there were have been cut down because of agriculture and further industrial development. So it would completelt fit the logic of the argument that those natural barriers would remain in Africa.
8:08 "the first people to start building ships where the Phoenicians [..] and the Carthagenians" - I think you missed most of the Bronze Age here.
He also missed that the Phoenicians and Carthaginians were the same people. Carthage was just a Canaanite colony in north africa.
But bronze age ships could hardly cross the entire Mediterranean, they were majorly built for navigating in rivers. In the late bronze age, egypt and some proto-greek civilizations already traveled around eastern Mediterranean, but not very effectively.
Plus, this video doesn't tries to dig deep into world history, so it sure would have some "simplified" stuff (but it doesn't mean ppl can't point out it's mistakes, they just have to be gentle lmao)
But yea, phoenicians and carthaginians were broadly the same ppl...
@@macosta3499 Sure the first ships were worse than later ones, but they still were ships. By your logic the sentence "The first people to start building ships where medieval" could be right because the ships before that were unable to cross oceans and the earlier were not very effective at transporting cargo or whatever. Or "The first people to start building ships were modern" because sails are not very effective.
@@orderofazarath7609 But the point is the ship's purpouse. They were able to navigate in the sea, but were not built to it. But phoenician ships were.
@@macosta3499 What I learned looking this up is that the Phoenicians were around earlier than I knew (2500 BC). However, Minoans still beat them to it (3000 BC).
Yeah Bronze Age ships preferably stick to the coasts, fear bad weather and aren't used at night, but they are ships navigating the mediterranean nonetheless. Minoa was not a river civilisation and ships were not using the optimal routes, but they are still ships on the mediterranean.
But I guess this expert opinion (wiki quote) lists Phoenicians as the first "true" ship builders and is to blame: "By 1200 B.C., the Phoenicians were building large merchant ships. In world maritime history, declares Richard Woodman, they are recognized as “the first true seafarers, founding the art of pilotage, cabotage, and navigation” and the architects of “the first true ship, built of planks, capable of carrying a deadweight cargo and being sailed and steered.” "
Sure.. the first "true" ship builders in 1200 B.C., but we get a "proto ship" by that definition in 2500 B.C. with the Khufu ship. I guess that one is a 40m long big boat by some definitions.... oh well.
Ok we just forget they were empires and kingdoms in Africa like Nubian kingdom, Abyssinian Empire, Mali Kingdom, the Ajuran Kingdom and many more, so u just have to believe what suits u and Africa is different from Americas and Australia because Simply Europeans didnt succeed to take Africa like Australia or Americas but ruther they were faced by organized civil stand and get their sovereignties back with their blood, just reminding thats all😅
Asimova2000 TheOne Well obviously English is not my native language, secondly if they are made of mud why are there still be seen today after thousand of years, Lol u have to believe what u like but truth is out there and i know were this is going so, in every continent there were those who builded empires and those who lived in basic clan system and Europe is not out of this list too.
You do know that the biggest reason there was no real resistance in australia and the americas was the fact that disease wiped out most of the populations there? Essentially any resistance was non-existent until the children of the colonizers started to pursue their own independence from the mother countries. Expect for Haiti, the only place where the slaves were able to overthrow their masters.
Asimova2000 TheOne
Wrong
Nubian Empire: www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2016/11-12/ancient-egypt-nubian-kingdom-pyramids-sudan/
Abyssinian/Ethiopian: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Ethiopia
Ajuuran: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajuran_Sultanate
All made out of stone
What’s the name of that empire from Africa that invaded Europe besides Mali 🇲🇱 and moors , probably Egypt or kemet
White folks are just a baby 👶 to this world... the youngest race (6kyears) vs melanin folks that been on this planet for over 100 million years if not billions. Now they think they are over everything on this planet..... didn’t they read the Bible..... let us make mens in our image... not no pale skin, frail looking, with teeth matching their skin tone.
Very interesting. You touched on a lot of really important and major arguments I’ve seen for this question. I imagine a range of these factors play a role such as rivers and arable land which constitute 90% of Indian and Chinese land, and being prominent in Egypt and Mesopotamia explaining why these civilisations first achieved a necessary food surplus that allowed food security and further innovation. I am unsure of the exact amount of much of Africa’s arability so cannot be sure to what extent this is a factor. Furthermore, the idea of Africa being vertical is interesting as it would restrict the ease at which empires could expand and geographic boundaries such as the Congo rainforests and the Sahara and the Ocean’s would make access to Eurasia much longer, more difficult and expensive hindering the speed and ease at which technological innovations would be exchanged. It may also be the case that the limited contact until the Industrial Age meant African kingdoms were not under the same threat that Middle Eastern European and Asian societies were to each other - for example if one state didn’t quickly innovate it risked being conquered by its rivals. While the same pressures likely existed between African states the lack threat from more military developed states may have hindered the development (the need to develop) domestic arms productions and military reforms which occurred in the other regions. Interestingly it seems similar things occurred in China some what with guns which despite being invented in China hardly developed beyond match locks while in 200 years Europe and the Middle East significantly innovated this technology and returned to China with far better weapons. This may be due to the different pressures since China faced few external threats with Japan being isolationist, Korea a puppet state, while no significant powers able to challenge it or threaten it were near. The only external threat were central Asian and Mongolian horse men who used fast moving hit and run attacks which when considering early guns were slowly firing requiring initially two people would be ill-suited for this threat. By contrast European and Middle Eastern civilisations faced heavily armoured troops (far more resistant to most projectiles) and heavily fortified castles both of which guns proved very effective at combating. (Such as the case with the Ottomans who used them to destroy the strongest walls -arguably - ever erected the Thedosian walls projecting Constantinople.) This seems to have lead to an incentive and necessity for European and Middle Eastern states to innovate (as Spain and the Ottomans did) or die (as the Malumuks did). Guns were extremely important first against the native Americans and later African states. Guns was thus likely an important factor.
Another important factor was likely the Caribbean which I believe Pomaranz mentions. First the pressures of other states and the rising costs of modernised and larger armies and motivated the need to reforms (early state capacity building which was crucial). The incentive to profit of the New discovered (to Europe) Americas pushed European states to capture territory from the natives and from each other the former made easier by the use of guns and the massive destruction caused by diseases and some cases the capture of leaders (to destabilise states). The America’s were a huge source of income especially the Caribbean where the smaller area (constituting less administrative costs) and providing a source of highly lucrative cash crops helped fund European state building, military build ups and modernisation and latter industrialisation. Europe’s proximity to the sea made this easier than the Middle East or China with the Ottomans lacking the same resources. China and perhaps to a lesser extent India also as mentioned I believe by Pomaranz are better viewed as continents who lacked the same need to trade and attain resources externally as their economies were so large and resource rich they rarely at least early on lacked the same pressures to expand beyond their borders while European states often lacked resources and the wealth needed to both fight rivals and supply their states growing needs thus while China did interact with Asia and east Africa it did so only for tribute such as the expeditions of Zheng (misled likely) and while trade did occur it was less essential and China never attempted to control these states in the same way Europeans did. China likely could have industrialised if it had the same needs for goods or external threats but it lacked both.
Individuals such as James Watt used money made from the Caribbean (which was typical of many early industrialists) to fund innovations which the resources themselves such as cotton incentivised the need for new technologies such as the cotton spinning factories. Industrialisation thus was itself heavily reliant on the Caribbean and lesser extent Asian trade (incentivised by the discovery by Europe of routes around Africa, the desire to avoid costs of ottoman Middle men and the demand for these goods also for Europe which of course first motivated expeditions which found America.) It is also the case that Britain in particular was unique in that a lot of coal (essential to early industrialisation) was found near the surface in great quantities unlike in many other places (such as China) making its use easier.
I certainly do not claim to be an expert (I leant most of my history stated here from my undergraduate degree and the assigned readings such as Pomaranz) and I need to and would love to explore far more African history in much greater depth. If I have missed anything here please let me know and if anyone has any good reading especially on African history please let me know.
The video was very good though you should turn your lights on and maybe add some interesting posters or maps to your wall. If your looking for ideas for videos I would suggest state capacity. It’s a very understudied idea and has only been popularised since about 2005 by most mainstream institutions such as the world bank who previously advocated ideas which were internally opposed (though not intentionally) to how states ought to develop. I would be happy to recommend sources to anyone interested in this subject and I would argue the absence of capacity and the endorsement of the Washington consensus for so long might explain why many states especially in Africa have developed more slowly and faced more issues such as with corruption than those in Asia - alongside other factors such as the resource curse.
Thank you to anyone who took the time to read this I very much enjoyed both watching the video and writing.
I would say most African states were at least medieval in terms of structure and technology. There are of course the obvious ones, Aksum and Mali, but even the Zulus lived in permanent towns, had metallurgy, and relied on agriculture for both sustenance and trade. They certainly were not ‘hunter gatherers.’ Good video though.
Yeah his treatment of Africa and Native America as the same technology wise kinda ruined the whole video.
@@lloydcoe9680 The native Americans also had large cities like Cahokia and Tenochtitlan, they even had the largest in the world. The problem was that it took a lot of human labour to keep it running. The point of the video is that these people didn't have access to what the Europeans and Asians had, specifically a lot of land and a lot of trade, so they aren't just "stupid" or "backwards", anymore than it would be fair to call you stupid for failing to set up a civilisation on a tiny island in the pacific.
PlatinumAltaria You’re putting words in my mouth. I wasn’t calling anyone stupid or making any sort of insult or demeaning comment. I was simply saying, native Americans were less technologically advanced than Africans of the same time period. For all the impressive astronomy the Aztecs and mayan did with their limited tools, they were not technologically equal.
And I understand Africa is a huge place with many different cultures and societies with different levels of development. And that those generalisations I made will not be true all the time, however for the most part Africa was more technologically advanced.
PlatinumAltaria And I think it was actually only the largest city in the Americas and then sixth in the world. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teotihuacan
Indigenous Australians DID have agriculture. There's a lot of evidence for fields of cultivated native plants. There was a native grain belt which was used for baking. There's a popular book called "Dark Emu" which goes over a lot of this evidence.
Dark Emu has been debunked since then.
@@sendmorerum8241 Well, that's what the reich wing claim. Not so sure they are right about that.
"to stress or distress quando your taxes
to losers cornstarch 3-space death to
the desk asaurus"
Thank you, YT auto-captions, for the lyrics of the outro song!
Good research and video, it reminded me of the economic history courses I took in college.
Thank you for your video, I like the honest and logical take you took to it. Just a quick correction: I think the majority of African groups were not hunter-gatherer societies, rather most of them were farmers. The majority of the Bantu groups are farmers who keep livestock, along with growing things like corn, which is a staple that came through Portuguese trade, and others which predate Portuguese trade like older more traditional staples such as sourghum and some I do not know how to name in English. Pretty much hunter gatherers were a small minority in the plethora of large tribes, nations and kingdoms. However, I very much concur with the geographical theory put forward.
I can tell you that in Southern Africa the majority of our groups were nations in their own right. However, a consistent problem most nations had were fragmentations into smaller groups. This can be seen with the Zulus during the mfecane, bringing rise to other kingdoms like the Xhosa, Ndebele, Swati, Shangaani and other Nguni groups. Another closer to home example is the fall and abandonment of the Mwenemutapa (Great Zimbabwe) empire, and the subsequent rise of the Rozvi empire (centred at Danan'ombe ruins) which then fragmented when the last Rozvi changamire was killed. Fragmentation of empires and a seeming struggle to hold large empires for a long period of time was a big issue and one I think the geography has a role in.
However, it seems in West Africa they did not share this problem as much.
One thing I am convinced of however, is that the fact that from Europe you had close access to 4 continents really aided as it was through the sharing of ideas and adopting of others knowledge and skills that allowed Europe to advance to where it was. It was be shortsighted to say Europe got guns by their own wits, it was through the “discovering” of black powder from South East Asia. That development, and technological advancement was through accessibility of other people's who can be exchange with easily. However, in Southern Africa, the Americas and Australasia, this was not so much the case. People were often somewhat isolated from very different people with completely differing ways of life -not to say that our cultures even on the continent are anywhere near the same, but the usual variations as could be seen between the British, French and Spanish.
It's like how someone said about having 4 smart kids versus one going at it alone.
Anyway, thanks for the video. I really like what you're doing! God bless!
Ethiopia extended beyond Africa into Arabia and they also industrialized to the point where they were able to build modern weapons in which came in handy in 1889 with the Italians try to colonize Ethiopia little to the Italians North Ethiopian army was stocked with brand new berdan and Mosin rifles from Ethiopia
The Somalis once conquered 2/3rds of Ethiopia
JHyun - he means southern Yemen that’s why habesha are mixed with arab
JakeMoranIsLame yes, and for a short period occupied ethiopia out of brute force
@@radicalfraction8570 is there an occupation thats considered peaceful? 😂🤣its war
@Archie Fitzpatrick beC4u5e ThE b1ble Is acCur4tE!1!1🤣
I've never watched any of ur videos and watched the whole way through👌
Awesome video
Also subbed👍
Africa didn’t colonies Europe but African empires did conquer many parts of Europe a few times
Ah yes, northern Africans.
You mean that one time the Umayyad Caliphate made up mostly of west asian (white) Muslims conquered parts of Mediterranean Europe? Lmao
@@unatco6554 ancient Egypt and the kingdoms of kush conquered a few parts of south east Europe. And umayyad elite who where mainly western Asian wbu where not actually the majority of the population where not the ones doing the conquering. It was the amazigh, Tataouine, Songhai, and Tuareg where the ones doing the conquering mostly black and and heavily mixed berbers not many caucasians fought in those armies the Songhai and Wolof empire also had a few strong holds in Iberia. And some of those empires got pretty deep into the continent the umayyad got into central France and the Egyptians and kush got as far as modern day Romania and Ukrainian.
@@rubinortiz2311 Ancient Egypt ruling class was majority indo-european people as genetic evidence shows. Same for the Umayyad.
@@unatco6554 key words ruling class. Once again those weren’t the guys actually doing the conquering it was blacks and heavily mixed Berber groups. Egypt has had many dynasties where the blacks where the ruling class. I can bake many black pharaohs.
"And Ancient Egypt"
-Shows picture of Brendan Fraser's character in the Mummy-
...and subscribed
Me before clicking this video:
"Temperate climate and happy coincidence of raw materials, innit?"
Me halfway through this video:
"Oh cool"
🦆
Quack
@@leehaiko3999 Knock Knock
@@DontreadPimpBoy who's there
@@leehaiko3999 Duck man
Watching this just kept me thinking about the science tree and expansion in Civilization 5
A 10 hour version of this video that goes into detail on everything would be awesome.
Bruh. Rome and greece were far from the firat civilizations. Ever heard of the late bronze age collapse?
Basically because Europe is the best spawn point in the game.
They all spawned from Africa though?
@@jimmcclain8677 yeah but once you capture a spawn it becomes yours
I think you mean the Americans have the best spawnpoint
No Asia is...
Thats why India and China always had such a huge population....
Asia & Africa has nore and resources than Europe...
The only reason why Europe is rich is because of colonisation and looting....
@@steverico3090 So basically it’s cheating to get off your ass.
Thanks for the uploads, interesting videos!
this video is criminally underrated
Mr. Box,
Africa had agriculture; africans were not adversely affected by European diseases in the same way as American tribes, if anything the opposite was more true; Africans were protected from the rest of the world by the Sahara which was functionally better at defense than the English Channel.
The title of this video was about Africa. But you got a bit sidetracked and talked more about the Americas and Asia. I understand that you are making the spawn point argument but I’m not sure if you think that philosophy (on any level) makes a difference or not.
Your most devoted servant,
Penismightier3000
Penis mightier 3000? That's a weird name
The weird thing about natural barriers is that they work both ways. The Sahara may have kept people from going to southern Africa, but also kept Southern Africans blocked in.
@@matts1166 But wasn't the Sahara much less arid not that long ago?
So you're saying that different populations had different outcomes because they adapted to different environments... Sounds like evolution.
Or adaptation
if this sounds like evolution, please read about memetics because you are right
it is evolution, the weak shouls bw wept
In part, Adam. Biological evolution however acts very slowly. Given relatively recent common decent, it wouldn't have done much. The vast majority of people survived through manual labor, so even if there hypothetically were differences, it would be among very few people.
Far more significant is just pragmatics. Boats are going to be invented in water-rich areas, not in deserts. Cavalry will be pioneered on the steppes. When such inventions create a major advantage, "superior" civilizations will arise predictably, mostly by geography. If magically we had swapped the populations of the sahara and Britain in 1400, it'd be the Saharans in Britain who went on to colonize much of the world... not the Britons in the Sahara.
There are however relevant aspects of memetics, cultural evolution, the evolution of ideas. For instance it's plausible that liberalism evolved in part from the reformation. We can certainly see major philosophers forming a chain of evolving ideas... and usually they'll live near the previous breakthrough. So getting major advancements in say Greece, Baghdad and Britain in their times of innovation is no coincidence. Just as we see today with some of the more prestigious universities. A next breakthrough is more likely to come from a student or friend of the last innovator.
@@Veryveryinteresting23 Different name same thing.
Lonerbox, you're such a good intellectual. What reading list would you recommend?
Great video!
You should have considered the population density (which is a consequence of geography) that had dramatically affected the surplus production after the agricultural revolution in mountainous regions like Persia,Afghanistan and so on
Adam wasn’t taking the side of Marx, but the side of logic and reason.
Damn, so close
He was being disingenuous, Karl Marx actually thought there was no difference at all between any human other than environment. And according to Chomsky is a concept that was attractive to many intellectuals because they see them selves as the ones moulding people. So Adam smith and Marx were not on the same side on this at all, the difference is small, but noticeable. Remember Adam smith is rarely read, but often misquoted.
@@Flow86767 the idea that Marx saw history as nothing but class struggle is so untrue that all you have to do to disprove it is read ANYTHING he wrote beyond the opening statement of the Communist Manifesto, and if you're talking about equality of outcome when you talk about his plan for workers, Marx was very much against the idea and thought it was impossible. I'm not necessarily trying to defend him but it sounds like you haven't really read or watched anything that talks in depth about his beliefs
@@Flow86767 Calling it simplistic is so ridiculous and shows you have no idea how hard understanding dialectics can be
Lachlan Phillips unfortunately we decide for ourselves what's logical and reasonable
You answered a question I never thought about perfectly and I’m so glad I watched haha
Thank you! This is what I'd have liked to learn in school.
If possible, the addition of captions to this video would be greatly appreciated. Then I could show this video to my Dad which would do him a lot of good. Great work.
I'm glad to discover that I've never been alone yapping about these theories, thank you.
Actually moorish Spain was an African colony
True, but I think he is actually talking about subsaharan africa
When racists say that no civilisations came out of Africa, they mean the areas with black people
Not really, because, the caliphate of cordoba became independent from the rest of the Umayyad and Rashidun caliphate pretty quickly, and the central power capital of the caliphate was in Spain itself = Cordoba.
@@minivergur yes. I was being a little pedantic about the title.
@@notallopinionswerecreatede4465 yes. That African civilizations that bordered the Mediterranean had no problems competing with European ones shows the importance of the sea.
Very good video and well researched loved it! I learnt a lot
Wow what a poorly researched video, Africa was comprised of poorly developed hunter gather societies??
As a man of Nigerian heritage I would suggest you read up on the feudal Yoruba city states. Or better yet the Sokoto Caliphate a highly organised emirate system with highly developed systems of governance and a literary tradition.
Finally I would point you to the Malian empire which surpassed Europe in terms of living standards, literacy, scientific advancement and wealth in the medieval period.
If you are going to tackle such a broad subject please do some decent research first.
Neon Hombré he never said it was
@@kearvenstheodore8479 0.55 onwards
"The story of the Afrikaaners is just one of many that shows us how Europe went through many stages of Civilization, whilst Africa remained the home of small hunter gather societies."
Really you are going to start resorting to lies now??
@john son Agreed, I largely have no problem with your statement. What I took issue with was the categorization of the whole of the sub-saharan region as being composed of hunter gather societies. I immediately think of the Central African Pygmies or KhoiSan (bushmen) of South Africa when I think of hunter gatherers.
Less developed folks exist on all regions, Gypsies or travellers in Britain, Sami in Scandinavia or the Roma in Eastern Europe. But no one uses them as an example of societal progress or lack of in Europe.
I deliberately ignored Afro-asiatic civilizations like Egypt and the Kush that were developed thousands of years before most Europeans even had anything approaching civilization. Even the ancient Greeks borrowed heavily from Egyptian advances and said as much themselves.
In fact take the Slavs, their name is believed to be the origin of the word Slave. They largely never developed independently themselves. In Eastern Europe their major cities until recently had majority German populations and Russia was centralised by the Kievan Rus folks of Scandinavian origin. In fact until the late 18th century, the Yoruba of Nigeria lived at greater population densities than they did!!
Also a another problem is that interestingly some African regions do appear to have experienced the same kind of depopulation seen in the Amazon post contact with Europeans. There are huge empty steps of what are probably rice paddy fields in the mountains of Cameroon.
Evidence of the Kingdom of Kongo which the Portuguese and Dutch documented, with large cities with straight streets disappeared entirely. Its cities were on a par with those found in the Nigerian region. In fact people in either region were aware of each other and traded goods.
Whether it was down to disease, slavery, the introduction of firearms or colonialism we will only find out with more research and archaeological studies..
And finally Sub-Saharan Africa was trapped behind the Sahara which while not an impenetrable barrier it certainly slowed down the exchange of ideas to the region.
At the same time the harsh environment in the region in terms of climate and disease again slowed development in the region. It is the reason why black Africans still exist. If the climate was benign we would have gone the way of the Native Americans. Life expectancy of early European colonials dropped to an average around 40 years even with their more advanced medical technology!!
The fact that we had organised states was another reason why we endured. The British took a full 17 years to conquer the Sokoto Caliphate in Northern Nigeria. Even with the Maxim gun the Hausa/Fulani Cavalry were still deadly. The reason why the Emirs still exist in Northern Nigeria was because the leaders of the region said if you try to destroy our political structures we will go to war again. So the British accepted rule by proxy with the Emirs answering to them..
@Awoken Truther Thanks.. Research is so important, I mainly post to get these facts out there nowadays.
I didn’t write this btw my friend did he sent this to me “My first problem with this video is his clear, complete, misunderstanding of what the 'first ancient civilisations' were. With a map he shows at 7:22 he shows that the 'first ancient civilisations' (which is how he addresses them earlier) were Rome, Greece, a civilisation in the Middle East (I'm pretty sure it's the Phoenicians as he talks about them later) and Ancient Egypt. Now most importantly these were not the first ancient civilisations. Those are referred to as the 'Cradles of Civilisations' and are Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Ancient India, Ancient China, the Andes, Mesoamerica. At the beginning of the segment 'Environment' he talks about it being important in where civilisations do and do not emerge. He refers to the argument made by Adam Smith in 'The Wealth Of Nations' that it was due to the Mediterranean that the first ancient civilisations emerged. The main problem with this? He was just wrong. It wasn't just the mediterranean that allowed civilisations to appear, it was any major water source (considering there were about ten involved with the cradles of civilisation I won't list them).
The second mistake he makes is to say that the Phoenicians were the first to invent ships. Although he is wrong (one google search and it comes up in big bold letters as the Egyptians) is that they were the first to build ships that could carry you across the sea. I'm not sure if this is correct however either way saying this is just deceptive.
The third mistake he makes is with Egypt. He says 'it was for this reason ' (water sources allowing trade and commerce) 'that towns and villages were never situated more than a couple of miles away from the Nile or from the break up of canals'. Egypt (except from those areas a few miles from the Nile or in around the occasional oasis) is a desert. An inhospitable, unliveable desert. The Nile's annual flooding turns the useless dead sand into some of the most fertile land in the world (because of the silt carried by the river and deposited). It's not that they decided living along the Nile was better it's that they couldn't live anywhere else. “
just wanted to see how you would respond to this
Gay
The important takeaway from this video, I think, is not the particular history but what determines its course. Your friend's explanation is more historically accurate, but it only furthers the ideological points LB is making. I think your friend says it best at the end when writing ,"It's not that they decided living along the Nile was better it's that they couldn't live anywhere else." This is the case for all of this geographically and materialistic interpretation of history; people dont act from the abstract, they act from the real.
Thank you for sharing your friend's comment.
Kleph Hi friend here, this was never intended to be seen so it’s purposefully nit picky as, especially as I had intended to write a more relevant one on the videos latter half and my problems with the video as a whole. However some of the things he said are either terribly written or blatant lies. If you search up ‘what civilisation invented ships/boat’ it’ll show, very clearly, it was the Ancient Egyptians.
Kleph Also could you clarify what the ideological points of this video are, I think we took away different things from watching it.
@@lloydcoe9680 The ideological point is that we should not understand the imbalanced power distribution of the world, particularly the recent success and hegemony of Europe, as resulting from 1) race, 2) culture (ideas), or 3) great men.
As for the historically inaccuracies, I really have no idea what LB was thinking. At 8:09 he says the phoenicians and Carthaginians were the "first people to start building ships." Given the evidence of hollowed out logs and rafts and other such vessels from 5kya or more, I assume he means sea-worthy vessels.
Encyclopedia Britannica writes: "Navigation on the sea began among Egyptians as early as the 3rd millennium BCE. Voyages to Crete were among the earliest, followed by voyages guided by landmark navigation to Phoenicia [...] According to the 5th-century-BCE Greek historian Herodotus, the king of Egypt about 600 BCE dispatched a fleet from a Red Sea port that returned to Egypt via the Mediterranean after a journey of more than two years. Cretan and Phoenician voyagers gave greater attention to the specialization of ships for trade."
Given how little overlap this has with what LB says, I think it's fair to assume that he incorrectly remembered this history and didn't think to fact check it. Nevertheless, if we use this new evidence to challenge his broader narrative, I think we find that this still bolsters his point: there was nothing special about Egypt except that it was on a navigable river. Technology developed to navigate it, because that's a useful ability. That tech then improved to the point they could sail in the Mediterranean and Red Sea. Nothing here is significant about race, culture, or great men. Does this help?
I've thinking what you thought for a long time..
water+freetrade+scarcity=advancement
but what's your thoughts on the island nations such as Indonesia and Philippines? if that's the formula for advancement, why did they lag behind?
thanks.
Your channel is fantastic! Just found it. Subscribed!
Dave Rubin gives me so many headaches 😭
Thank you for this video LonerBox!!
Ha I literally just subscribed because your Ben Shariro video got recommended to me
The first video I got was the Christchurch massacre
The Eyeball Zone sent me here.
Because they’re [redacted]
Short answer: they did, just did it so long ago no one remembers or cares
Facts that's how Europe got ppl they where colonized by africa but due to the lack of the sun there skin color started getting lighter over generations to fit the climate
Well Africa did colonise Europe, where do you think Europeans came from? The Moon?
No. Just because the first people in Europe were darkskin doesn’t mean that modern Europeans are from Africa.
@@draco_1876 modern europeans originated somwehere in central asia, agreed, but if you go sufficently far up in their heritage you will still arrive in Africa, as for all other people on earth.
@@monke8072 Sure, but it wasn't exactly colonization, or at least not homo sapiens on homo sapiens colonization
@@monke8072 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joke
So apparently the Moors, Egyptians, aren't African? While Greek and Rome represented the entirety of Europe?
Who wants to tell him?
Things like these tend to happen in an echo chamber 😂
@@lilachie - you're definitely doing your part to keep it an "echo chamber" by not actually presenting any counterpoints.
As for FErgersonn's question: you realize the Moors and Egyptions were also Mediterranean civilizations right? I'm going to assume you didn't watch the video at all, considering you're only making a surface level criticism of the title alone here.
@@KingBobXVIimagine being schooled about your own heritage 😂
@@KingBobXVI and I was just joking not everyone on internet is that serious
Marx: MATERIAL CONDITIONS
Dude, was that your cover of lacrimosa? That was fucking siiickk!!! Where do i buy???
Didn’t the availability of domesticatable animals also play a big role? Like in Europe they had more animal husbandry than other parts of the world?
It did. Most oxen died in SSA because of a parasite from the tse tse fly.
Answer: they did, several times over the past few hundred thousand years.
Exactly
That wasnt colonisation was it?
No they did not
@@jenzyk1302 it wasn't how Europeans colonized...they merged with the people and current society bringing their good and keeping the good there for the most part. European colonization pretty much decimated local population then they move in and "colonized" who's left.
@@TheCastedone pretty sure fighting Neanderthals still aint colonialism if thats what you were after?
When you were showing the clips of all the racist people you should’ve put in Leonardo DeCaprio’s servitude rant in Django Unchained lmao
And to think i liked the 1st dude because owned the libs and feminists, ooh silly me
shadman haha
KrustBuket thank you for being upfront and not like literally everyone else that’s like “wHy dO i ReCoGnIsE yOuR pRoFiLe pIcTuRe ?”
For someone who hasn’t done history since I was like 15, this was very informative (since then all I’ve focused on is science and English Literature). I have one question though that you might consider though for another video, in the modern era , due to it’s mass (and therefore mineral resources) and it’s location in the world and the rise of renewables (e.g. solar power) do you think Africa can be a superpower which would allow more equality across the world?
Good stuff! I see that you are a true student of history...actual and unbiased history!
It did... 1.8 million years ago. The moors also colonized spain for a few 100 years.
They didn t colonised u bloody idiot they invaded in 711
NO Pt Nah the moors did more good to a lot of Euro nations such as irrigation and how to clean themselves. The Greeks were the first to ever give Africans the name of Moorish. The Moors has a lot to do in the exchange of knowledge such as architecture, mathematics, and even medicine. They never “invaded” the euro nations if they made them better.
@@trufu9678 europeans had bath houses thousands of years before the moors arrived to Europe. And records show europeans in the medieval ages bathed regularly. All the moors did is rape pillage and enslave white and christian people.
The moors are not black
subscribe please yes they were... That’s why the Beethoven topic is poppin up... he was moorish
Also, you forgot to mention the Golden Age of India. That one gets ignored so often, by so many people. It really is infuriating.
Man, you cant expect a westener to know the history of india and afrika
The golden age of India wasn’t nearly good compared to 🇮🇶 or 🇪🇬
@Meforbleach hehe dont be too sure
Also golden age of Middle East. This one is the major factor that led to Renaissance.
@@dxdboy7418 Nah, they were even wealthier than Iraq and Egypt.
This was gold, cause it debunks some of the “normal” bullshit we gotta put up with ...( the number one explanation )
It also debunks the myth that the British Empire was somehow uniquely evil. It was just lucky and did what any other group would have done, given that same good fortune.
@Oboubia Decker Yes, it was evil at times. It was also virtuous at others. The Empire lasted for hundreds of years & rules over a quarter of the world at its peak. If you want to boil down all of that history to a binary & characterise it by it's worst excesses, that is up to you. I'd contend that's a gross simplification.
Think of it this way. Would the majority of people living within the empire have been any worse off under their native elites who were often more brutal, more racist & more corrupt than the British?
For the average man farming a small plot of land, does it really make a huge difference to your life who's sat at the very top of your nation?
Also, do the beneficial contributions of Empire count for nothing? Are many of the former colonies not far better off from having been part of the empire?
If you look at these questions objectively & take your emotional reactions out of the analysis, I think you'll be surprised by some of the answers you find. I'm happy to admit that colonialism was bad in many ways. Are you prepared to examine where it was good?
@@McMonkeyful all of the intentional positives of colonialism were only felt by the British and later the colonies which they had successfully massacred enough of the indigenous population and culture to then offload some of their own population into the land and obtain control. Railway systems in India left behind by the British is an example of an indirect positive felt by the Indians. But. Britain also caused famines that killed millions, Slaughtered thousands and before Britain arrived in India, India accounted for 25% of the worlds economy whereas afterwards when the British left it accounted for around 2%. The draining of trillions, exploitation of the people and land was the main reason for this.
Also Britain occupied land in Africa, in Kenya for example setting up concentration camps in the Mau Mau uprising and setting camps in South Africa too. They also left behind a power vacuum created by them that lead countries to be plunged into civil war over who should be in power further ruining that countries development in the future. All this while Britain indulged in the benefits acquired through murder, genocide and cultural cleansing.
Being able to see many different perspectives to this history is fundamental but also understating as a collective what matters most when determining the general nature of a particular aspect of history is equally as important.
A lot of the time I see people clouded by their romanticised view on British History leading them fail and see the people that are till today being tormented by the ravages of that empire
@@bed8587 Your views of Empire are as lopsided as the people who look at it through rose-tinted glasses (and I don't meet many of them nowadays). I see no point in engaging further in conversation as it's clear your mind is made up.
@@McMonkeyful Colonialism has no good aspects for the colonised daft twat. BED gave you an excellent response and your cowardly reply says all about you.
Really well researched and funny content! I liked it.