this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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I am a big fan of material essentialism. There are other theories though. Basically, europe was always a tiny unimportant peninsula on the coast of Asia. We had no noteworthy resources at all. Ad such it was never worth it to steal from us. However eve5yohe especially hat to deal with us constantly stealing from them and messing up their plans. Overtime that imbalance just snowballed and then we were best positioned to take over the new world.
So Europe was safe from having resources worth stealing (I would pushback on lack of resources, Europe was probably the best place to get wood for ships, emphasis on was).
That’s a good explanation for motive, but it does little to explain efficacy. Is there more to material essentialism that explains why it worked? Being a violent asshole doesn’t necessarily lead to being good at it. If that makes sense. Or maybe I’m missing the point.
The efficacy is the part that puzzles me.
There's also an element of luck. Gunpowder had been around for hundreds of years, but europeans were able to quickly develop it for military use and basically pulled off a timing attack.
well look what europe had in africa before 1880, if america hadn't been fucked with disease the europeans would've been stuck with coastal forts, some islands probably. the europeans carved africa up with machine guns
Don't forget advances in medicine like Euros learning quinine can treat malaria, before that they kept getting owned by diseases that they had no defence against
this is a popular misconception, malaria is not an african disease. it was almost everywhere, and eliminated in the first and second world in the 1950's. Quinine was also known and produced for malaria in the 17th century. the big medical advances in the understanding and treatment of the disease were contemporary to the scramble for africa, and not implemented/efficacious at the time
It is the same with any kinda barbarian group. If your land doesn't give you resources, you learn to fight to take them from your neighbor. Your neighbor learns to fight to fight you. At some point the fighting gets too hard to be worth it so you go find softer targets. I saw a cool chart of Mongol migrations that show just this dynamic. The toughest army taking thr good land and the others being sent into he world to raid softer targets. Half the dynasties of China were started in that way if I recall. Fighting being a widely applicable skill let's you take over places and then you declare yourself kings and pretend you aren't just fancy warlords.
England is one of the few sources of tin that was known about in antiquity. So they were important for bronze. So thr only natural reauouces they had were ship parts and weapon parts. Which explains a whole lot on it own really.