Why were Europeans able to create colonial empires?

In My Humble Opinion
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Two things before I get on to the main attraction:

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[li]I sure hope I posted this in the right forum.[/li][li]This is not a place to promote or discuss white supremacy. Take it elsewhere if that’s your intention, please.[/li][/ul]

Now that we are through with that: I pose this question to you, forum denizens. Why were the European kingdoms able to create these huge empires stretching over continents? The first and most obvious answer is that they were able to do this via technological superiority. But what allowed these people to seeming innovate much faster than many other places in the world?

My guess is: Europe is fairly suited for habitation by humans, and therefore these people can spend less time surviving, and more time innovating. Of course, this is just my own hypothesis I created in my head independent of any study and therefore I have no cite on hand to prove or back this up.

Hope this question isn’t to dull and “academic” (for a lack of a better word, I suppose) for what is seemingly a fairly laid-back forum. Thoughts, piercing criticisms, etc.? :dubious:

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Guns, germs, and steel.

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Technology & organization.

The germs destroyed, but created nothing.

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Now that looks like something that’d be worth a read. Thanks.

ETA:

Yes, yes, but how did these people gain this advanced technology while the rest of the world lagged behind in many regions of the world?

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Just read the book. Trust me, Diamond does a better job of handling your questions than we ever could.

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#1: This is actually a “weighty” question which is more suitable for Great Debates, I’ll ask a mod to move it for you.
#2: Your question is the subject of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs & Steel which is practically required reading for this forum. It’s an easy and informative read, which I highly recommend you check it out from the local library or even buy a copy if you can afford it. In the book Mr. Diamond dismisses any racial advantage that Europeans had over anyone, and without giving away spoilers (heh) it basically comes down to location, location, location.

Jared D. is also the author of the semi-satirical essay “Agriculture: The World’s Worst Mistake” which isn’t related to your question at all, but it’s one of my fav. essays so I just wanted to share it. :slight_smile:

(On Preview: Or, what everyone else said…)

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I feel compelled to point out here that Diamond’s hypothesis is not universally agreed upon as truth. The most common criticism leveled at him is that he overstates the importance of location. A geographer’s explanation for why the world turned out the way it did is…Geography? How unusual.

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True, but it’s the best theory I’ve ever read.

The presence of domesticate=able animals in a given area also figured strongly, don’t forget.

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True. But it helps when 90% of any opposing force is wiped out.

Without smallpox, influenza, etc killing millions and completely devastating countless cultures I doubt Spain could have taken out the Aztecs, even with Cortes’deft alliances.

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The places most productive for agriculture, until the modern era, were China and India. In the 1600s and even the 1700s, China and India drastically outproduced Europe, technologically, economically, and agriculturally.

The fabled “riches of the orient” simply meant that the average person in China, India, or the Ottoman Empire was better off than the average European, and the rulers of those countries were vastly wealthier than the European elite. The only advantage the Europeans had was the stream of treasure from the conquest of the Americas. The gold and silver from those Spanish treasure fleets ended up in the East, in payment for Eastern goods.

So Europe wasn’t particularly naturally more productive agriculturally or through natural resources than other areas, in many cases the reverse.

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They created empty space to be filled by Europeans with little effort - ready-made villages, irrigation, drinking water, paths, cleared access to resources, cleared fields (sometimes still with edible crops growing)… that’s not to be underestimated.

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But it was the domestication of animals, specifically in Eurasia, that not only gave the Europeans a head start but also herd immunity to diseases that the rest of the world had no defense against.

Another major factor was the East-West orientation of Europe & Asia, which allowed domesticated plants to be shared between cultures that shared similar climates and growing seasons. The Americas, by contrast, are oriented North-South, so a harvestable grain found in Mexico could not be easily transplanted to, say, the Great Lakes region. (Certainly not in the virgin days of agriculture.)

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One theory is that Europeans ended up conquering most of the world because they started out at a disadvantage. For a lot of human history, Europe was a backwater. The prosperous parts of the world were China, India, and Persia.

But a result of this was that China, India, and Persia felt no need to go anywhere - they already had everything a civilization needed right there at home. And they certainly had no reason to go to Europe.

Europe, on the other hand, did not have the stuff that those other countries had. So they were motivated to develop the technology to travel around the world. And the technology that allowed them to go places ended up also allowing them to conquer the places they went to.

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The points I will bring up relate only to the British Empire, because I’m not educated enough on other major empires:
–They got a lot of help from the locals. The conflicts between the natives of Asia, Africa, and the Americas were often more contentious than the conflict between these natives and the Europeans. In numerous cases, the Europeans won out because they were helped out by native alliances. A common way the empire expanded was by offering to help out a nation fighting its traditional enemy, and then basically forcing the winning side to become a British protectorate.
–They co-opted the local political establishment. How did Britain rule all of India with just tens of thousands of soldiers and bureaucrats? They let the native rulers do the day to day governance of the country, intervening only when British rule was threatened. India’s native princes were among the greatest opponents of Indian independence because they knew (and they were right) they would quickly be ousted. Indeed, most Indians didn’t even know at the time that the British ruled the country because they had so little contact with foreigners.

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Germs actually worked both ways. Africa would likely have been totally colonized without the diseases that wiped out so many Europeans. Haiti would probably have remained solidly French – or perhaps have been seized by the British – without the diseases that wiped out so many. India might have been much more solidly dominated by the British.

(I recently read “The Great Arc” by John Keay, about the British mapping and surveying program in India, which, among other things, helped establish the exact shape of the earth, and determined the heights of the highest Himalayas. The project was heavily hit by diseases, which killed many of the European surveyors – and a hell of a lot of the Indian ones also.)

Disease both helped and hindered European colonialism.

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Don’t forget that Ireland was England’s first colony. They learned there that the locals could be easily bought and wouldn’t offer much resistance. Add technology to the mix and it was easy for them to take over countries around the world.

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Not to forget a complete dearth of scruples or fucks to give.

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Indeed. As organized as the Incas and Aztecs were, they couldn’t maintain any organization with plagues rampaging through their lands and as more people got cut down by steel. The Europeans were more organized, but it’s not clear they would have been better organized without the destruction of organization visited on their opponents.

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Re: A geographer’s explanation for why the world turned out the way it did is…Geography? How unusual.

Geography is Diamond’s third career, actually, after membrane physiology (I think) and ornithology / community ecology. I think he has some good insights, but I don’t agree with him on everything. Also, he doesn’t ‘dismiss’ ethnic differences in intelligence, etc. as much as he seeks to provide alternative explanations- he doesn’t actually try to prove the race/IQ or other related questions, one way or the other.

Re: The fabled “riches of the orient” simply meant that the average person in China, India, or the Ottoman Empire was better off than the average European,

I think that depends largely at what time point you look, and also on the distribution of income. India being richer than Europe, in terms of per capita income, wouldn’t mean all that much if the wealth was monopolized by a much smaller elite. If you can furnish some citations about income distribution in early modern (or even medieval) India and Europe I’d be interested.

Re: How did Britain rule all of India with just tens of thousands of soldiers and bureaucrats? They let the native rulers do the day to day governance of the country, intervening only when British rule was threatened.

Not really. The large majority of India was under direct British rule (after 1857, at least, and probably earlier), and an even larger share of the key economically important areas was (for example, only a few native states had coastlines).

Re: Indeed, most Indians didn’t even know at the time that the British ruled the country because they had so little contact with foreigners.

Do you have a citation for that?

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How many European kingdoms actually controlled (as opposed to just claimed) regions as large as those controlled by the contemporaneous Chinese emperor? And how many were as efficient at conquering large regions as the Muslims of the eighth and ninth centuries, or the Mongols of the 13th and 14th?

But yeah, read Diamond.