But they had no connection to the “metropole”, weren’t they free states?
By your definition, they were Volkswanderer.
Oh, sorry, I meant to link to this one instead.
This is what makes Great Debates Great. The reasoned responses, backed by well researched cites.
:dubious::rolleyes:
Of course- because before Europeans Sub- Saharan Africa was populated by peaceful, literate, egalitarian, advanced democratic civilizations.
:dubious::rolleyes:
What I’d say is- before the Europeans, Africa had plenty of it’s own problems and issues- but Europeans brought in a shitload more. And some solutions.
OK< let us take the North American natives.
Before 1492 they were hungry, illiterate, constantly warring and slavery was common. They had no defenses against disease, and 40 was old. Stone-age hunter gatherers or large agricultural civilizations based upon slavery and sometimes human sacrifice.
Then the white man came and fucked everything up for a century or two.
Now we have today.
You think the natives are better off today or before Columbus? Would you rather be a slave growing maize then or living on the rez now?
Yeah, not like the Europeans who lived peacefully together for all those years.
It is grossly absurd to make any assumption that Africa would end up in a problematic state now if not for an invasion of Europeans. Or to assume that Europe would not be in the same state Africa is in now if they didn’t have the rest of the world to plunder after wasting all their own resources.
“a century or two”? You seem to be missing a few centuries of warring, genocide, torture, and slavery. One can’t enjoy the steaks without killing a couple of steers.
That’s easy for YOU to say!
Are you describing Europe or the Americas?
They had defense against the diseases that they had encountered.
Not this again. The tribes inhabiting what is now the east cost of the US were, for example, neither large civilizations like the Aztecs, nor H/Gs. They were groups of mostly farming an fishing communities.
Not much slavery IN Europe after 1500 or so.
Yes, but no modern medicine. Which, sure, we didnt get until fairly recently.
Sure, for a smallish area. But there were some of the Moundbuilders that were largish empires on the East coast.
Think for a second about the story you learned about the Pilgrims back in kindergarten.
What did the pilgrims do? They landed at an empty spot that was perfect for setting up a farming village. And so they set up a village. And why was the spot perfect? Because it was the site of a village. But why didn’t the people who lived there stop them from moving in? Because they were all dead. Why were they all dead? Disease. And there was only one survivor, a guy named Squanto. And what did he do to save the Pilgrims from starvation? Teach them how to grow native crops. The pilgrims literally would have starved if they hadn’t found baskets of stored maize. Grown by the farmers who used to live there, before they died.
The vast majority of native Americans in 1491 were farmers. Over 90%.
It seems to have benefited India to some extent.
How so?
And I think in American thought we often wrongly think of the pilgrims as being the start of America. But how did Squanto communicate with the pilgrims so easily? Because he had already been to Spain and England, making the Atlantic crossing six times in his life. He spoke some amount of English.
Yeah, the story of the Pilgrims is such an incredible microcosm of the story of the colonization of the Americas. And people learn all the details, but somehow don’t learn them. Every child in America learns that Squanto taught the Pilgrims to grow maize, but most adults simultaneously believe that the Indians were nomadic hunter-gatherers.
People learn the facts but can’t integrate the facts into their world-view because the facts wouldn’t make sense according to their world-view.
The Brits built railroads, improved sanitation and hygiene, trained a native civil service, etc. And now India is a united republic with a common language with which it can communicate with the whole world. It is industrializing. It’s probably a much more modern country than the native princes would have made it if left alone. Probably.
So, I called it then. This fucking railroad nonsense. Why do people have it in their head that railroads couldn’t possibly have been built without white people in charge?
Put another way: If you want to claim that India of 2016 is better off than India of 1616 in many ways, I won’t disagree with you there. The same applies to most of the world.
But if you want to argue that India of 2016 in our colonial reality is significantly better off than India of 2016 in the counterfactual timeline where it was spared colonialism? Yeah, sure… It’s just a coincidence the colonizers ended up the rich ones and the colonized the poor ones. :rolleyes:
Only right at the end, in their own estimation. As far as they British were concerned, they were rebellious colonists.
And metropole is a legitimate term of art in this field, there’s no need for the scare quotes.
No, not really. They never replaced the indigenes in their new homelands, just lived beside them (and lorded it over them)
I gave that all the response that “Boers are what made South Africa great” deserved.
This completely ignores that we should be considering what the situation might be today. Would you rather be a peasant on a Spanish estate in 1491, or living on a reservation now?