What if all continents had been in regular communication since ancient times?

Until the Portuguese began the Age of Exploration, the world always had several cultural centers that developed largely uninfluenced by, and even in ignorance of, each other. The Western Hemisphere might as well have been on another planet from the Eastern. Africa south of Ethiopia was almost as isolated. Australia, too. China was only vaguely aware of and not even vaguely interested in India, let alone lands further west. And then all that changed rather abruptly, on the historical time-scale.

Imagine that in the Sixth Century B.C., the Greeks win the Battle of Alalia (Corsica) against the Etruscans and Carthaginians, strengthening their colonizing position in the western Mediterranean – to the point where Greeks are able to get more or less safely through the Pillars of Herakles, and then they can sail up and down the coasts and colonize. Soon Greek colony towns dot the Atlantic coasts of Africa and Spain and Gaul – all in continuous competition with the Carthaginians, breaking out in war periodically – which spurs technological progress. Eventually one nation or the other – doesn’t matter which, the other soon copies it – hits on the essentials of deep-sea sailing technology, and the Age of Exploration is off and running. (And if Rome rises in this timeline, then the Romans will get deep-sea sailing technology too.)

But, it goes rather differently than in the 15th Century in our timeline: Neither the Greeks nor the Carthaginians are numerous enough or technologically advanced enough to conquer the native empires everywhere they go. What each does, instead, is found a global network of politically independent (at least, the Greek ones are, that’s the Greek custom) coastal colony towns, each farming the immediate neighborhood, and trading (for slaves among other things, no doubt) with the “inland barbarians,” and trading with the rest of the world. The Old World diseases spread to the New World before they get the chance to grow quite so virulent as they did in OTL – probably a lot more Indians survive contact. The introduction of Old World crops and animals to the New World and vice-versa happens in antiquity, so gradually perhaps that nobody is really sure where the potato came from. China is no more isolated than any place else, it is regularly exposed to the wider world – and to the fact/idea that other, powerful civilizations exist – from the Warring States period on.

And, any idea – whether technological or scientific or philosophical or religious or political or artistic – that once becomes current in one of the world’s centers of civilization, will soon be known or known of in all the others. Greek philosophers are thoroughly exposed to the philosophies and religions of India and China. Everybody the world over hears about this Greek thing called democracy. If anyone invents the printing press or the stirrup or the rigid horse collar, the whole world has it before long. Greek musicians will be exposed to Indian and Chinese music.

And the “inland barbarians” – in the Americas, in Africa, everywhere – might not be such pushovers, because they get exposed to everything their Greek or Punic neighbors on the coasts have and, not being in immediate or constant danger of being conquered by them, have the space and leisure to copy it.

How does history, generally, go in this timeline?

Wouldn’t it just mean that the native Americans were wiped out sooner due to diseases introduced by this contact? I don’t see how you can avoid that part, and that’s going to have a large impact on their population. Same with the native Australians, if we assume they are part of this wide spread contact, as well as the Polynesians.

-XT

The first thing to clarify is that the world was not quite a isolated as your OP seems to assume. The Chinese were vicariously aware of the existence of Australia, and Australian products, notably trepang, turtle shell and mother-of-pearl, were being regularly sold in Chinese market places. Similarly the Romans, and I assume Hellenistic Greeks, were quite aware of the existence of southern Africa. Alexander pushed his armies into Pakistan, employed Neplaese mercenaries and fully intended to occupy the whole Indus valley, so we have to assume that the Greeks were well aware of the existence of and value of India. The thing is that they knew of these places and they did not give a shit about them. They just did not care. It wasn’t an issue of deep sea sailing technology. You can get from England to Australia, China or South Africa and never leave sight of land.

The only real difference to your time line is that the Americas are discovered earlier. it would not make any difference at all to Australia, Africa or China. The Greeks could have set up colonies of the type you propose in India, Africa or Australia using the technology available to them. Colonies cost money to set up, and since the Indians and Chinese were at least as technologically advanced as the Greeks they could never set up colonies there. It was only with the invention of the firearms and gunboats that Europeans had any real ability to set up colonies in those regions. Maccassans did set up colonies in Northern Australia, but they were short lived for various reasons. Heck, the first English colonies almost failed multiple times, so it’s impossible to believe that they could have succeeded any earlier.

As for the Americas, it’s hard to see how that works out.

Your idea that disease would have less impact makes little sense. From Columbus’ voyages alone it seems the population of the Americas was halved by disease. The Greeks would have had the same impact. Smallpox, influenza, diptheria and measles were all fully developed pandemics by the bronze age. The only disease the Americans might have been spares is Black Plague. That would probably have spread from the Himalayas at about the same time in both timelines, so devastating both New and Old World to the same degree.

So the Greeks reach the Americas, disease still devastates the natives. The Greeks will find an empty land just as the English did. They may or may not colonise that land. They still have steel armour and weapons and horses, so they can still subjugate any native people they like. The big difference will be that they will not be colonising at the same time as the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions as the English were doing, so there rate of growth will be more like of the English colonies for the first hundred years: initially struggling, then slowly expanding, but nothing like the rate from then on that was made possible by the Revolutions. So the locals away form the initial colonisation sites will have time to rebound from the new diseases and assimilate the new technology, especially horses, cattle and crops. The result will be many more intra-Indian wars as a new balances of power are established based on the technology. It seems highly likely that the European settlers will be facing Indians with cavalry and probably metal weapons within a hundred years.So the regions west of either the Rockies or the Great Plains are likely to remains autonomous, at least to the extent that India did under British rule. IOW rather than simply becoming a European land, the regions is likely to be a European colony populated almost entirely by Indians.

Australia actually provides a very good example of the likely outcome. The people of Northern Australia had a long history of contact with the rest of the world, at least 5, 000 years. For at least 500 years prior to European contact there was a large annual migration of Malyasian and Indonesian fishermen and traders into Northern Australia.

The result was that Northern Australians were largely immune to most diseases. There was a substantial decrease in reproduction, but that seems to have been due entirely due to sterility induced by venereal disease. That may have ben due to limited sexual relations between the groups, or it may have been symptomatic of social breakdown brought upon by colonisation, or more likely a combination of the two. Had sexual contact been more frequent or prolonged and the idnigenous social structure remained more intact the Australians probably would have seen no incraese in death rate due to European contact. The upshot of this is that Northern Australia remains largely an Aboriginal land. Aborigines make up about 40% of the population and about 80% outside the major urban areas.

So in the scenario proposed here, that is the scenario that would have been sen worldwide. With only exposure to small trading colonies the local populations would crash due to disease, but they would then rebound. They would then evolve the same disease resistance as Eurasians have to those diseases, aided by the inevitable interbreeding with the outsiders which provides a good gene pools for disease resistance. Within a few hundred years populations would rebound to original levels and that population would be as disease resilient as the Eurasians.

That’s not exactly true. There was quite a regualr exchange of monks and other scholars, at least I know of Chinese ones going to Indian universities to study and some Buddhist missionaries the other way.

Even when I remove your whores, your point is nonsensical.

Removed spam post above.

No. Because Old World diseases in 535 B.C. are not the same as Old World diseases in 1492 A.D. Less time to evolve, less virulent.

In this timeline, there is probably no Polynesian culture. Simply because the Greeks or the Carthaginians or the Romans or the Chinese or even the Olmecs reach the Pacific islands centuries before the Polynesians did in OTL.

The problem with the americas and disease was that it was a double whammy - diseases put pressure on the americas just as euros were set on colonizing them. If the pattern of contact was different and more gradual, the populations of the americas could have had time to acclimatize to the diseases and recover from demographic collapse … and absorb and diffuse old world technologies.

That being said, the Greeks were historically pretty aggressive colonizers.

But as far as I know, they didn’t have the crusading-Christian “we have the one true god(s) and everyone else must convert or be destroyed” attitude of the Europeans. I wouldn’t expect them to be as irrationally aggressive* or to go with the European program of systematically destroying every native culture they could, destroying the records and so forth. And if the populations do have time to rebound then I think they are highly unlikely to do what the Europeans did and essentially annihilate the local populations. The Europeans didn’t do that in Africa, India or China after all.

  • Conquer for profit, yes, ruthlessly slaughter and enslave for their own benefit, yes. But they’d be less likely to bother with conversion by the sword, or to engage in wars of outright extermination. No profit in it when you can just enslave and exploit instead, or demand tribute. Especially when you don’t have as overwhelming a technological edge.

“Convert or be destroyed” was hardly a universal european approach to colonization - it certainly was not main item on the menu for the French, Dutch or English colonizers. They had plenty of problems because they were very aggressive, and they certainly enjoyed converting natives, but they hardly murdered off their non-Christian subjects for being non Christian.

The Greeks (and of course later, Romans and Cartheginians) were quite capable of murdering off locals on occasion - read Herodotus on the history of early Greek colonization - one Greek colony murdered off the entire male population of a place they were colonizing, and forcibly “married” (that is, mass raped and enslaved) the women … this wasn’t a unique event, as it famously happened again in Messina (this time to a greek colony) - which triggered the Punic wars:

Also court diplomats. The Indian king Arjuna, overthrown and taken as a prisoner back to the emperor as a result of Sino-Tibetan interference, would have had good reason to know who the Chinese were ;).

For that matter further west the Abbasid Caliphate that had defeated the T’ang at Talas in 751, sent troops to aid them in 756. Late the Caliph Harun al-Rashid made further overtures to the T’ang, including a diplomatic mission to Chang’an in 798 that led to a brief anti-Tibetan alliance between the two dominant world powers of their day.

China’s isolation and indifference to the outside world is an oft-repeated meme, but a very exaggerated one based mostly on the stagnant late Ming and elements of the late Qing dynasties ( and ignoring early Ming and Qing expansionism ).

And based on official policy of the Chinese at the point where they began to intrude more clearly on Western consciousness.

From [url=]The Problem of China, by Bertrand Russell:

Now, I suggest that not even Qin Shih Huangdi would have been so peremptory with a Greek or Roman or Carthaginian delegation if it had arrived in China in his time. The obvious superiority of his civilization to all barbarians’ would not have been quite so . . . obvious, then.

You don’t know anything at all about the history of plague, do you?

An impression I formed from The Master’s Column:

Time is a factor in all that. The diseases Greeks of Socrates’ day carried would have been deadly to Native Americans, but less deadly to them than the deseases Spaniards of Columbus’ day carried.

the response BrainGlutton quotes is just the sort of dumb arrogance that you would expect from incompetent leaders of powers that are about to go down the toilet. The same Macartney is quoted as saying: George Macartney - Wikiquote](]The Problem of China,[/url)

superiority indeed! Guess who was proven right by the historical record of 19th century, the above-mentioned “superior” Qing emperor or Lord Macartney?

And I bet there are plenty of dispatches of the same nature nowadays from the White House to Beijing as that one from Beijing to London 200 years ago. Historical circumstances change, but the sheer arrogance and cluelessness of the dumbbells keeps knowing no bound.

Yes, all true, no doubt. But, Bertrand Russell (writing in 1922) adds the following editorial comment to his account of Emperor Chien Lung’s reply to Lord Macartney:

Today, the Chinese are no longer inferior to the Western world in science or technology.

And, if the hypothetical described in the OP had come to pass, it may be that China would have kept pace with scientific/technological developments elsewhere in the world every step of the way.

I’m afraid here, the Master is wrong. Europe was indeed a crossroads of disease, but there’s nothing new in that. Plague was an off-and-on problem since Roman times (at least), and its effect on populations over that time was pretty constant. The Black Plague was merely a particularly nasty edition in an old book - but one which the Europeans weren’t adjusted to at that time. It, and previous plagues, would have roughly the same effect on completely new populations. Evolution here has an effect in its ability to penetrate the resistance of a specific population. Barring some amazing coincidence, the diseases of the +15th century would be no more effective against the AmerIndians than thos of the -5th.

In any case, diseases weaken in virulence over time, though they tend to improve in ability to spread. But plagues were notable for that problem in ancient times.

Native Americans were wiped out only in North America, particularly in the U.S., and not precisely by contagious diseases but genocide.

It is hard to believe educated people gives so much credit to the idiotic theory of the diseases, invented by Europeans and Americans to hide the genocide that happened in the Americas.

Yes, blame germs, not the European invaders!

Why can’t they have died by both, like the late Earl Warren?