Diamond makes a good argument as to “why Eurasia”, but cannot answer “Why Europe within Eurasia, over the last few hundred years”.
I would contend that this is down to rather contingent historical factors, the single most significant being the rise and fall of the Mongol empire.
Briefly, the Mongols took the 'Rus, the Arabs, the Persians and the Chinese; and when they were done, all of these competing peoples - each one of which could have rivaled Western Europe - was thoroughly convinced of the importance of guarding against further nomad troubles (not irrationally - witness Tamerlane, the Manchus, etc.), and had absorbed Mongol notions of how to fight and how to govern - all of which held them back from relative competition just at the time Western Europe was starting its rise.
Nope. Never the Byzantines or the Catholic Church. The Great Library was possibly destroyed four times:
The library is famous for having been burned resulting in the loss of many scrolls and books, and has become a symbol of the destruction of cultural knowledge. A few sources differ on who is responsible for the destruction and when it occurred. Although there is a mythology of the burning of the Library at Alexandria, the library may have suffered several fires or acts of destruction over many years. Possible occasions for the partial or complete destruction of the Library of Alexandria include a fire set by Julius Caesar in 48 BC, an attack by Aurelian in the A.D. 270s, the decree of Coptic Pope Theophilus in A.D. 391, and the decree of the second caliph Omar ibn Al-khattāb in A.D. 640.
The first two times, by the Romans, are either doubtful or by-blows of war. Only the last two seem to have been deliberate, and they are both rather doubtful as to what was destroyed and by who.
The Nile isnt really navigable into lower Africa. Sudan was about as far as they could go, and even to get there you had to cross many cataracts. Aswan was about as far south as you could go with ease, and that’s well within Egypt.
You have read about the quest for the Source of the Nile?
the short answer is that the weren’t. Africa had large civilizations just like all the other continents. There was the Ghana empire, the Mali one (from which Mansa Musa hailed), and some other one I can’t remember.
It’s just that, as it happened, when Europe finally slid slowly into the enlightenment and the initial development of rigorous science and technology, at THAT TIME, Africa didn’t have as many large centralized civilizations.
I remember reading how the Ghanaian civilization was so advanced they had managed to blacksmith scissors, which is no small feat (it’s really hard to blacksmith something as small and intriciate and that needs such small tolerances as scissors).
Even outside of centralized civilizations, metal and iron tools and weapons were common throughout Africa, made by the peoples themselves. From what I understand this is where the machete comes from.
Now, add to that that Europe’s relative power early on (let’s say, 1500s-1830s) came from not its technology but from a much better, stronger centralized civilization back home that could pull together resources from afar to build huge ships and war machines to kick everyone’s ass and enslave everyone. Of course, that highly centralized -ness came from bloody wars earlier on. Plus, Europe’s terrain makes it easier to maintain local dominance over a wide area, versus Africa’s which is much larger, and more riven with rivers and mountains. Plus, the currents go down to Africa from Europe, making sailing the one way much easier, but harder the other way.
To those making the point that isolation kept Africa “backwards”–look at the Americas. Populated by Paleolithic hunter-gatherers and nearly completely cut off from the “Old World,” they saw the rise of many, many complex societies, long-distance trading networks, and scientific and technical discoveries. The technology of the continent taken as a whole perhaps was not up to that of Europe as a whole, if that’s even a meaningful comparison, but the encounter between Europeans and Americans was largely an encounter between civilized peoples.
The essential reference here is “1491,” by Charles Mann, who relies heavily on Diamond’s ideas as well as original reporting on current thought about the Americas.
I’d like to see a similar book on sub-Saharan Africa before European settlement began in earnest.
Seriously this stuff isn’t an obscure secret. Wikipedia has a pretty good overview of pre-colonial Africa states. The African architecture article is pretty good, too, and instantly refutes half the ridiculously dumb claims made in this thread.
I don’t know why we need an explanation for this though. We’ve had various civilizations rise and fall and various civilizations do better or worse on technology. The time period of the last few hundred years is but a blip in human history.
The European inventions of the past few hundred years, though, have made it far easier to propagate technology across the globe rather quickly. Which means that the situation with European technological dominance is quickly eroding, and once its gone, we’re not likely to see any region dominate from a technological standpoint again.
Would you care to recommend one? Is there one similar to “1491,” ie, published in the last few years for a general audience and incorporating recent research on the period immediately before Europeans began moving into Africa in earnest?
I tend to agree, but I’d say that an explaination is necessary exactly because if one isn’t provided that is reasonably convincing, there has been a regretable tendency to find one in some sort of innate European superiority - in either genetics or culture.
I think you’re both missing the relevant point, which is that we’re all comparing everything to the rise of modern technology. Yeah, Europe started the modern technological revolution thing. If that’s all we’re talking about/comparing to, then yeah, that point in history is all that’s important. It’s just an issue of limited scope. As many have mentioned before, Europe was never unique/better in terms of tech/inventions before that. That one point to the modern era? Yeah sure. But that’s it. And the modern tech revolution had to do with a LOT social forces that came together very slowly in just the right way. So we can throw superiority out the window. Like anything else, there’s a lot of luck involved.
As to Christianity playing a part in the collapse of the Roman Empire, it’s worth looking at the Eastern part of the Empire (i.e., Byzantium), which didn’t draw its last breath until 1453, with the arrival of the Ottoman Turks. But before that, the eastern Empire suffered greatly from the depredations of the (mostly) Norman crusaders, who did their best to loot Constantinople, and at one point actually took it (although they didn’t hold on to it for long).
Europe, unlike many areas of the world, had nicely watered plains and rolling countryside - plus the climate was compatible with the wheat crop being grown in Mesopotamia, Diamond’s east-west movement again. Diamond mentions that Africa could not easily grow wheat because the seasons and rain were wrong. From what little I know of Africa, a lot of it is desert or dry savannah outside of the rain forests, and does not support the wide cultivation of large surpluses of crops. A surplus of food is the start of a more advanced civilization. Or, there may have been civilization that, like the mound builders of central USA, used wood and dirt and other materials easily swept away. We see the evidence of Rome, or Egypt, or Angor Wat, because the stone endures.
The civilization of the Mayas is thought to have disappeared through irrigation failure and/or climate change. Any African civilization would have the same problem - if the state of their food surplus was fragile, small changes would wipe out the surplus and the social structure would implode into civil war and collapse.
The geography of Europe, however, made travel sufficiently difficult that it was easy to maintain many separate independent countries - it was difficult to invade and hold all of it. This encouraged warfare, a great impetus in technology development. Gunpowder became applied as a siege technology to defeat fortifications, etc.
The other thing Europe had, was a collection of countries around a huge navigable body of water, encouraging ship technology. Most other civilizations did not have ocean-going vessels as part of the technological development of the society. This also created the trade routes that spread knowledge. Most other civilizations remain landlocked, ships only perhaps plied an external small coastline where there were few competing places to trade with. As someone posted above, too, few coasts had the convenient harbours that Europe had.
As I mentioned earlier - the industrial revolution was a side effect of the need for coal for mills and metallurgy. A wood blast furnace of any size would probably strip the locale of usable trees. Europe in general had a goo supply of trees to feed metallurgy, close to the well-watered food producing regions. England had coal in tantalizingly deeper locations as the easy pickings were used up; the steam engine originally was developed to pump out these progressively deeper mines. Hence England was the cradle of the industrial age. Train sized boilers and miles of iron rail required metalworks on a massive scale, which in turn needed fuel on a massive scale - requirements that England of all the choices was capable of meeting.
Of course, even by a century or two before the industrial revolution, Africa was being subjugated by Europeans with much better weapons, so even if there had been the resources for an industrial revolution, the locals would not get the opportunity to apply what they learned.
Up to a century or so before the industrial age, the civilizations around the world were roughly equal - military technology, architecture, all the other products of civilization. Coal gave the Europeans their head start to get beyond that level.
England started the industrial revolution, more-or-less. But long-distance sailing (which keeps getting brought up in this thread) was done by the Arabs and Indians and Chinese in addition to the Europeans. The Polynesians did it much earlier.
It’s true that the Portuguese and Spanish were the first to do really, really, really long-distance sailing, but why should they be lumped in with the English in some European technological innovation category?
Which is basically what I said originally, so you say I missed the point by repeating my point?
Of course you can. At least as far as the Sudd, and you can always go around that if you have to (you don’t always have to, it dries out) . You do realise the cataracts are just rapids, not cliffs, right? And that the Egyptians and Nubians traded along that corridor for millennia. And moved entire armies both ways, of course.
You do realise the journey to find the source of the Nile wasn’t so much a “discovery” as a “Columbusing”, right?
Plus, a lot of people in Asia and (indirectly through the Middle East) from Europe were trading with the East African coast. You don’t have to go through the Sahara to get to East Africa.
My knowledge of West African trading patterns is limited, so I’ll let someone else speak to that.
The thing about when I say Egyptian culture is African, not Eaurasian - if this was not the case, the culture would have started at contact points with Asia and Europe, and spread south from there. This so quite clearly not what happened. Egyptian culture has itsmostimportantroots in Upper Egypt, not Lower Egypt. These Africans were creating astonomical megalithic circles two thousand years before Stonehenge.