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jernfrost | 7 years ago
It should not be forgotten that this is primarily about the major powers of Europe. Not every European country was a major power. Europe is full of smaller countries, which often had little say in this matter. Ireland e.g. has a brutal history of oppression by the British. It is not like whites were nice to each other and only cruel to others.
Big colonial powers have a different view of people. I remember reading about polar expeditions, naturally since I am Norwegian. It is hard to not notice the stark difference between how Norwegians treated Inuit people and how the British treated them. The British were full of contempt for the natives of the polar regions. They viewed them as backwards and as having nothing useful to teach them. The British assumed British sense of civilization, property law etc was universal. When an Inuit took an object belonging to a British expedition member they brutally flogged him as punishment for "stealing". Never mind that the concept of ownership was entirely different to the Inuit.
Norwegian polar explorers in contrast eagerly learned from the natives how they used their dogs and how they dressed for the cold. It is a probably the chief reason why Amundsen would beat Scott to the pole. Amundsen did not deal with the different culture of the Inuit by assuming superiority and doling out cruel punishment to anyone not following his moral code. Instead they used trickery, making the Inuit believe that if they went into their storage room, they could blow up.
I am not writing this primarily to make my fellow Norwegians look amazing. But it is easier to contrast with cultures you actually know. Anyway we were kind of dicks to our indigenous people, the Sami, but to point out that European culture varied greatly. Saying the west did this and that, is a bit like our own homogenization of Africa, as if it is just one country.
2) We must know our history to not repeat it. I DO think it is a problem that we often try to sugarcoat our past. However we should also keep perspective. Too often people get into this pattern of thinking as if the past brutality of European colonial powers is inherent in being white. That is just as racist as claiming jews are inherently money grubbing bankers and africans are lazy. Europeans are as much product of their history and upbringing as everybody else, and has the same potential for change. Nor is everybody the same. While Europeans enslaved people, there was also Europeans fighting hard against slavery. Emancipation developed further and quicker in Europe than in many other parts of the world. E.g. slavery was ended by Europeans before it was in the Arab world. I don't think that points to white superiority, but simply is a way of pointing out that every civilization is a mix of different values and ideas, both good and bad. The good can triumph over the bad.
We should however recognize that the struggles many countries face around the world is partly of our making. However we cannot take full responsibility. Africa or India would not be as modern rich or developed today as by magic if Europeans had never set their feet on shore. All of these areas were hundreds of years behind Europe in technological development. What Europe could have done is treating them better. But that does not make Europeans uniquely bad. The powerful have always through history had a tendency to exploit the weaker ones.
stef25|7 years ago
Best refrain from reading the Guardian, it's what they do best. Despite the fact that nobody alive today had anything to do at all with the horrors from our colonial pasts.
> Africa or India would not be as modern rich or developed today as by magic if Europeans had never set their feet on shore
Do you have some references that back this up? I don't dispute it, just curious.
7952|7 years ago
jernfrost|7 years ago
I don't think their writing is bad. My issue is not so much what they write, but rather how a lot of people end up interpreting it. Many will use such writing to vilify whites. OTOH there are plenty of whites who uses any writing about say coloreds to do the same. People in general are eager to create simplified narratives and blame the other guys.
> Do you have some references that back this up? I don't dispute it, just curious.
I would say it is a logical conclusion from reading history. India and Africa was already progressing at a certain pace and was several hundred years behind Europe in development.
What has been observed through most of history is that most countries progress by importing ideas from other rather than by inventing it themselves.
Africa e.g. has very little coastline and rivers relative to landmass. That makes water based transport mostly inaccessible. Labor specialization and mass production relies on that. Industrialization was thus highly unlikely to occur in Africa spontaneously. Adam Smith remarked this over 300 years ago.
The founder of modern Singapore remarked that the most important technology for their development was air condition. India, Africa, South East Asia etc are simply too hot places. It gives a lot more diseases, makes it harder to work and think. There are limits to how much heat the human body can dissipate. Cold climates are thus more practical for working as long as you have suitable means of providing heating.
Until the invention of air condition, the southern states of the US were far more backwards. Air condition led to a surge in people moving south.
In short India, Africa etc had a lot of natural barriers to development which meant they were always going to be far behind Europe. European invasion gave a way of leapfrogging many of these disadvantages.
partycoder|7 years ago
The technologies that bootstraped the European civilization come from the fertile crescent, aka middle east. Not only that, but what is eaten in Europe are mostly plants and animals that are not endemic to Europe. Take that away and you would have a continent full of people spending all their time trying to feed themselves, without time to innovate and with a lower population.
The European Reinassance is 99% of the time misattributed. The real causes were:
- the introduction of paper to Europe (as an alternative to parchments, made from animal skin)
- the introduction of a new numeral system
- the acceptance of secular thought
- the Latin translations of the 12th century
- the scientific method
None of those fundamental prerequisites are European merit. And yet it is hardly ever mentioned because it does not justify a messed up perspective of the world where one group of people "civilized" the rest of the world.
Before St Thomas Aquinas reformed the church through philosophy, scientific research would be considered heresy and could get you killed. St Thomas Aquinas studied from St Albert Magnus, from Latin translations made in Spain after the fall of the Al-Andalus (Islamic Spain).
Copernicus developed his theories by studying the Alphonsine tables, compilation of observations made by ancient astronomers. The Alphonsine tables were also Latin translations made in Spain.
Take away the Alphonsine tables and modern numerals and you've got no Copernicus, no Galileo, no Newton. Take away paper or secularism and you get nothing at all.
Europe continued the work of fallen civilizations, did not figure it out everything from scratch.
asianthrowaway|7 years ago
I'm all for acknowledging eurocentrism, but this euro-bashing is ridiculous. If these "prerequisites" were all that were needed to kickstart the Renaissance, why did it not occur in the middle east, for instance, where all of these elements were also present?
jernfrost|7 years ago
It was never my intention to suggest that Europeans are inherently superior to others and that we have some unique ability of innovations.
Of course European advancements were built on advancements of those who came before us. Just as Chinese advancement today is built on advancements made by the west earlier.
I am merely stating a fact: European civilization was significantly ahead of the competition. And those innovations could not easily have been made elsewhere for cultural and geographic reasons:
1) Europe went through major paradigm shifts with1 the renaissance and enlightenment which was in large part possible in Europe because it was a divided continent. Many great thinkers lived on the borders between countries so they could flee to another one as soon as their ideas got unpopular with the rulers. Such a mechanism was not possible in other advance civilizations such as China, which was a big monolith. New ideas in such societies could easily be squashed.
Single rulers could easily retard progress for decades. Consider e.g. how one of the Chinese emperors forbid all sea travel and burned the fleet. The whole of Europe could never suffer such a profound setback because it had no single ruler. Any European nation engaging in such stupid policies would quickly learn of the stupidity of that as competing nations would race past them.
Europe represented a sort of semi-free market of ideas, which did not exist elsewhere to the same degree.
2) Europe had a clear advantage in geography. Using water wheels for power generation and rivers and canals for goods transport was significantly easier in Europe than China, India, Egypt etc where the waterflow varies too much through the year.
The first factories relied on inanimate power from waterwheels which was not easily constructed elsewhere in the world.
Later steam engines relied on cheap transport of large bulks of coal and ore. Britain e.g. had a geology that allowed building canals to mines to transport large bulk loads of coal cheaply. Outside of Europe there was limited possibility to do this.
I could go on, but there were simply a large number of factors that favored Europe. Hence European supremacy was not merely a fluke, and the other nations could not by random occurrence have leapfrogged Europe. The modern world relied on being brought to the rest of the world from Europe, unless it was going to happen much much later.
It does not mean what European did was morally right. It just means one should not delude oneself into thinking that without Europe all the other nations would be prosperous today.
adrianN|7 years ago