Sure but even by 0AD Egypt was a vassal to Rome, and had been living under a Greek royal family for centuries prior to that after Alexander's conquests. Doubly weird considering they became the breadbasket of the empire, so it's not like they couldn't support a large population.
Also is it true that Africa was underdeveloped vs European and Asian contemporaries prior to colonialism? I think there were some relatively substantial empires and we have perhaps fooled ourselves into thinking they were backward savages to justify colonial rule.
Development is a nebulous term. African societies weren't building oceanic armadas or smelting steel but they were making huge advances in mathematics and physics. Some African societies were larger and wealthier than contemporary European ones. But the western yardstick is to measure the development of a society by how many bombs and iPhones it produces per second. Same goes for pre-columbus American civilizations. South American societies were engaged in full-scale hydrological engineering and advanced animal husbandry and selective agriculture exceeding European development. North American societies were governing massive tracts of land and creating self-sustaining food forest ecosystems.
African societies weren't building oceanic armadas or smelting steel
And yea, Egypt was Black at one point. You can't really hide multi-ton stone sphinxes
Pretty good chance they reached America before Columbus as well, but just didn't commit genocide
Africa is not a monolith. Neither is development. North Africa was pretty advanced if I recall correctly with people like Mansa Musa and there were very significant cultural and scientific developments in the Muslim world at the time. I think that Europeans had better armaments, armor, naval technology and possibly construction ability. However that is a result of Europe having more easily attainable iron and coal deposits, constant war and England being an island. African animals are also more or less impossible to domesticate (except camels and maybe zebras, but not really) and this gave Europeans a leg up in agriculture and prioritized urban development which in turn leads to ideas spreading faster and more technological development. I think a lot of the gap was due to Europe having more cities, which also allowed for biological warfare. Parts of Africa were incredibly wealthy and developed and parts more or less operated off sustenance farming.
Great Britain is an Island, England is part of that island. Sorry but i gotta point this out when i see fit, cause all of the countries that make up Great Britain played a part in its history, and it's not fair to leave them out.
I would hazard a guess that the relative smallness of Europe played a factor as well. Less distance between all the major city-centers meant easier dissemination of ideas and trade.
The answer is complicated for the reasons others have said, but I like to explain it this way:
Advanced, peaceful aliens arrive at Earth in 1400 CE. They want to set up relations with earth but they are used to dealing with planets that have one planetary government, society, etc (just like Star Trek). They don’t quite know how to deal with such a fractured and diverse planet.
So these aliens decide to only meet with leaders from selected societies. They don’t have specific criteria but are generally looking at a whole host of factors we might broadly call “development”: education, metallurgy, governmental forms, material output, health & sanitation systems, etc.
The aliens would almost certainly choose to meet with reps from at least China, India, Persia, the Byzantine Empire, North and West Africa, parts of the Arab world, and Tenochtitlan. Europe, outside of Byzantium and Al-Andalus, would have been completely bypassed. On a global scale Europe was a poor, irrelevant backwater that didn’t have much in the way of achievements that we mention or much pull beyond its own corner of the globe. If you could go back to 1400 and live some place for a year, you almost certainly wouldn’t pick Europe.
Outside of North Africa (and some part of West Africa)… I don’t know much about comparing the rest of the continent to Europe. But I really don’t think they were much behind if at all.
If you could go back to 1400 and live some place for a year, you almost certainly wouldn’t pick Europe.
I wouldn't pick any of those other options either though.
I don't know why people always conflate civilization with resources.
Europeans even before 1492 probably had slightly better lives than the average Indian/Chinese/MENA person, simply because Europe has more land and the climate is easy-mode as fuck. It's just that they didn't invent anything.
Roman accounts prove that Northern Europeans had fairly good quality of life, judging purely by the height difference (today it's only 1-2 inches, but was much bigger back then)
If I could go back to year 1400 and live out an 80 year lifespan, purely for the sake of enjoyment and not for altering history, it'd be North America no contest. South America or Africa second picks
The Byzantines were very seriously on the decline by 1400. Constantinople was a shadow of it's former glory, and the territory it governed was not doing very well either. If they made the cut I really don't see why Venice, Paris, Milan and Bruges wouldn't, as they were some of the largest and richest human settlements on the planet at the time.
Al-Andalus had also been gone for hundreds of years, and by 1400, only the Emirate of Granada remained which would be very unlikely to make the list.
On a global scale Europe was a poor, irrelevant backwater that didn’t have much in the way of achievements that we mention or much pull beyond its own corner of the globe.
While they were certainly not at the height of their proportionate wealth and influence, Europe in 1400 was still one of the most significantly densely populated areas on earth, making up roughly 25% of the world's population, with China and India each being another 25%, and the rest of the world making up the last quarter.
They made plenty of technological innovations too, improvements on horse collars, ploughs and horseshoes all originated in Europe at the time and significantly improved the life of the working population. There were also major novel advances like eyeglasses, rudders, navigational tools, compound cranks, rolling mills, glass mirrors and a host of others.
Go back to the 800s-900s and you'd be more accurate.
If you look at pre-industrial societies, then Africa is on par or even ahead of Europe, examples would be the Umayyad Caliphate, Egypt, the Malian Empire, the Abyssinian Empire, the Kongo, and the Zanzibar Sultanate.
European identity is recent in human history. The whole Mediterranean region had significant shared culture — including the “Middle East” and Northern Africa — that was a far stronger identification than any sort of
European-ness
euro penis
that would be relevant to the nation states of the 20th century through today.
europe "lucked" into being more diseased than the new world.
then they stumbled into a social order that was capable of sustained genocide and theft NO MATTER WHAT WAS GOING ON BACK HOME! this social order incentivized some of its most vicious members to expend their energies in genocide and theft abroad.
It depends on how you define civilization. The Aboriginal Australian civilization predates the early Mesopotamian civilization that I learned about in school, but that civilization was only seen as the first because of eurocentric ideas of what a civilization looks like. In Australia they were hunter-gatherers, but also practiced advanced agriculture that Europeans didn't even recognize as agriculture when they got there. The comment I made about the earliest civilization being in Africa was based on a list I saw that considered the San people of Africa the first civilization. But they didn't really justify it either.
FWIW I recently read An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi and I enjoyed it a lot. It’s a good primer for those (like me) totally uneducated about Africa’s history and civilisations. It’s a pretty accessible and anti-colonialist overview. The approach is quite normie historian (focus on Kings, Queens, wars etc) and the author has pretty takes towards the end but still very worth it imo.
Better question: why did Europe get absolutely walloped compared to Africa, and Southeast Asia, and China, and India, and the Middle East during the bronze age?
the Aryans invaded Europe 4500 years ago and killed all the men, but when they invaded Punjab in India they could hardly kill anyone without it happening in turn--they even wrote multi-generational sagas about how long their wars went on, the record of which is clearly observable in the much lower male genetic sex bias in Punjabis vs. Europeans. And then of course every other continent mentioned above has been genetically untouched by foreign people since the paleolithic. Why is that?
European hunter gatherers accomplished literally nothing, while Native American hunter gatherers produced Chocolate, Vanilla, Ayahuasca, Potatoes, complex cities, llamas, dog-based wool, and dozens of other things I can't even remember
Literally everything ever accomplished in Europe has been done by Anatolian farmers (Middle Eastern) or post-Aryan admixed people (East Asian admixture) who together constitute 75% of European ancestry (the rest is indigenous hunter gatherer)
This is just unironically asserting that white people are majestic Aryans, except you can't be saying that. What, are you going to tell me that it's the inferior DNA of the European woman that has removedd their legacy?
Also it's ridiculous to assert that hunter-gatherers accomplished literally nothing. What do you know about pre-PIE Europe and its culture? This is actually the same thing as saying that Sub-Saharan cultures are inferior because they built huts instead of colonnades.
Native American hunter gatherers produced . . . complex cities
The Mexica and Inca were not hunter-gatherers, neither the Cahokians.
And then of course every other continent mentioned above has been genetically untouched by foreign people since the paleolithic.
This is just entirely without basis.
Literally everything ever accomplished in Europe has been done by Anatolian farmers (Middle Eastern) . . .
This whole premise is bizarre, because the spread of Indo-Iranians is a millenia-long process most likely originating around the north of the Black and Caspian Seas. But these are the people who we think of as early Europeans, they predate the concepts of Europe or Asia. The Germanic peoples of antiquity are descendants of the Corded-Ware culture. This is the Mycenaeans and the Hittites. (who, incidentally conquered previous inhabitants of Anatolia). The expansion of cultures out of the Eurasian steppe probably has a lot to do with horses, chariots, and riding, which would enable a comparatively rapid dissemination (pardon the pun) of their culture and genetics.
I put this under this line because they are the Anatolians and also NOT the "middle-eastern" early agriculturalists like the Sumerians and later Akkadians and Assyrians, who wouldn't even expand into Anatolia until the first millenium BCE.
. . . or post-Aryan admixed people (East Asian admixture)
Please tell me you aren't asserting that Indo-Iranians are East Asian.
I also take issue with your assertion that they killed all of the European men 4500 years ago, which seems to be a result of this unfortunate subtitle on a science-reporting article about an archaeological study in Spain, the site in question also appears to be from 2500 y.a. and the researchers suggest that chromosomal differences are a result of successive preferential access to mates.
Fundamentally, all of the arguments you are putting forward are race supremacist ones. True to form, they are based on a hodge-podge of faulty premises and misrepresented historical pieces arranged in a way to support your vision for who the Superior People are, while ignoring the incredibly complex history of the human species, its cultures, and how they adapted, adopted, spread, mixed, and mutated over the course of millenia.
This is just unironically asserting that white people are majestic Aryans
It's not, it's asserting that 35% of their ancestry is.
Also it's ridiculous to assert that hunter-gatherers accomplished literally nothing. What do you know about pre-PIE Europe and its culture?
It's obviously not a literal caliper take, it's meant to turn-on-its-head the original looneytune concern-trolly "questions" that were posted in the OP subreddit. If you can't understand that idk what to tell you. Obviously I don't think European hunter gatherers are inherently handicapped
Please tell me you aren't asserting that Indo-Iranians are East Asian.
All Indo-European/Steppe/whatever-you-wanna-call-em were admixed with ancient East Asian.
the Aryans invaded Europe 4500 years ago and killed all the men, but when they invaded Punjab in India they could hardly kill anyone without it happening in turn--they even wrote multi-generational sagas about how long their wars went on
the Aryans invaded Europe 4500 years ago and killed all the men
No, current consensus is that the "Indo-European/Aryan Invasion" was a process of migration from the Steppe/Black Sea and there were battles over fertile areas and grazing plains but nowhere near a full population replacement or concerted conquest. There seems to be a long process of trade, immigration, and elite intermarriage (the immigration and therefore intermarriage were overwhelmingly men) that cause much of Europe to adopt Indo-European language and material culture. There were some notable exceptions, largest being the southern coast of Britain where there was some Indo-European speaking people that crossed the channel, and from genetic evidence, did fully genocide and replace much of the earlier neolithic population.
This is just a long way of confirming what I said lol
Western Europe went from 0% Indoeuro male DNA to 80%. While the actual ancestry went from 0 to 35%. In less than 500 years
anyone can call it whatever they want, I just call it genocide