3.5 How the Colonial World Developed                                         Version 1.1 March 2012

 

 

 

This brief summary will be updated after more work and review against the experts, and over the longer term it can be updated as we learn more, but it will only be replaced by a better story.

All around the world, herders and farmers caught diseases from their animals that spread as epidemics around increasingly dense populations, cycling especially around Eurasia with its large variety of domestic animals, contributing to the collapse of some societies, but increasing the immunity of the survivors.

Trade developed across Eurasia along the “Silk Road”, between China and the Middle East and eastern Europe, for high value goods (such as silk), carried by people, camels and horses.  The Chinese explored the world with large, sophisticated sailing ships, as far west as Africa, but had no incentive to explore east (towards the Americas) or further south (around Africa).  Arabs, Indians, south east Asians and East Africans traded widely over the Indian Ocean and the Asian coast. 

Indian arithmetic and algebra spread through the Arabic world to Europe around the 1100s.  The reinvention of the printing press in Europe in the 1400s (printing occurred in China 600 years earlier) made books more widely available there.

Later, Western Europe’s competitive nations on the Atlantic coast – Spain, Portugal, France, England, Holland and later Germany – adopted  Chinese sailing technology and, by hugging the coast around southern Africa, found a route for trade with South and East Asia in bulkier items carried by ship.  The Europeans also adopted and improved Chinese technology in metallurgy and gunpowder.

Though the Vikings had known about North America for hundreds of years, Western Europeans “discovered” the Americas by accident in 1492, looking for a shorter trade route across the Atlantic to India – and they still mistakenly call the locals “Indians”.  European ships accidentally blown off course en route to India “discovered” the west coast of Australia, whose east coast was then “discovered” by a deliberate search by the English. 

Native Americans and Australians, and indigenous islanders, were decimated mostly by European diseases (such as smallpox and influenza) carried by these traders and invaders.  Only a few significant diseases went back to Eurasia from these places (notably syphilis). 

Europeans had steel swords, guns, cavalry and logistical backup from Europe, generally against indigenous foot soldiers with wooden weapons.  Christianity was consciously spread “by the sword”, especially to the Americas, but also in Africa and Australia.

Europeans exploited local animosities in North and South America, India, Africa, and Australia, to persuade some indigenous groups to become allies, relied heavily on them to defeat the allies’ local enemies, then often turned on the allies. 

The Europeans established the Atlantic slave trade, purchasing African slaves from coastal Africans with cheap European goods, using slaves to mine silver and grow sugar and cotton in the Americas, and using the profits to pay in bullion for highly desired Indian and Chinese imports. The Europeans initially had no quality goods to trade with the Indian and Chinese, but the Chinese needed precious metals to make coins for their money economy, at a time when much of Europe was still bartering. 

The callous “divide and conquer” strategy of betrayal on all sides never quite succeeded in China, though as the Western Europeans grew stronger, from about 1850 to 1930 they forced China, weak at the time, to tolerate intrusive European demands to artificially prop up trade .England deliberately promoted opium addiction in China to create a demand for its goods.  England set up artificial trade barriers (eg against high quality Indian cloth) to support English owned, slave based cotton plantations in the Americas and the initially poor quality cotton mills in England.  The economies of China and India were ruined by these impositions and recovery did not commence until the 1980s.

European colonialism did not arise because of any innate superiority or innate evil in Western Europeans, but because of unequal technological development born of geographical accidents, uncontrolled epidemic diseases, animosity between indigenous peoples, short sighted elites and abuse of human rights on all sides.