(light orchestral music) - We need to look at something astounding that happened over the course
of like a hundred years. This is the final chapter, and what I think is the
most mind-boggling chapter, in the story of how Europe
took over the world. The reason why it's so mind-boggling is because this is the part of the story where the map goes from
looking like this in 1800 with Europe controlling like
35% of the world's land, to looking like this by 1914. (light orchestral music) With 84% of the Earth being
controlled by the people or the descendants of the people from this once isolated
continent in Europe. 84%, how on Earth did this happen? A huge part of this next chapter has to do with this continent, the second largest continent on Earth and the part of the
world that the Europeans hadn't really carved up yet. So this is where the whole
story comes together. It shows us how technology
and different ways of thinking helped these people take over the world, and in the process, shaped
the world we live in today. The way that we trade,
where we get our stuff, the language I'm using to
speak to you right now, and most of you understand it even though you don't live
anywhere near the place where it was invented. I'm telling you, this isn't
far away history anymore. This is the world we currently live in. So let me show you the
third and final chapter of how Europe stole the world. (orchestral music) Another video, another set
of beautiful printed maps. And I'm telling you, this is the chapter where
the maps get really good. Cartography really took off. Okay, let's get up to
speed on where we're at. Remember it all started
with Spain and Portugal. They ramped up this colonialism
thing back around 1500 and this led them to divide
the world between them until other European
countries got in on it, too. Then the real competition started. The Dutch created the modern corporation, which allowed them to
speed all of this up. The world quickly turned
into a giant marketplace run by Europeans with boats and guns and incentives to bring profits to the shareholders back home. (playful music) This is all a huge part of the story, but I'm telling you,
when it comes to scale, imperialism is just getting started and that's because Europeans
are about to level up. We're gonna call this Imperialism 2.0, a new way of taking over the world, fueled mostly by technology
and a rare cooperation between all of these empires. One British prime minister described this Imperialism 2.0 as, "the vulgar and bastard imperialism of irritation and aggression, of grabbing everything even
if we had no use for it." But let me tell you, if you're like me and you kind of have a
low key implicit belief that European domination was inevitable and that this was gonna
happen no matter what, I'm here to tell you that
it almost didn't happen. That's because by the end of the 1700s revolution was in the air. (light orchestral music) Empires were losing their colonies, starting with a group of Europeans who were done having a king
and declaring independence for themselves in the late 1700s. Soon you had a bunch of Spanish colonies declaring independence. And then over here in Haiti
you had enslaved people who were organizing and rebelling against their French masters, throwing them out and
starting their own country. These empires weren't only
losing their colonies. Back in Europe, one ruler even
lost his head in all of this. The empires were losing their grip and soon they were
fighting with one another like never before. It was chaos and it totally freaked these European rulers out. Are they losing their empire? Are they gonna lose their reigns on power? Is the era of abundance and
domination coming to an end? No, we can't let this happen. So they start doing something
that was kind of unheard of. Instead of fighting and
competing with each other, like they've always done, the European powers start
talking to each other. Their empires were in jeopardy and they needed to collaborate, find ways to share power
both at home in Europe, but also on the world stage. Soon, this new culture of
diplomacy and collaboration would turn to focus on the one continent that none of these European
powers had carved up yet. The new imperial frontier. Certainly full of resources, but not yet conquered. (whimsical music) I mean, the maps tell the story here. The maps were like a record
of what Europeans knew and didn't know about the world. I mean, this one British
map from 1800s says it all. Look at this thing. Europeans were definitely
familiar with Africa, especially here in the coast, where for hundreds of years
they had trading posts, and of course, the Atlantic slave trade. But look how they mapped the
interior of the continent. It literally just gives up and is like inland parts
almost entirely unknown, which is pretty rare for this time period. At this point, the
Europeans had really mapped a lot of the world, but this place was off limits. It was the stuff of legend, of myths. The caption here on the map says that this interior part of
Africa "may be considered as absolutely unknown or
completely unexplored. All we know," says the map, "is that its immense and arid sands are intersected with complete collections
of the most ferocious beasts and most uncivilized men." That's all they know. (light music) There was a very good reason for this. The fact is that soldiers
and explorers from Europe who went into this area, a lot of 'em didn't come home. Up to 40% died from diseases like the mosquito-borne illness, malaria. So much so that this part of the map became known as the White Man's Grave, totally off limits. But that soon changed. (playful music) Two giant things happen
that change everything, completely redirect what Europeans can do with their mounting power. First, these two French guys are able to take the bark of this tree, which had been used for a very long time for a variety of purposes and isolate a vital
chemical called quinine. It combats malaria, the major
killer of Europeans in Africa. They now have a white man's shield to protect them from
the White Man's Grave. The door is slowly creaking open. Second, this guy happens. King Leopold II, he's the
king of this new country called Belgium, and it
existed for like 40 years. It's kind of a minor place in Europe, nothing like these OG colonizers. So it's like 1875, and
King Leopold wants to play with the big boys. He wants a colony. So he literally goes
around and starts asking these major colonial powers
for like some of their land. Like he goes to the
OGs, Spain and Portugal, and he's like, "Hey guys,
I know you're in decline. Can I have one of your colonies?" And they're like, "No." So then he goes to the
British and he's like, "Hey guys, I know you have New Guinea, maybe you don't have any plans for it. You could give it to me." And they're like, "No, Leo. Don't you realize how hard
we worked to steal this land? We're not gonna give it
to you as a handout." So King Leopold decides to take
matters into his own hands. He turns to the map and
decides this part of the map, the parts unknown, where
none of the colonizers have arrived to yet, is a
prime place for his colony. King Leopold sets his sight
on the White Man's Grave. A quick reminder that this is kind of the fantasy of the Europeans who haven't explored this. In reality, at this point, Africa looks a lot more like this. But in the mind of King
Leopold and other Europeans, it's a big, blank canvas
with unlimited possibilities. So Leopold sends explorers
to like the dead center of this blank canvas. And they're armed, not only with some of the latest and greatest weapons, but also with medicine that shields them from these killer tropical diseases. These Belgian explorers arrive and are able to make
agreements with the locals, laying claimed to this land. King Leopold now has his own little colony in the center of the White Man's Grave. And of course, they start mapping it. This is a map from a bunch of Belgian cartographers and explorers when they first arrive to
this center part of Africa. Very little detail here at the beginning. This is 1880. They basically got this river, some of the offshoots, but they don't really know
what's going on in here yet. This becomes the frame that Leopold uses to build his colony. (light music) Now of course, this freaks the French out because they're like, "Hey,
what's Belgium doing in Africa? Why are they exploring all this land?" So they decide to send their own explorers to claim their own bit of land. After all, they've got the medicine, it's not nearly as dangerous, and the Belgians are doing it. Well, of course now the
British are waking up. They're sending people, too. And even the new kid
on the imperial block, Germany is chipping in, and now suddenly we've got
a scramble on our hands. (tense orchestral music) "But wait," say the European powers, "Let's learn from our mistakes. Instead of the old days where we always had to fight over things, in this era of revolution and warfare, remember that we're trying to be better about talking to one another? Coordinating, remember?" So it's 1884 and all these big, Africa hungry European empires
get together in Berlin. I mean, there's amazing painting of just them all sitting here, looking at this big beautiful map, which would be like an
amazing activity to do until you realize what's
actually happening here. You've got the chancellor of Germany, you've got the OG colonizers, Portugal explaining this place to Belgium and France and Italy, and you've even got the new
country, the United States who showed up kind of new
to all this imperial stuff, but quickly learning
how power really works on the international stage. Basically, anyone in
Europe who didn't have an empire yet got in now. Oh, and crucially, they didn't
invite any African leaders. And to be clear, this painting
isn't like exaggerated, like it's not a political cartoon. This is literally a
bunch of European dudes in a room in Berlin in 1884 discussing and coordinating
how they're going to carve up and take this continent. And they decided that there
was gonna be one big rule for this new scramble for Africa. No pretending. None of this only on the
map, fake imperialism thing that the Pope arranged
for Spain and Portugal a few hundred years previous. You actually have to control the land if you're gonna claim it. So they divide up the
map on who gets what, they leave the conference, and they get to work. The French start moving in
quickly from West Africa. The British begin taking over Sudan and expanding north from
down here in South Africa to take over all of this land. The Germans really start
establishing themselves here and over here. Italy starts occupying
all this land up here in the north and east. And Leopold, well, he got his colony. 77 times the size of Belgium, here it was as a blank canvas when they first started exploring in 1880. Here it is 14 years later. Little Belgium down here,
giant Congo up here. The blueprint is filled out,
the conquest is complete. With his new colony,
King Leopold, of course, went on to do horrible things, exploiting, pillaging the
resources from this place and wreaking horrible havoc on the people. And it is horrific and it is horrendous, and I made a whole other video that kind of goes into it more. I'll link to it and go to the sources in the description, please. Okay.
(intense orchestral music) All of these empires
were carving up this map, coming in, mapping it very beautifully. It's like literally the
opposite of what it was. It's unknown and now it's totally known. Pillaging the resources,
bringing it back home, making record profits,
et cetera, et cetera. And all of this, this carving, it happened really fast. (intense orchestral music) But wait a minute, hold on, pause. How does this make any sense? Like it made sense when
it was all like on water and there were ships
and there was domination and trading ports and all of that, but this, this is an incredibly, logistically ambitious thing to do. Like this was actually a
central question for me that led me to make this series because I just didn't
understand how these countries, in a matter of a few years, could completely carve up
the second largest continent? Well, the answer to that question isn't that surprising. These Europeans now had a leg up. They had new tools. (upbeat music) Remember they had invented
capitalism to make them rich. That gave them time to do science, which gave them technology that they used to make their capitalism
better and more effective, more productive. This cycle repeated itself
over and over and over, giving Europeans a further and further leg up technologically, until soon they had stuff
like this, a steamboat. You didn't have to worry
about the wind anymore to keep going. You could just steam your way
all the way up African rivers. - Or the old African queen. - Or the railroad, quick way
to transport food and troops. Like you can see this map, all of this red is either
railroads that they put in or railroads that they were
constructing at this time. This allowed Europeans to level up, not just in Africa, but everywhere. I mean, here they are in India. The British quickly taking
over this entire subcontinent of what today's India and
Pakistan and Bangladesh with this massive complex rail system that they built basically in no time. They also invented the telegraph, which could now relay messages
in a matter of minutes instead of weeks. I mean, this political
cartoon really personifies how powerful this was. And of course, what we've been
looking at this whole time. (upbeat music) They made maps. (orchestral music) Big, beautiful juicy maps
showing the geography and the people and all of the
land that they had conquered. In addition to technology, these empires had also perfected the art of allying with local power holders and turning the people against each other. "Divide and conquer," which allowed a small group of Europeans to control millions of locals. And of course, they had these. (orchestral music) These refined killing machines that allowed small groups
of European soldiers to rip through truly
formidable African armies. Like look at this painting from Sudan where the British used their guns to slaughter 10,000 enemies
with just a few hundred losses. And hear this casual caption showing that these savages were now "mowed down by these
modern weapons of war, clearing way for civilization." Now, it wasn't this easy everywhere. Descendants of white Dutch settlers held off the British for a long time down here in South Africa, and the Ethiopians were able
to hold off the Italians from conquering their land, making it the only place in
Africa to never be colonized. But listen, in the midst
of all this bloodshed, we have to talk about something
that doesn't fit cleanly into our narrative of good versus evil. Because the presence of these
Europeans in this continent also brought really positive things. Remember those French
dudes that discovered the treatment for malaria? Well that was tested in the field in French Algeria, a colony. It changed medicine forever, giving us our modern
understanding of mosquitoes and the diseases they spread. This scramble into Africa
helped push forward our understanding of health
and disease and medicine. These and tons of other
medical developments help these Europeans conquer land, but it also brought innovation
that we still use today that has saved countless lives. (light music) Okay, so technology was
a major defining factor, but it wasn't just technology. Once again, we see in this chapter what we saw in other chapters. That Europeans had to develop new, sophisticated mental inventions that allowed this all to go down. The popular story that they
were telling themselves at this time was that all civilization could be ranked according
to the level of development. And look, according to this analysis, they placed themselves at the top and they could tell themselves very easily that they were the enlightened
people of the world. This new colonizing story was the most sophisticated
and tantalizing yet, and it's one that's still kind of embedded in a lot of our brains still. That the enlightened
civilization had a burden to bring civilization to
the rest of the world. And for that, they kind of needed to stay on top and control. And the reason why this story was so believable and tantalizing is because at this time it was being blended with
actual real objective science that was being done by Europeans. Like this guy, Charles Darwin, someone who changed the way that we think about the natural world. He had just put out a book
about how animals evolved into hierarchies with different
capabilities and traits. Well, if that applies to all animals, then it must apply to humans themselves and their societies and
their civilizations. So then they go out into
the field with their maps and they start gathering observations that confirm this story. And soon, they're
measuring people's skulls all around the world. They're keeping notes, they're developing theories and terms, they're writing academic papers, all of this to define a pretend set of pseudo-scientific ideas, the idea that we're all
part of a different race, all with different natural capabilities. And that is what must explain why some people have the
resources and the technology and others do not. Like the previous stories that
Europeans told themselves, this one was intoxicating. Think of all the generations that passed where this story could be ingrained into the minds of the people. But again, remember that I'm not saying that these Europeans
are telling themselves this story every day. We're now talking about the great, great, great grandchildren of like
the original colonizers. The individual people didn't
have the grand plan in mind to go carve up Africa. They were just responding
to what they knew, what they'd been told was real, what they wanted to believe. It was a way of life. It was a way of thinking. And if we think that we're somehow exempt from a similar type of mental
model that we don't see but that dictates our behavior, we're tricking ourselves. I mean, listen to one of
these British imperialists, Cecil Rhodes. He says, "We happen to be
the best people in the world with the highest ideals
of decency and justice, liberty and peace. And the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for humanity." Okay, Cecil has made up his mind. (orchestral music) Okay, so let's look at the map in like the early 1900s. Africa looks like this, completely carved up by European powers. Over here, the Dutch had conquered the entire Indonesian archipelago. The French completely taking over this part of Southeast Asia. But the real kingpin in all
of this taking over land stuff was the British Empire. In addition to all this
stuff they had in Africa, they occupied the huge
Indian subcontinent. They also had a few of
these important ports like Hong Kong and Singapore. I mean, I can't go over all
of the stuff they took over 'cause it's just too much. At the peak of their empire, they ruled over 412 million people, which was a ton for that time. Their domination had spread
to almost 25% of the globe, making Britain this rainy
set of islands in Europe the biggest empire that ever existed. In doing so, they spread their people, their ideas, their economic system, their fringe language to
every corner of the world, including where I'm sitting right now. Because remember, the US
is just one expression of the British Empire, the branch of the empire that went on to become the most powerful
country in the world to influence how the
world order would look. By 1914, Europe had successfully
taken over the world. (light music) They were deathly rich compared
to the rest of the globe. And their ideas, both good and bad, were deeply embedded in
the international system. But suddenly, all of this technology, all this industrialization
that made them so effective, turned away from conquering faraway lands and was turned on each other. (cannon explodes) (orchestral music) Over the next 30 years,
hundreds of millions of people are killed in the two
most destructive wars ever made possible by all the same things that allow Europeans
to take over the world, sophisticated weapons in technology that Europeans are now
turning on each other. The so-called sophisticated race is now slaughtering one another on an unprecedented scale. These wars didn't do the image of the civilized Europeans any good. And Western-schooled
local elites decided that they didn't wanna be ruled
by foreign forces anymore. They were able to rally their
people around common language and birth to national
identity that didn't include being ruled by white people
from some faraway continent. And they pushed the colonists out, sometimes peacefully, but
most often with force. The Europeans had built
this insane global project for more than 400 years, and yet they saw it crumble
in a matter of decades. (tense orchestral music) So, today, the map has
been severely redrawn. Former colonies are now
mostly independent countries. There are still a ton of
weird, idiosyncratic holdovers from the colonial period. I've talked about those many times and I will continue to talk about them. (light music) I wanna finish this up, finish this video and
finish this series up with my last thought here, which is something that the
map doesn't tell us much about. (light music) Even though all these
countries became independent and they can claim their own
sovereignty, their own borders, their colonizers are gone. They didn't actually. Not only were there loads of borders that were literally drawn by colonizers, I mean, see basically
all of my previous work. But by the end of this it was the Europeans that
had tied the whole world up into an interconnected system that still kind of echoed the old one. The Dutch invention of the
shareholder corporation didn't go away. Private companies didn't
suddenly stop looking for the same far off places to find resources, to find labor, to feed increasing demand
among their people back home. And European rulers and their offspring didn't stop using their big
metal guns and their technology to get what they wanted In faraway lands. Occasionally talking to each other and occasionally fighting with each other. Fighting to control
land, to control people, to control ideas, and
perhaps most powerfully, the idea that our enlightened
way was indeed the best way. - We will stand with
the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of, by, and for the Iraqi people. - Certainly it has not gone away. (light music) And yet, if it were only that simple, a simple narrative of good and bad, greedy Europeans take over the world and do anything to stay ahead, that would be a lot easier in some ways, but it's not. Europe taking over the world has also thrust humanity
into an age of peace and prosperity where people live longer, suffer less in a lot of ways, have more food to eat. I mean, the very moral lens that you and I are using right now to evaluate the good
and bad of this history, that was a lens that was
cultivated and developed by the same cultures that pillaged and subjugated their
way around the planet. These ideals of justice and equality and human rights and representation, social equality and self-determination, those ideas permeated the globe alongside the colonizers who carved it up. And yet, it was this conquest
that put these people on top of the whole system giving us the power and the advantage, the default power holders in our world. (light orchestral music) These three parts have been a story of how an isolated
group of farming people, some of them my ancestors, left their shores to explore, discovering a vast world that eventually they would find a way to control. And in the process, setting the rules for how things work today. What's slightly scary to me about this is how easy it is to look
back on this whole history and feel like it was gonna happen this way no matter what, that it was inevitable. That of course Europeans
took over the world. They were always more adept, they were bound to control the planet. But if there's anything I've learned diving into this broad tour
through European imperialism is that this idea is just hindsight bias. This didn't happen because
of some superior DNA or because God wanted these
people to take over the world, but rather it happened to
because a bunch of people happened to be at the right place that allowed them to start a chain of millions of little decisions that pushed them to do whatever they could to procure more and more resources. They got ahead because
of lucky circumstances. And yet today in our modern world, we continue to do whatever
we need to to stay ahead while simultaneously believing that it was always gonna happen this way. (light music) It's over. It's over. I mean, the series is over, but the year is over. I deserve this. Not only is it the end
of the Europe series, it's the end of the year and what a year it has been. By the way, this video is
not sponsored by anyone, probably because we're in a recession. And so I'm gonna take this time to just reflect a little bit
on what this year has meant for me as a storyteller and a journalist and for our team and what
we are gonna do next. I think for me, the big
thing I learned this year was that we can build a big operation. Like for a long time it was just me kind of pushing buttons on a laptop and like making stories. And this year, it actually became a team. We now have lots and lots of people making really, really cool
stuff, a very talented team. And we're doing journalism on
a level that we've never done. We go really deep on every fact
that we say on this channel, and that requires a lot of work. Sometimes that feels really tiresome, but a lot of the time that feels exciting. That we on YouTube can be
doing like hardcore journalism and fun stuff too, obviously. We got to do a few in the
field documentaries this year, which was really amazing. I went to Paris and Korea and Switzerland. We printed a lot of amazing maps and showed you what maps
were like over the years and what they were used for. Oh, and my hair got really long 'cause I decided for the
first time in my life not to cut it, and that's making my
whole no shampoo thing a little more complicated. Maybe I'll make a video about that. Anyway.
(romantic music) I eat a lot of Doritos. Like a lot of Doritos. Like I really like Doritos, even after I know how they're made. But in my mind, this is
kind of just the beginning. Like I want this to be the beginning. I want like four years from
now to look back and be like, "Oh yeah, 2022. That was the year that we
really started to ramp up." And that gets me to the thing that I'm really excited about
that we launched this year, which is a community on
Patreon called The Newsroom. A place where people like you support us in what we're trying to do here and allow us to grow. More and more, and especially
during economic downturn and unpredictability, this work that we do relies
on community support, on people like you showing
up and supporting us. And it's our Newsroom
supporters that are allowing us to do better work, to do more of it, and I'm very grateful for that. In addition to supporting
independent journalism, Newsroom members also get
access to a bunch of cool stuff, like a behind the scenes vlog, an extra video every month. There's a lot of really talented, interesting people behind the scenes. And every month you get
a vlog where you see how it's all done. You get access to music
from our composer Tom Fox. You get access to my scripts. Like occasionally we do
Q&As where we get to chat. I do polls where I get story ideas. It's become a really cool
community of supporters and just a kind of a sounding
board for cool ideas. Oh, and here's a big one. We've started publishing
our videos over on Nebula, which is a creator-owned platform where you can get our videos a week early. There's a link in my description
that explains all that. If you wanna support the channel and you're like a production person, then we have LUTS and Presets, which help us color our videos and photos. And if you don't wanna support the channel and you just wanna keep watching, that's fine, too. I'm not here to tell you to give me money. I'm here to make cool stories and I hope that you're
learning from these videos and I appreciate you being
here in the first place. So, let's raise a glass
to a wonderful year of learning and growth
and amazing stories, and look forward to a 2023 that I hope is gonna be full of even more growth. Not only growth in the number
of people that are here, but also a growth in our desire to like understand this world, to understand the story
of how we all got here and how it works today. I will continue to be
the curious storyteller who tries to bring those stories to you in the best way possible. I appreciate all of those
who are here supporting, and cheers to a great 2023 of curiosity and a lot of maps. Bye everyone. (light upbeat music) (gentle music)
