(dramatic music) - It's easy to think that
Europe was so successful in taking over the world because they had, like, better
ships or guns, or whatever. But when you actually
look at the whole story, you see that it was actually
just a perfect storm of technology and timing
and ideology and religion, of a few key inventions. And what I wanna show you in this video is that one of the biggest reasons that Europe was able
to take over the world is because of the invention
of the modern corporation, a collection of people
who don't know each other but who pool their money
together for the same goal: extracting resources from far away places. So this is part two of "How
Europe Stole the World." (dramatic music) (image clicking) Hey, before we dive into this story fully, I need to tell you about
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for supporting this video. Let's dive back into how
Europe stole the world. (upbeat music) Okay, quick catch-up on
where we are in the story. In part one, we talked
about how Spain and Portugal went out to get in on trade and accidentally ran into a bunch of land they decided was unclaimed,
and it turned into a big race to see who could take over
as much land as possible. After about a century of this, other Europeans start to take notice of this model of expansion, and they realize that it's a a great way to enrich your country. Some of these countries have
been dabbling in imperialism, but in the early 1600s it
was time to get serious. The first to follow suit were the Dutch who were becoming really
good at navigating water and making maps and doing business. They decided to follow Portugal's lead and go around the bottom of Africa, stopping right here at the very tip in what today is known as
Cape Town, South Africa. They established a permanent
colony of white settlers whose descendants would go on to become a major part of
South Africa's history. (images whooshing) (cheerful music) The Dutch used their prime
position in Cape Town to restock on their way to Southeast Asia where they were trading for
spices with local empires and claiming serious amounts of land in what is today in Indonesia. Around the same time, at
the start of the 1600s, we see the next kingdoms trying their hand at large scale imperialism. Meet the two rookies on the block, (upbeat music) England and France, who would go on to actually cause a lot of
trouble on the world map, but for now they're just getting started. They, for the most part,
followed Spain's lead going west for the Americas, though England sent ships
east at this time as well. Anyway, here in the
Americas they showed up and, like colonizers before
them, found lots of land and lots of people living on that land. Hm, kind of inconvenient. "These aren't real people, right? "They don't actually own this land," you can hear the English people like sort of saying to themselves. So they came up with a
new very useful tool. It was a mental tool. In addition to guns and smallpox and alliances with local tribes that helped them divide
and conquer the locals, Europeans also developed a
complex set of legal philosophies to convince themselves that these people were not in fact capable to claim any land. After all, they were foragers. They didn't farm. They couldn't own this land because they didn't use
it for productive means. They were subhuman, or
at least non-civilized, so they do not deserve to own property. Very clever, very effective. (upbeat music) And so now you see the next
layer of ideological thinking that was required for these Europeans to justify their land theft. It was the need to dehumanize the people living on these lands. (upbeat music) Here's a letter from a British settler who describes North America
as a wilderness, quote, "Where none inhabit but hellish
fiends and brutish men." This dehumanizing paired really
well with another ideology that was very popular at
the time, Christianity, (angelic music) a religion that told
its followers to go out and preach to everyone so
that they can be saved. Perfect. (birds cawing)
(upbeat music) We have these unrefined,
brutish, fiendish men, and we have Christians who
have the power to save them. Anything is possible now. So by the late 1600s, the colonizing project is fully underway. A lot of Europeans are getting in on this, but here are the major players. You've got Spain and Portugal, the OGs, and then you've got the
Netherlands, France, and England. We need to make one thing clear that the major reason why
these European empires were so successful so quickly was because they were really the first to start trading by sea
in the Western Hemisphere. So while Jesus and saving and whatever was a big part of the justification of Europeans going out and
feeling entitled to take land, he became less and less
of a part of the picture, especially for the Dutch who
basically were just like, "Who cares about Jesus? We want profit." (cheerful music) And this is the next phase of the story of how Europe took over the world. We'll call this chapter Private Empire, and frankly, it's one of
the most important things to know about this history. (cheerful music) Remember that European imperialism started as a desire for trade, to trade with big empires in the east. Then surprise, we found all this land. We'll call it unclaimed
and we'll start claiming it while dehumanizing the
natives in the process. Remember? Okay. A lot of that was funded by governments, like kings and stuff, but eventually the citizens
themselves of these places realized that they could
make a business out of this. And again, this is where the
Dutch wrote the blueprint. (cheerful music) So now instead of asking
the ruler for support, they could just get
together a bunch of people and form a corporation, like
the first corporation ever, the Dutch East India Company, which would fund private voyages. And you, a random Dutch
person in the 1600s, could buy this share, a little
portion of that company, to get in on a little bit of the profits. But if the profits are big
enough, then everyone wins. Welcome to the era of corporations. (energetic music) So now you have the Dutch with their new Kickstarter campaign crowdfunding their private empire, totally exceeding their goal. And these Dutch corporate sailors set out on the tried and true routes
that they already knew, arriving to Indonesia where they showed up not to convert people
to Jesus necessarily, but to harvest cloves and peppers
as efficiently as possible and to come home and to
sell them for a profit and fatten the pockets of the shareholders who funded the whole journey. This isn't like a surprising
novel model to us today because this is how the world runs, but at this point, this
was a new invention. Oh, and the government
secretly loved this. They could give the company
some military power, kind of ignore the details of exactly how it was all going down, and still ensure that their country got in on the world's riches. And these corporations
leveled up really quickly and became basically
little private empires with the ability to take
over land, build bases, and establish relationships with locals, not for the prestige of like a king, but so that they could make more money for their shareholders. It was the private investors who helped them get really big really fast all through this invention of
the publicly traded company. (melancholy music) And again, it all started with
the Dutch East India Company. And just like any startup, they were more nimble than
the clunky old government. They had good funding. They were private. They were fast. They had an ability to
undercut competition. All of this allowed them
to dominate this region when it came to taking over
land, harvesting stuff, and bringing it back to Europe. And because they were the best operators, they eventually became the kingpins of all spice trade in Europe, things like black pepper, nutmeg, cloves, all of this because of the countless trips that they were taking between
the East Indies and Amsterdam. (melancholy music)
(thunder cracking) Okay, but it wasn't just the Dutch, the British also got in on
this private empire idea. (dramatic music) Let's see here. This map, it's the map of all of the British private companies and there's spheres of influence. The government doesn't own these places. This is like government-supported but by and large private companies, profit-seeking businessmen
looking for stuff that they couldn't get
in their own country going out and finding
places where they could. Over here in North America
you have the Virginia Company who's like going hardcore on tobacco, and then its sister company,
the Plymouth Company. One was funded by a bunch of Londoners and the other, the
Plymouth Company, funded by a bunch of rich dudes
in Plymouth, England. Their job was to colonize land and to build a business in the new world. And then if you look
over here in the east, you see the British East India Company who got really good at taking over giant
amounts of land in India. (dramatic music) The French were doing the same thing. They had their own West India Company that was colonizing the Caribbean to grow and sell sugar,
and many, many more. (dramatic music) Private empire was such a
powerful accelerant to imperialism because it got all of
these private empires to compete with each other and to get better and more efficient and to practice their conquests. Repetition fueled by
profit-seeking people. They developed amazing
skills and they drew maps, a lot of beautiful, beautiful maps. (dramatic music) As a map nerd, this is where
I start to, like, perk up. I notice around this time, like sort of late 1600s
and then the 1700s, European maps start to
fill out with more detail, with more accuracy. Because after all, the more
you can depict on paper, the better blueprint
you have to conquer land and exploit it. So by the 1700s, Europe
is now a different world than what you saw in the 1400s. You start to see kings
living in insane excess. Tea and coffee and chocolate
and tobacco and sugar, they have access to so much stuff. (dramatic music) And perhaps most significantly, it wasn't just for the ultra rich, it was a new middle class, the mercantile class of
merchants who were getting rich off of all of this new commerce. There was suddenly abundance. (dramatic music) And with abundance comes time, time to sit around and
think about art and science, all while sipping on coffee
harvested from faraway lands stimulating these European brains to invent new ways of measuring things, to observe the world, the stars, to manipulate nature, to make life better. And the competition between
these private empires just grew. And like with any
profit-seeking competition, these companies needed to keep leveling up how much wealth they could
extract from these places, how much land they could take
over to meet demand back home, until eventually they turned full on to the most horrific version
of profit-seeking imperialism: (dramatic music) stealing millions of people from most notably here in West Africa, taking them to their new colonies
and forcing them to work. (solemn music) (images screeching) Stealing and trading humans
and forcing them to work was not anything new to this continent. Islamic and African slave
traders had been doing this for a very long time, but it was here in the 1700s, in this context of private empire, that things really start to pick up as these European empires, mostly England, Portugal, and
France, took it to a new level to fuel their highly optimized, shareholder-fueled private empires. So optimized that the slave
trade itself was outsourced to a private company, at
least in the case of England. It was imperial profit-seeking
efficiency at its finest and most horrifying. You can almost hear the glee and greed in the voice of one English
slave trader who wrote, quote, "What a glorious and
advantageous trade this is. "It is the hinge on which all the trade "of this globe moves." (solemn music) But Europeans are starting
to become really enlightened at this point, right? Like, they're starting to
think through like human rights and like equality and starting to lay the
groundwork for like democracy. Yes, but remember that
these Europeans had ideas in their minds that were planted
hundreds of years earlier, ideas that allowed them to
invent things like the new world and unclaimed land that
actually belonged to them. They applied a lot of those
same ideas to the slave trade. A lack of Jesus, a lack of white European
culture and technology, making these people
inferior, in need of saviors, to make use of their land, their resources, and their bodies. (dramatic music) Okay, but let's just be clear
about what's happening here. Yes, this is about profit. Yes, this is about ideology. But this part is so damn important to me because this is the foundation upon which our modern world is built. In this moment, these empires
were actually building structures in our minds, structures that define who has power, who is worth something,
who gets resources, who is permitted to lead,
to exploit, to benefit. These structures were defined
by force, by profit, by greed, and they totally worked. They put Europeans on top, giving them the prosperity and resources to fuel scientific, cultural,
and political revolutions that allowed them to keep
holding onto that power, to keep exerting domination over others. Okay, yeah, I get it. Half of you just had like a conniption because of this like woke
sermon that you just got for me. That's not what this is, okay? I'm trying to look at the
history and tie it to today, how all of us live in a world that was built off of what
happened during this time, the ideas, the movement of people that happened because
of this private empire. That's not the woke mob. That's just like what happened. Sorry. (cheerful music) Even after the British
people here on the east coast of North America wanted
to break away from England and start their own country where, quote, "All men are created equal," they still couldn't throw
off the thirst for profits that slavery brought them. These structures were way too
firm, so they kept doing it. The momentum of private empire
was too great to slow down, at least not without a bloody war that almost ripped this
young nation apart. (cheerful music) (cannons banging) (swords clinking) So that's private empire, a huge part of Europe's ability
to take over land on the map and reshape the world. In part three of this series, which is gonna be the final part, I'm gonna tell you what happens next when these powers reach
every part of the globe, establishing an order that they control, how we talk, how we do our
politics, how we trade, including some really
good, positive things that have made the world better. It's an order that was shaped by these forces of European imperialism, and it's an order that still
shapes all of us today. (cheerful music)
