Why didn't Africa Colonise Europe?

in 1838 in what is now south africa a group of dutch settlers known as the afrikaners face down an army of indigenous zulu warriors by the banks of the income river with no more than 464 fighters they won a decisive victory against an army of over 10 000 zulus they called it the battle of the blood river their victory despite being grossly outnumbered was seen by the afrikaners as a sign that they had been singled out by god as the chosen ones born to rule the land this was divine intervention historians have since argued it was because they had guns why didn't africa colonize europe that's a very good question that i've just decided to ask myself and also borrowed from this book by anas farofakas why were the colonizers from europe so technologically advanced whilst the indigenous people from africa had to defend themselves with shields and spears i think this is a very important question because the answer to it and the way we arrive at that answer forces us to ask a much bigger question about human nature in general it forces us to ask the bigger question why do people do the things that they do let's ask some racist people in the end race is real genetics are real and genes that provide high intelligence are real and they're concentrated in white and asian populations that's why the world's greatest civilizations have developed in europe north america and asia and not africa race is uh you cannot ignore it you cannot get around it okay i'm fairly firmly convinced of this at this point you know all these culture cucks oh no it's just the culture they just need to assimilate they just need to assimilate you know speak english and split the flag no way man no way can't happen it's race has to be race but is there evidence that it's genetic this is i'm not a geneticist genetic in what regard i mean if we took the brain of a 25 year old black man in the brain of a 25 year old white man what is it that they're doing that different sizes yeah yeah explanation number one race and iq and bones now i know the laws of internet free speech compel me to take this idea seriously and i know i really should get around to watching sean's video on the bell curve whilst also reading the book myself to make sure everything's in context [ __ ] that in any case there are intuitive problems with using genetics to explain the success of civilizations especially when you introduce factors like time if we look at the first ancient civilizations we can see there are plenty of things they have in common but race is not one of them i mean you have greece rome mesopotamia and ancient egypt that's like four different skin tones and then you have the golden age of islam when for nearly five centuries the global center of maths science and philosophy was baghdad this was at the same time when white christian europe was stuck in the dark ages the agricultural revolution which was the first big leap of human progress began in what is now syria and iraq over 5 000 years before it arrived in the uk if we're going to explain these shifts of cultural dominance we could probably do with an answer that isn't quite so static as the inherent genetic quality of the races explanation number two high-level ideas so this is the explanation which mostly comes from conservatives or classical liberals who at the very least are not so eager to measure the skulls of their black and brown contemporaries their notion is that human history is essentially the history of ideas and the success or failure of any society hinges upon the intelligence talents and morality of those living in them i'm going to split this explanation up into two parts the individual and the collective for the individualists society's course of history is mostly determined by a small number of exceptional unique and heroic or sometimes villainous characters the success of the uk during the industrial revolution would be owed to the innovative genius of inventors like james wyatt and thomas savory for the united states it would be the founding fathers this is often referred to as thomas carlisle's great man theory the idea that the history of the world is but the biography of great men so the more great men there are in a society the greater that society will be why all the great men happen to come from europe whilst none of them appeared in africa no reason and then we have the collectivist view in this prageru video ben genius shapirium says that the success of the west has been owed to its unique combination of greek reason and judeo-christian ethics which were handed down to us by god why god chose to only endow certain people with these ideas and why only people in the west were able to properly embrace them no reason you can see we come to a bit of a dead end here if europe was able to colonize africa it's because all the good ideas were in europe and all the bad ideas were in africa and i know that seems like an insane coincidence but those are the rules that i've just made up and facts don't care about your feelings i'm so sorry i hesitate to use either of these explanations because if i did there'd be nothing else to talk about and if i applied this approach to other social phenomena then i might end up saying things like black crime rates are nothing more than a multitude of bad choices being made disproportionately by black people that their treatment at the hands of the police has nothing to do with race and everything to do with culture and if that sounds a bit vague then the more inquisitive members of my audience might seek out a more concrete explanation for black people always making bad decisions then i'd eventually have to contend with the fact that my audience is full of nazis and i'd have to save face by calling them out and before i knew it i'd have a bunch of them following me around with smartphones in front of my children and that would be a bit [ __ ] and just to be fair i've also seen plenty of leftists make the mistake of simply taking this idea and turning it on its head arguing instead that indigenous africans were morally superior at peace with themselves and with nature whilst it was the europeans who were tainted by greed and bloodlust because again the problem is why explanation number three the environment now by this i don't mean systemic racism or socio-economic factors at least not here i mean literally the environment and the geography of where civilizations emerged and where they did not and i feel quite safe offering this explanation because i did not get it from the left i got it from a classical liberal in the wealth of nations adam smith talks about the first ancient civilizations and why he thinks they appeared in the parts of the world that they did he noticed that the thing they all had in common was their proximity to the mediterranean sea and to inland rivers in his own words that sea by far the greatest inlet that is known in the world having no tides nor consequently any waves except such as are caused by the wind only was by the smoothness of its surface as well as by the multitude of its islands and the proximity of its neighboring shores extremely favorable to the infant navigation of the world when from their ignorance of the compass men were afraid to quit the view of the coast and from the imperfection of the art of shipbuilding to abandon themselves to the boisterous waves of the ocean in other words the boats were [ __ ] and the people were betas the mediterranean sea is still and the weather around it is predictable which is probably why the first people to start building ships were the phoenicians in the middle east and the carthaginians in north africa for a long time they were the only ones who did why does this matter because water makes it easier to transport goods and societies that were able to move freely across water were able to expand trade giving them access to a rich variety of resources and allowing them to grow this is why the towns and villages of ancient egypt were never more than a couple of miles away from the nile or from the breakup of canals in the south europe and the middle east were able to do the same with their close network of rivers and inlets such as the baltic sea and the arabian gulf by contrast the people of sub-saharan africa had no inlets their rivers were few and far between and it's unlikely any of them were in the mood to navigate the treacherous storms around the cape of good hope this chapter from adam smith is essentially a giant [ __ ] you to the internet classical liberals of today in no uncertain terms he says the difference between the most dissimilar characters between a philosopher and a common street porter for example seems to arise not so much from nature as from habit custom and education when they came into the world and for the first six or eight years of their existence they were perhaps very much alike and neither their parents nor playfellows could perceive any remarkable difference this father of classical liberalism is not taking the side of sargon or dave rubin here he's taking the side of marx it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being it is their social being that determines their consciousness but enough from our two daddies let's talk about the event that really started to set africa and europe apart part uh what agriculture the agricultural revolution took off around 12 000 years ago when people in the middle east reigned in on hunting and gathering and started to acquire their food through farming they left their nomadic lifestyles behind and started to build societies on the base of a reliable and consistent food source did they do this because some smart man probably john locke came to them with a good idea no more recent archaeological discoveries have found that people in the middle east already knew about farming over 23 000 years ago they had all they needed to build civilizations there and then they just chose not to because they couldn't be [ __ ] they didn't need to before the agricultural revolution hunter-gatherer societies enjoyed an abundance of foods that allowed them to survive by doing very little work in southern turkey a small family-sized group only took about three weeks to gather enough food to last them a year agriculture wasn't established here because people were genetically or morally superior it had to happen here because they were starving as the climate began to change the fertile crescent in the middle east started to dry up the wild grains that grew in the area became increasingly scarce and the wild deer and antelope parts started to die out the people started farming here because they had no other choice the people in sub-saharan africa and australia were still living in abundance and had no incentive to change their way of life the new kind of workload in the middle east also started to bring a new kind of produce hunter-gatherer societies usually survived on things like meat fruit and fish things that rotted quickly and couldn't be stored agriculture meant people were now producing grains corn rice and barley which lasted a long time and could also be produced at a higher rate than people were consuming them for the first time in history humans now had access to something called a surplus an excess of production this one small addition to human life gave rise to quite a few unexpected consequences number one writing the earliest records we have of writing come from mesopotamia but they were not writing poems or stories they were recording quantities of grain that individual farmers were storing in a shared granary in sub-saharan africa there is plenty of anthropological evidence for music and even drawing but not for writing number two money because farmers were storing grains they also needed a way to prove how much they had stored this was usually done with ious that were engraved into shells but it was also the origin of metal currency the problem was these coins were made of iron they were extremely heavy and it often took years before they were minted for this to work people needed to have faith that the system would treat them fairly this gave rise to number three the state in order for people to trust the system bureaucrats had to be employed to manage public affairs and protect people from thievery because they were sitting on surpluses they also had to protect themselves from outsiders and so armies were born none of these hierarchies could have been formed without the surplus available to feed them because rulers bureaucrats and armies didn't produce anything themselves naturally the people on top started to distribute wealth in a very unequal manner which set them further apart from hunter-gatherer's societies which were mostly egalitarian but the rulers were still outnumbered by their subjects and could have been overthrown at any point they had to somehow convince the people that their rule was just divine number four organized religion agricultural societies needed something that justified growing inequalities they needed an ideology that lasted beyond the life of any ruler this ideology was cultivated by the clergy and because clergymen didn't produce anything themselves they could only exist in a society that could sustain a surplus organized religion was always expensive but its function was practical that's why for thousands of years the church in the state were one in the same and the church has never shied away from its role of reminding people of their place as the 19th century anglican hymn goes the rich man in his castle the poor man at his gate god made them highly and lowly and ordered their estate number five technology agriculture drove a whale of innovation and it did this by creating new technological needs without farming there would be no reason to invent the plow or irrigation systems with new technologies and growing populations of loyal subjects agriculture societies were able to build the pyramids in egypt the coliseum in rome the inca temples of south africa and the ziggurats in iraq none of which could have been built by the small groups of tribesmen in australia and southern africa number six biochemical war kind of surplus gave way for the growth of cities but this also meant more and more people and animals being crammed together in small spaces before the invention of waste systems the towns became a lab of deadly diseases and viruses which inevitably passed between different species chinese virus more like the every post-agricultural revolution society's virus right this resulted in many people dying but over time people in agricultural societies grew resistant to the flu and other diseases in ways that people living in tribes did not now notwithstanding that columbus was a genocidal maniac with a very cringe gold obsession but it is true that far more people in the americas and australia were killed by disease than by the sword or the gunfire of the invaders even if the settlers came in peace a hug or a handshake from one of them would have been enough to wipe out an entire village for the ones with more sinister intentions this was their first chance to engage in biochemical war most famously when a group of european settlers nearly wiped out an entire native american village by gifting them with two blankets and one handkerchief which they knew had come unwashed from a smallpox infirmary now this is where someone with a bit more self-control would be like done agriculture started where it did because it had to and the surpluses it created brought a whole bunch of other things that propelled society forwards in a way that hunting and gathering could not people in australia even if they wanted to couldn't adopt agriculture because the island lacks the necessary flora and fauna to do so but i can already send someone jumping in and saying something like hey mr box you do realize that there were agricultural societies in sub-saharan africa before the europeans arrived why didn't they build empires was it the socio-economic factors you [ __ ] beta signed tyler durden ak-47 okay there was agriculture in sub-saharan africa before the europeans arrived but there's another problem here if you look at africa on a map the land mostly goes north and south whereas in europe and asia it spreads east and west and for a much larger distance why does this matter climate changes dramatically as you move north and south whereas it stays relatively consistent if you move from east to west a society in zimbabwe could have done well but would have had very little room to expand move south and they would end up in the stormy coast move north and they'd have to go through dense rainforests the equator and over a thousand miles of desert people in europe could trade for thousands of miles across the silk road they could invade neighboring villages steal their wealth and technologies and eventually build empires well what about the empires in china india the middle east and south america why did they all fall behind the west how do you explain the industrial revolution then sincerely cthulhu dick 1350 part the industrial revolution historian kenneth pomeranz wrote about how east asia and europe were more or less on par with each other until the mid-18th century they had the same life expectancies and their economies were very similar pomeranz even argues that china's economy was more of a libertarian free market than any in europe but around 1760 the industrial revolution took off in britain and spread across europe as their economies boomed asia fell behind this split became known as the great divergence so how did people try to explain this well in a book called a farewell to alms a brief economic history of the world gregory clark argued that the industrial revolution was owed in large part to demographics that is to the remarkably high birth rates of the british upper class as they formed an increasingly large proportion of britain's demographic makeup they were able to spread their superior genes and work ethic through the general population the problem with this claim was there wasn't any evidence for it clark did make the effort to show that the upper classes had above average birth rates what he seemed to forget was that this was the case for most of europe and asia for the very obvious reason that infant mortality rates were lower for rich people now there are some cultural explanations that are a bit more valid here the german sociologist max weber makes a very strong case in showing that capitalism developed more quickly in protestant nations than it did in catholic ones mostly because of the protestant work ethic and the tendency for protestants to turn catholic holidays into working days but even weber himself always stressed the importance of remembering that these outcomes are not intentional instead the compatibility of protestantism with capitalism was simply an unintended consequence now the list of possible reasons for the great divergence is very long but probably the most obvious one is coal as it turns out coal was much more abundant in europe than it was in asia and the country that had its coal closest to the surface and in the highest concentration was britain this gave them an incentive to industrialize quickly whereas france and germany who had to buy their coal at a higher rate from the uk were a bit less inclined okay one more thing some people have argued that the great divergence actually started long before the industrial revolution you can kind of see this when you look at the uk because there's an upward trend that starts around the 1500s the answer to this is once again water coming back to adam smith britain's position as an island surrounded by fairly safe waters gave them a very strong trading advantage over their european neighbors smith talks about how eight men on a ship could move from london to edinburgh carrying as many goods as a hundred men with 50 wagons drawn by 400 horses could from calais to bordeaux and the benefits of water don't stop there on a continent riddled with wars and invasions european countries had to spend a lot of their money on military defense but for the british to defend themselves they mostly had to build boats they got very good at this very quickly and by the 18th century the british navy was the strongest in the world when it came to building colonies the british were able to spend hundreds of years extracting wealth and resources from around the world and when they had to they could very easily fight off their weaker competitors along the way the afrikaners i mentioned at the beginning of this only ended up on zulu turf because they were forced inland by the british navy they commanded the seas all thanks to the 20 miles of water that separated it from the mainland the answer to the question i posed at the beginning of this video is not in the genes or in the culture it's in the water human history is four fifths water part what have we learned here today the geographical conditions of europe and asia force people to cultivate the land in a way that africa and australia could not the surplus that resulted gave way to the rise of writing cities states technology and armies it equipped them with ships to cross the oceans and armed them with not just weapons but the biochemical power to breathe death upon their enemies when they arrived on the coasts of southern africa and australia the natives who had been living off the land for thousands of years didn't stand a chance and even the most laborious of the skull measuring classes are willing to concede that people like animals adapt to their environments the people in europe and africa adapted to radically different environments and the societies that spawned out of them were the products this is why africa could never have colonized europe and i know this doesn't necessarily answer every question there is on racial inequalities and social problems and all that but i hope that for anyone who sincerely wants an explanation to racial disparities in the present day you should hopefully now know where to look now go ahead and like and subscribe and leave a comment if you have some money that you think should belong to me consider supporting me on patreon or hand me a donation on paypal if you didn't like this video and just want to say something nasty well here is a picture of my face in profile with annotations to give you a head start [Music] [Music] is

Channel: LonerBox

Views: 271,396

Rating: 4.7341752 out of 5

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Id: jx1Jg4QAPmM

Length: 24min 36sec (1476 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/burnerforrnba]

Great video along with part 2

[u/dabbling-dilettante]

This was a really informative video, LonerBox has some amazing videos on their channel for going down a rabbit hole with- looking at the Cult of Winston Churchill one next 👀 appreciate you sharing this!

[u/Soft-Rains]

Its great he's talking about food pressure and farming but its still quite oversimplified to talk of hunter gatherer abundance. We are talking about an incredibly large and varied peoples living in many climates, cultures, time periods and countless other variables with a massive gap in information. It was not the norm that 3 weeks could feed a family for a year and I'd love to see the source quote from the Maisels book he cites (edit: found the source, its 1967 experiment by J.R. Harlan that I can't find).

r/askanthropology has plenty of answers on the subject and a lot of the estimates for "work week" are flawed in how they define work and leisure.

[u/al_spaggiari]

If you go back far enough it kinda did.

[u/slax03]

Guns, germs, and steel?