No European Colonization

[NotYetRegistered]

So, let's suppose that European colonization never got started because nobody dared to take the risk to sail to unknown lands. Yes, it's an implausible scenario but let's just go with it.

How do you think the natives would've developed futher?

[Dr. Croccer]

I don't think the Americas would end up any different. There would be major changes in Africa and Asia though. African kingdoms would probably have turned into military powers in their own right and conquered quite some territory with new tactics. There might've been some kind of African Roman Empire, probably Zululand. Without foreign proxy wars, India would be ruled by one country, which would have developed and pobably even surpassed Europe.

[Phalanx300]

Europe would be colonised by Blacks and Indians?

[Juvenal]

Well things might have gone like this...

The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson

The point of divergence for this alternate history is 1405. The Black Death has killed 99% of Europeans rather than 30%-60% as actually happened.

From there it takes history right up until just beyond the present day. So we have a complete history of the world with European civilization completely absent, and Christianity reduced to a minor faith.

The story consists of 10 independent episodes. They are linked by the presence of four characters, each time as different people, but always with the same essence. It is quite fascinating, I never seen anything written that way before.

You will find many parallels with our own history, but also startling divergences, driven by the different natures of the cultures taking part.

As for colonization, well the effect of taking away European civilization is that the Islamic world has Europe and Africa as its frontier to expand into, while the more insular Chinese eventually begin to colonise the western coast of the Americas. This serves to give the indigenous peoples of the Americas a fleeting chance at independence by forming a coalition of their own.

With Islam directing its energies west rather than east, India is able to become a great power in itself, and it is here that Robinson places the equivalent of the Enlightenment, implying that Islam and the Chinese culture are too rigid to allow such a transformation.

Eventually we get something like the World Wars all rolled into one when Chinese and Islamic forces run out of other cultures to assimilate.

Finally, we see a post-war world, rather similar to our own post-war world, increasingly concerned with the effects of mankind on the environment, and fearful of nuclear Armageddon.

Some reviews:
SF Site
JanuaryMagazine
SF reviews
Wikipedia

[removeduser_4536284751384]

Without foreign proxy wars, India would be ruled by one country, which would have developed and pobably even surpassed Europe.

India would never be united, and they'd develop faster divided than they would united. Competition encourages advancement. That's why Europe was more successful than China despite almost identicle conditions; China was united and stagnated, Europe was divded and demanded the survival of the fittest.

[Dr. Croccer]

Yes, I agree that competition has been the main incentive for development, but I think that the most likely eventual outcome for India would be dominance by one state. Perhaps it would crumble into pieces and the whole process would start again.

[Blaze86420]

India would never be united, and they'd develop faster divided than they would united. Competition encourages advancement. That's why Europe was more successful than China despite almost identicle conditions; China was united and stagnated, Europe was divded and demanded the survival of the fittest.

That's actually a great topic. You should start a thread on this.

[Juvenal]

India would never be united, and they'd develop faster divided than they would united. Competition encourages advancement. That's why Europe was more successful than China despite almost identicle conditions; China was united and stagnated, Europe was divded and demanded the survival of the fittest.

This bears a strong resemblance to Niall Ferguson's view in his TV series currently airing on Channel 4 (UK).

I must admit I grind my teeth every time he uses the phrase "killer app" to denote key advantages that enabled Western Civilization to come to dominate the World. Nevertheless I am enjoying his series, even if I harbour some suspicions that the theory is all rather too neat and tidy.

For balance, here is a somewhat more jaundiced treatment of Professor Ferguson and his views (without resorting to character assassination) which I think helps to put them into context.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.p...article/10281/

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Friday 11 March 2011
The decline of the West… again
A few years ago Niall Ferguson thought Islam would bring about the end of the West. Now he’s scared of China.
David Bowden

In Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, the trendy young historian Irwin tries to spice up a lesson by sudden reference to Christ’s foreskin.
His clever-clever students, drilled on their old-school teacher’s academic discipline and trained in rebuffing his sexual advances, are unimpressed by what they see as a duff attempt by their young teacher to be down with the kids. But Irwin, undeterred, carries on with his discourse, explaining that his example is not a presentational affectation to get their attention, but the sort of surprising factoid they should be focusing on in history. In Bennett’s critique of contemporary education, Irwin stands as the symbol of the modern obsession with novelty and style over truth and meaning: we know from the outset that he becomes a TV historian, drafted in to advise the government over how to spin the suspension of trial by jury.

Given that Bennett has admitted that the character of Irwin was directly inspired by Niall Ferguson, it’s not surprising that there was more of a hint of this scene in the Harvard professor’s new Channel 4 series Civilisation: Is the West History? He began in a school classroom, which was a televisual prompt that this was a serious-yet-accessible educational programme, but perhaps also a nod to Ferguson’s role in advising his old friend Michael Gove on the new history curriculum. ‘Who can tell me’, he asked, ‘why the West came to dominate the rest?’ The kids came back with a series of answers, ranging from military superiority and accumulation of knowledge to the developments of international trade and exploration.
These all seemed reasonable responses from a group of 14-year-olds in history class, but Ferguson had a glint in his eye. ‘What if I told you’, he intoned, ‘I could boil it down to six things… which I’m going to call “killer apps”?’ The kids looked rather crestfallen at this, as though they’d been expecting a lecture by an eminent and high-profile academic historian, and instead got a supply teacher with an acoustic guitar. Fortunately, we moved on from the classroom and off to watching Ferguson wander around modern China discoursing further on the killer apps idea before he asked them to call him Niall.

It also turns out that of the six killer apps he was so excited about, two (development of expert knowledge, international trade through capitalism) were mentioned by the schoolkids and the third (military muscle) has generally formed the argument of several of his books. Fortunately, Ferguson’s self-confidence is legendary: he already seems to have forgotten that a few years ago he was convinced that the biggest threat to the West was Islam rather than China and that the first step to Western supremacy was the invasion of Iraq.

Ferguson talks at a fast pace and fires out lots of information which generally makes him look smart on TV, because he sounds like he’s bravely and innovatively riffing on ideas and challenging received wisdom, while somehow churning out received wisdom and playing the same notes over and over again. If historians are like rock groups, which is a very Niall Ferguson thought, then he would be Status Quo. That said, it’s very easy to have a pop at Ferguson and it’s that love-to-hate tendency which accounts for his high profile. He infuriates liberals because, as a thoughtful classical liberal, he’s sometimes willing to follow some seemingly liberal ideas through to their illiberal conclusion (he supported the Iraq War), which is upsetting to those who think liberalism is the nice form of capitalism (Lib Dem voters). He annoys others because he supported Thatcher and has read Marx, and it turns out that Marx actually said some very complex things about capitalism and human progress which went deeper than simply concluding he didn’t much like it.

Ferguson is beloved by right-wingers because he talks up empire, derides moral relativism and hates Islam. As James Heartfield has noted previously, he holds some peculiar, if recognisably mainstream, views on racial intermingling, and yet has dedicated this new series and accompanying book to his partner, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom I believe does not hail from his native Glasgow.

Whatever his failings as an academic historian or public intellectual, then, he undoubtedly has a journalist’s talent for getting under the skin of contemporary society’s concerns. Following self-consciously in the footsteps of Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (currently being repeated on BBC HD), this is intended as a celebration of Western values at the same time as the entity which passes for the West seems set to disintegrate economically, and perhaps already has done so philosophically and morally. Getting an hour on Channel 4 on Sunday evening to talk about industrial developments in medieval China is no mean feat, and his suggestion that the West’s success lay in its ability to wilfully steal from the East, and decide what was worth using and what was not, is an intriguing conceit.

If you wanted to know more about modern China and how the West could compete with its growth, however, you would have been much better off watching an actual piece of journalism in the shape of BBC2’s excellent The Chinese Are Coming, which was a lucid and informative look at how China has risen off the back of Western economic decline and political rudderlessness. In the backdrop to the mealy-mouthed reaction to the unexpected flowering of democracy and revolution in the Middle East – where some commentators from left and right respond with terror at the thought of what ‘Western values’ might mean – Ferguson has once again proven that he knows how to ask the right questions. His answers may prove to be a little off, but you wouldn’t expect otherwise.

David Bowden is spiked’s TV columnist.

[Radosław Sikora]

So, let's suppose that European colonization never got started because nobody dared to take the risk to sail to unknown lands.

The very wrong assumption is that a sailing was necessary to colonize the world. History of Russia shows that for Europeans, a land expansion and colonization was also possible.

[Town Watch]

Columbus and the earlier explorers did a pretty good job arguably with inadequate naval technology. But with the compass, sextant (for latitude) and a marine chronometer (for longitude) it was quite possible to actually locate yourself on the globe quite accurately and reliably, so you wouldn't necessarily get lost. You could find your way to previously visited places, and basically start serious exploration for map making and colonial purposes. Chronometer, basically an accurate clock I guess, came around in its functional form as a navigational tool around 1760s, sextant IIRC some decades earlier.

[Mr. Shaboobies]

Europe would've continued the same as it always had been. It isn't like Europe was shaken to it's very roots by colonization, rather it was the other way around. It is interesting to think how the americas would've been like in present day without colonization. Probably have some huge empires in south america that most likely would have reached Roman levels of grandiosity if left to develop.

[Claudius Gothicus]

Stagnation, collapse and revival. Mayans had already experienced an economic collapse if I remember correctly. We would have never witnessed a ''modern society''

[flopsies]

Major discoveries would not happen. Europe would probably still be using candles, and Japan and Asia would not be the technological powerhouses that they are now, but still Feudal WArs

[Menelik_I]

Colonization don't happen but great discovery and global trade still happen ok

1- America.

Not much change most of the continent was sparsely populated with semi-nomadic tribes anyway except for Inca, Maya and Aztec.

These big three would trade with the Europeans and likely buy firearm weapons, or at least a faction within buy weapons and take over. As they start to trade with Europeans for industrialized goods they become more prosperous, groups from Aztec move into the Great plain and settle the place, local Indians are assimilated or conflict ensue if they bought weapons too.

If Europe has demand for food product then Aztecs start great farming estates and sell products to Europeans when Gold start to run out.

2- Asia.

Nothing change much, they adopt european weapons, trade, modernize and someone try to conquer a piece of dirt.

3- Africa.

African kingdoms consolidate thanks to firearms and some assimilate European culture like Kongo and Ethiopia and flourish in a mix of the two.

For the rest of the continent due to great size and massive geography no uber Empire emerge, but mostly coastal city states slowly consolidating has they exploit the interior to trade with the Euros.

Zamzibar consolidate hold over east Africa and Islam is slightly more widespread.

Overall the pattern would be to acquire western weapons, consolidate existing states, spread cultures and trade with Europeans. Some wars might occur, but largely the situation is bound to stabilize after some time.

[Claudius Gothicus]

Colonization don't happen but great discovery and global trade still happen ok

It's not like XVI century Europeans(or more or less any other culture at the time for that matter) knew that you could actually maintain a trade relationship with technologically inferior partners without actually robbing all their gold/resources and enslaving/exploiting their populations.

But nice scenario anyways

[SPECTREtm]

And why would they not take the risk?... We need a scenario if there is to be a sensible discussion.

[Menelik_I]

It's not like XVI century Europeans(or more or less any other culture at the time for that matter) knew that you could actually maintain a trade relationship with technologically inferior partners without actually robbing all their gold/resources and enslaving/exploiting their populations.

But nice scenario anyways

Well in Angola and in other places they managed to solve the problem funnily :

1- Buy Weapons first ... so you can shoot if the merchant switch to Viking mode
2- Buy the things at credit ... so the merchant have an incentive that nobody messes with you or He will lose a payment.

[Ludicus]

you could actually maintain a trade relationship with technologically inferior partners without actually robbing all their gold/resources and enslaving/exploiting their populations.

Well, for the Europeans, slaves (and gold) had become Atlantic´s Africa fundamental attraction. A fact remains-Africa did not need European imports.

XVI century Europeans

XV century...

[Menelik_I]

Well, for the Europeans, slaves (and gold) had become Atlantic´s Africa fundamental attraction. A fact remains-Africa did not need European imports.

Er ... you are wrong there Ludicus, Africa needed Europeans Imports : Gun powder Weapons, Glassware, Iron tools and Technicians/Know-how.

At least Ethiopia and Kongo kingdom warmly welcomed europeans specialist workers, soldiers, monks and builders, to work for them ... so I really don't get why you say that African's didn't need Europeans imports

ETA:

In fact there was extensive trade between the Mediterranean and Timboucto, and the Zanj coast with the wider Indian Ocean.

[Ludicus]

Er ... you are wrong there Ludicus, Africa needed Europeans Imports : Gun powder Weapons, Glassware, Iron tools and Technicians/Know-how.

Allow me to clarify, Scholars as John Thornton and George E. Brooks points out that pre-19th century Atlantic Africa did not need European imports:
"...Africans could produce all or most of what they required, including manufactures. What they chose to buy was therefore luxuries and prestige items, such as European, Indian or Cape Vert textiles, various adornments and alcohol.
Iron was relatively scarse in coastal regions; so they welcomed cheap metals utensils and tools. Later, in the 18th century, they wanted firearms gunpowder and, above all, the specially-prepared Bahian tobacco known as fumo"

At least Ethiopia and Kongo kingdom warmly welcomed europeans specialist workers, soldiers, monks and builders, to work for them

Correct...

...Zanj coast with the wider Indian Ocean.

Yep...