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Yes I agree white people gave us climate change, the world wars and 9/10 genocides in the last 200 years
I mean, counting them as the same is part of the genocidal process -- where else would we consider exterminationist wars against distinct ethnicities and nationalities to be the same?
those conflicts are all recorded history, at least going back to the Moghul Empire. India prior to colonization was more similar to Europe -- except not a backwater as vital trade routes went through it -- in that the wars that took place on the subcontinent were largely between local powers, of which there were many, even while under one empire or another. the back and forth wars with the Persians, Moghuls, etc., were about who owed whom tribute/feudal fealty -- I don't recall any of the involved groups attempting to just wipe out all the serfs or something. like I'm not saying this to excuse any of the combatants - they willingly threw the lower classes through the meat grinder regularly just because they wanted some piece of land held by their rivals, and the stories that survive from this time period all reflect an awareness of how much the ruling classes sucked for not recognizing this.
but none of it comes close to comparing with Europe's colonial wars after contact with the Americas. those sit in a category of their own because they decided from the start that they didn't want to rule the people who lived here but rather exterminate them in order to claim their wealth and land.
The one guy saying white people invented architecture :lmayo:
Alright we’ve had our laugh, now face the wall
It varies traditionally yeah they'd be considered white but in America Spanish people aren't even white because whiteness is an elusive and made up construct and you can't expect internal consistency in racism because it only exists in the minds and actions of racists and they're making it up as they go
Greek people aren't always white. The ancient greeks are always white, but the modern greeks might as well be turks as far as the average American cares.
that's a bit harsh, white people also told black people to build NYC for them and i hear they have very special corner stores there
Alshually sweater they're called bodergers, nit corner stores :so-true:
where do people without bordigas even go when they want to buy lasagna, an armchair and a hot take at the same time?
My local bodacious gives me free hot takes every time I come in!
Mine also has one of the bojangles cats that bojangles are famous for.
I was always a fan of those Loubega cats! Give it pets for me next time you get 2 pieces of patio furniture and an overgreased sandwich!
place that's conveniently located next to two megacontinents of resources has a golden age of innovation
Eh, its more
place where colonizers in a remote island nation figured out industrialized sailing/shipping first
England and Japan have some significant parallels in development.
But go back in time a few hundred years and you'll discover the folks building/maintaining the largest road networks tended to dominate (namely Rome, Beijing, Champa, Cairo, Tenochtitlan...)
But for a few flukes of history, the center of the world could very easily have been Indonesia or Vietnam or Djibouti or Tampa Bay.
place where colonizers in a remote island nation figured out industrialized sailing/shipping first
they didn't though, "industrial shipping" has been around since forever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhow
If you want to qualify "industrial" as simply the scale change that occurred in the 1600s then fine, but it's hardly "figuring something out" (like algebra or rocketry), and more "going through the motions"
What changed was the structure of european societies, and the scale of the shipping.
the structure was more important and fundamental, and came from the Black Death, which killed off so many people (40%, with much lower death tolls in Asia) that the kings no longer had power over their population, because there were so few workers left that people had to be paid well (leading to a "middle class")
the scale of the shipping changed because of the massive glut of free wealth from the Americas, which hyperstimulated European economies, and their newly formed middle classes' appetite for luxury goods.
this appetite for luxury goods, and more importantly the fact that said appetite was in such a broad swathe of the population (middle class, bourgeois) instead of just the king and a few nobles, in turn stimulated colonization and the rest is history
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwi3m6Hz4K34AhWikokEHfKjDyIQFnoECAYQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fclas.ucdenver.edu%2Fnhdc%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2Fattached-files%2Fentry_147.pdf&usg=AOvVaw34wkM88QVRnHs6P0EwwcXp
they didn’t though, “industrial shipping” has been around since forever.
Trans-Atlantic Trade was functionally non-existent prior to the Colonial Era.
it’s hardly “figuring something out” (like algebra or rocketry)
wE'Ve HaD rOcKeTrY sInCe FoReVeR
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_rocket_and_missile_technology
The industrialization of an applied science requires overcoming a host of engineering and logistical obstacles. The folks that figured out how to do this consistently enjoyed a sizable economic advantage over civilizations that - by dint of geography or technology or whatever - were merely subject to unannounced visitors.
the scale of the shipping changed because of the massive glut of free wealth from the Americas, which hyperstimulated European economies
The early colonial empires - Spain and Portugal - had their economies destroyed by the glut of valuables they extracted. Subsequent colonial powers - England and France - focused on less commercially valuable but far more utilitarian exports such as tobacco, iron, lumber, fur/cotton, and sugar/rum. These provided precursor elements for industrialized manufacturing. And it was industrial manufacturing that hyperstimulated the economies of the colonial powers in the end.
Once the colonies established their own domestic industrial capital, they were able to launch successful revolts and de-colonization movements.
To this day, nations with large export-oriented shipping economies dominate in global trade.
Trans-Atlantic Trade was functionally non-existent prior to the Colonial Era.
I am pretty sure that other oceans exist.
The thing that I'm conceding to you here is that the scale of something like Indian Ocean trade was far smaller than the later Atlantic one.
(partially because of the rise of the euro-bourgeois, and also partially because the Americas were essentially a huge wonderland of free stuff)Indian Ocean trade was still huge for its time, comparable to the Mediterranean, and qualitatively not much different from the later voyages by colonial powers (at least until more modern ships were invented in the late 1700s)
The early colonial empires - Spain and Portugal - had their economies destroyed by the glut of valuables they extracted.
Okay, now what happened to the wealth those "failed" countries used to hold? It doesn't magically disappear, it goes elsewhere and stimulates other regions around them.
England and France - focused on less commercially valuable but far more utilitarian exports such as tobacco, iron, lumber, fur/cotton, and sugar/rum
All of those things are wealth, and the Americas were chock full of them. You're just agreeing with my point. We can debate about why England/France benefited from this more than Iberia did, but that's a totally different argument. The big-picture reality is that there was a huge resource glut, and the Western European countries (the ones with access to the Atlantic) benefited.
Yes, even Spain/Portu benefited tremendously from it compared to the countries that DIDN'T experience it at all (the various states in India, China, SEAsia, and even Russia)
wE’Ve HaD rOcKeTrY sInCe FoReVeR
Again, my point is that there's a difference between "figuring something out" and just being a leaf in the wind of an economic breeze. The innovations of western Europeans RESULTING from this golden age were things that were "figured out" by their newly formed scientists and engineers.
ACTUAL industrial shipping (steamships, thermodynamics stuff) was stuff that was figured out in the late 17/1800s, WELL after many colonies were already taken.
The so-called "Industrial shipping" which you credit with the responsibility of colonization was not "figured out", it was just something that happened.
The Portuguese had trading colonies in Kerala and Karnataka in the early 1500s. Can you convince me that 1500s Portuguese ships were meaningfully "industrialized" or transformed in some way from their predecessors? This was almost 300 years before the first steamship was invented.
Sure these 1500s ships were probably all-around better built, due to all the money flowing in, but crediting that as the REASON for colonization is like saying that people are poor because they don't eat caviar.
The ROOT REASON for colonization is pretty much what I said in my second comment. The combination of a QUALITATIVE bourgeois societal shift from the Black Death, and a magnification of this effect via a QUANTITATIVE massive glut of wealth, and the expectation of wealth, from the Americas. Literally everything else, is downstream from this.
I think that's giving whyte people too much credit. We didn't invent genocide, we just industrialized it.
That subreddit really is as bad as one would imagine, lol
Honestly most threads in there (if not all) would basically be every post on the dunk tank forever
