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[R*dittor] Why did Africa never develop? I'm not racist, just measuring skulls for science
(lemmygrad.ml)
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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the_dunk_tank
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It's the dunk tank.
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The answer is complicated for the reasons others have said, but I like to explain it this way:
Advanced, peaceful aliens arrive at Earth in 1400 CE. They want to set up relations with earth but they are used to dealing with planets that have one planetary government, society, etc (just like Star Trek). They don’t quite know how to deal with such a fractured and diverse planet.
So these aliens decide to only meet with leaders from selected societies. They don’t have specific criteria but are generally looking at a whole host of factors we might broadly call “development”: education, metallurgy, governmental forms, material output, health & sanitation systems, etc.
The aliens would almost certainly choose to meet with reps from at least China, India, Persia, the Byzantine Empire, North and West Africa, parts of the Arab world, and Tenochtitlan. Europe, outside of Byzantium and Al-Andalus, would have been completely bypassed. On a global scale Europe was a poor, irrelevant backwater that didn’t have much in the way of achievements that we mention or much pull beyond its own corner of the globe. If you could go back to 1400 and live some place for a year, you almost certainly wouldn’t pick Europe.
Outside of North Africa (and some part of West Africa)… I don’t know much about comparing the rest of the continent to Europe. But I really don’t think they were much behind if at all.
1400 is a good year to be in Europe because the plague just killed everybody so labor has historically high bargaining power.
I wouldn't pick any of those other options either though.
I don't know why people always conflate civilization with resources.
Europeans even before 1492 probably had slightly better lives than the average Indian/Chinese/MENA person, simply because Europe has more land and the climate is easy-mode as fuck. It's just that they didn't invent anything.
Roman accounts prove that Northern Europeans had fairly good quality of life, judging purely by the height difference (today it's only 1-2 inches, but was much bigger back then)
If I could go back to year 1400 and live out an 80 year lifespan, purely for the sake of enjoyment and not for altering history, it'd be North America no contest. South America or Africa second picks
The Byzantines were very seriously on the decline by 1400. Constantinople was a shadow of it's former glory, and the territory it governed was not doing very well either. If they made the cut I really don't see why Venice, Paris, Milan and Bruges wouldn't, as they were some of the largest and richest human settlements on the planet at the time.
Al-Andalus had also been gone for hundreds of years, and by 1400, only the Emirate of Granada remained which would be very unlikely to make the list.
While they were certainly not at the height of their proportionate wealth and influence, Europe in 1400 was still one of the most significantly densely populated areas on earth, making up roughly 25% of the world's population, with China and India each being another 25%, and the rest of the world making up the last quarter.
They made plenty of technological innovations too, improvements on horse collars, ploughs and horseshoes all originated in Europe at the time and significantly improved the life of the working population. There were also major novel advances like eyeglasses, rudders, navigational tools, compound cranks, rolling mills, glass mirrors and a host of others.
Go back to the 800s-900s and you'd be more accurate.