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The article overlooks a very important factor, that only Europe had colonies in the Americas, and that brought massive wealth to the continent since the XVI century. Before that, the Middle-East, India and China were , in general, more technologically and scientifically advanced than Europe.

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This overlooks why Europeans were able to achieve colonisation. Let's remember that e.g. the Inca empire, one of the biggest empires the world had ever seen at the time, was essentially colonised by 168 men (with one canon) [1]! And in a territory (Andes) that was inhospitable to the Spanish.

This is quite mind-boggling. There are many reasons for this, but clearly an important reason is that the conquered empires where themselves forged with violence (and did colonise neighbours), and internally divided, more so than the Europeans.

Divide-and-conquer

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conquest_of_the_Inca_E...

> This overlooks why Europeans were able to achieve colonisation.

Columbus stumbled upon the New World while looking for a new sea route to Asia. There were no Chinese or Indian traders looking for sea routes to Europe.

Before industrialization, there weren't that many things Europe had to offer that weren't already available elsewhere (Asia already had firearms and ships, maybe not as good, but good enough for the era). Whereas India had pepper and spices and China had silk, both of which were highly valued in Europe and could not be produced domestically.

> Let's remember that e.g. the Inca empire, one of the biggest empires the world had ever seen at the time, was essentially colonised by 168 men (with one canon) [1] ... There are many reasons for this, but clearly an important reason is that the conquered empires where themselves forged with violence

There were other reasons too. Pizarro's men had steel armor and weapons whereas the Incas had stone or bronze weapons and padded armor. They had horses (mounted lances can do stunning amounts of damage to unprepared infantry) and the Incas had no experience in dealing with horse-mounted troops when you're on foot (spear walls, spiked pits etc). Pizarro held the Incan emperor hostage. Smallpox and other diseases took their toll later on. etc. etc.

>There were no Chinese or Indian traders looking for sea routes to Europe.

That's possibly not true. The author of this book makes a compelling case the Chinese had actually been exploring earlier:

https://www.amazon.com/1421-Year-China-Discovered-America/dp...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Menzies#1421:_The_Year_C...

I'd never heard of this book (or theory before) but its Wikipedia page has lots of criticisms and claims that the book is basically nonsense (having said that, many of the references are to a site called 1421exposed.com so...¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ). The Wikipedia article about Zheng He's voyages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_voyages#Seventh_voyag...) has substantially better references and makes no claims (even speculations) that he ever traveled to the New World.

Let's just admit that if such a voyage did in fact take place, it did not make anywhere near the impact as in Europe.

While there is truth to everything you say, I question the importance of horses in the Andes. Horses are not really at all useful at the kinds of altitutes where the Incas dwelled.

The key to the Spanish conquest was that the Inca empire was full of internal conflict, the most important of which was the lethal enmity between the sons of Huayna Capac. The Spanish never really had trouble finding native allies, who were only too happy to get some rival tribe to be 'wacked' by association with the conquistadores.

You're right, native allies were important for the eventual conquest of the Incas. I was referencing the key Battle of Cajamarca where ~160 Spaniards slaughtered thousands of Incas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cajamarca) and took Atahualpa, the Inca emperor, hostage.

Europe became rich through brute military conquest/colonization of the Asia, Africa and South America. They capitalized on free labour, free flow of ideas and goods from their colonies.

Actually diseases from Europe swept through the population, decimating it; except right at the coast the natives met the devastating germs before they met the Europeans themselves. There was brute force, but little of it was needed. Europe got Syphilis in return, which also caused widespread death for a generation or two, before mutating into a less fatal form.

Europeans got the bubonic plague from Asia as far as we are aware.

As I said in another post: this begs the question: why did the Europeans manage to be so much better at brute military conquest/colonisation than anybody else? Rest assured that everbody else also tried ...

Guns (Military weaponry) and the Bible (Idealogy, Culture). They used their bigger better guns to physical subjugate their subjects. They then used their religion or the idea that their culture was superior to mentally subjugate them. Once their subjects were physically and mentally subjugated they proceeding to build an economic empire on their backs.

    to mentally subjugate them.

This is a daring proposal. What you are essentially saying is that we could simply walk into another country, tell the population: "Hey we are better than you, do as I tell you" ... and voila, we rule them.

It really doesn't work this way. If you don't believe me, try your scheme on your neighbours. Report back.

Well, the key question is why did the Arab World and Asian civilizations fail to do the colonization that the Europeans did. Also, the parity between Europe and the rest of Eurasia was largely achieved around the 1400s, which is to say, prior to the first wave of colonization.

>> why did the Arab World and Asian civilizations fail to do the colonization that the Europeans did

Perhaps because of the sheer size of Asia. Western Europe isn't exactly large.

Western Europe? Do you mean the landmass that extends all the way from the Atlantic ocean to the Pacific? You can walk all the way from the Bering strait to the Atlantic Ocean, and down to the tip of Africa.. thats a pretty large landmass and there was no gulf between Asia and Europe. (its pretty inhospitable in parts I agree, but the Mongol Empire reached the Mediterranean)

Also, perhaps, because the Arabs who were conquering were generally a land-based civilization, whereas the English, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, were all sea faring civilizations.

Certainly the Arabs had boats and knew how to use them, but I'm not sure sea voyages held the same cultural cachet in the ancient Arab world as it did in the ancient European coastal civilizations.

I think the key to this question is ocean going vessels. The big colonisers the English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese were all seafaring nations.

This was the platform from which the global colonisations of 1400 onwards sprung.

What were the peculiar conditions that caused these guys to take to sea in the first place and why didn't their Asian counterparts do likewise?

I think the Arab world can lay claim to some conquests - Spain for a while anyway ...

I think this is an important question, why did the European nations have more success in colonization? Was it something inherent in the nature of Arab/Asian cultures that made them less willing to travel oceans and capture new territories? They have coastlines and trade routes too. Can it be explained by history/climate/geography/religion?

All of the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Spain were "colonized" by the Arab world during the conquests after Mohammed's death, much before the first wave of European colonization. It was not in a seafaring fashion but it was no less monumental and likely resulted in vital knowledge in math and the sciences being passed on during a time when Europe was one of the most backwards places on earth.

The Arabs conquered North Africa (which speaks Arab to this day), Persia, Spain (from the 700 to the 1400, a fairly big ammount of time) and they where able, by means of maritime commerce and the spead of Islam, to influence lands as far as Malaysia and the Philipines.

The Turks conquered Constantinople, the capital of one of the most advanced civilizations in Europe, and they employed the new cannon technology to successfully besiege the city in 1453. The Mughal empire pretty much colonized India in the 1500s, and did it basically with gunpwder. [1]

Xinjiang, Tibet, and Vietnam were occupied by different Chinese dynasties several times. While it began in the XVII century, China pretty much colonized Taiwan, despite previous Spanish/Dutch. China had a significant commercial presence in the Indic Ocean and Southeast Asia by the 1400's, and substantion immigration to SE Asia - specially to Malaysia. Ming China had substantial naval technology, and they have repeatedly won naval battles against the Portuguese, one of the great naval powers of the time [2]. They invented fire-arrows, basically incendiary rockets, frequently used agrains ships. [3]

The Arabs, Turks and Chinese of the 1400-1600 were colonising/conquering other lands, making maritime commerce and exploration, and had gunpowder technology good enough to beat European powers at the time. The Arabs specially had a strong presence in Africa and did as much slaving as the Portuguese.

So in terms of technology, the civilizations in Asia where more or less equivalent to Europe. They did not fail at colonisation, they just had much less to colonise, and less interest to explore. The reasons are:

1- Of the advanced civilizations of the time, Europe was the closer to Americas, a large, a rich continent whose inhabitants did not use metals nor gunpowder as in the rest of Eurasia. Native Americans had no immunity to Old World diseases too. The Turkish or Chinese could very easily defeat the Incas and colonise portions of the Americas, had it been closer and they knew about it in time to do so. But Europe was closer, they discovered it first, and the countries of Europe stated competing to colonise it. By the time Asians realized the existence of America, it was probably totally colonized.

2- Europe was very interested in commerce with India, specially access to spices, and America was pretty much discovered by accident in an attempt to find a new route to it [4]. The Chinese and Arabs already had easy access to the Indic Ocean Commecial zone, so they had little incentive to expeditions. The Chinese, in particular, could simply grow their own spices, produced their own silk and porcelain and had little interest in foreign products, and even less interest in expading their religions (the Muslims did spread Islam as far as the Philipines and even to China) The Europeans sufferd from Turkish commercial blockades, and had to contour Africa to have access to Indian Continent, which was a long and dangerous route. So they eventually tried a new route.

tl;dr: Europe discovered and colonized the Americas because it was nearer and because of the lucrative spice trade. Asia did not because it is more distant and because they could grow their own spices.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mughal_Empire [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tunmen [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_arrow [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyages_of_Christopher_Columbu...

This sort of question is itself poor history. We cannot cleanly use today's popular cultural boundaries like "europe" and "arab world" to describe people 600 years ago. The assumption that we can bake all european nations into one civilization that has coherent and universal cause-effect relationships is not really solid.

So what is your explanation as to why the West charged ahead, but the Middle East stagnated?

Its the wrong question, which is why you don't tend to find a lot of respected historians writing books that seek to answer this question. A lot of assumptions are baked into this question that historians do not think are valid.

The sort of "why the west won" pop history makes experts cringe in the same way that articles on AI hysteria might make experts here cringe.

I guess the answer is complicated, but clearly one factor is the Arab golden age of science ended when it was suppressed by islamic conservatives, but modern science was then adopted by the West.

The Islamic Golden Age is usually considered to end after the Mongol sack of Baghdad, back in 1258. The main rise of Islamic conservatism doesn't really start until after the Ottoman Empire starts to decline, about the loss of the Battle of Vienna in 1683. Even then, it should be noted that the Islamic fundamentalism doesn't really arise until the 20th century.

Right. I think one important factor is that western europe was spared from the mongol conquest and genocide- china and the Middle East were not.

>The article overlooks a very important factor, that only Europe had colonies in the Americas, and that brought massive wealth to the continent since the XVI century. Before that, the Middle-East, India and China were , in general, more technologically and scientifically advanced than Europe.

That's an important point. However, what was important over the long-term is what the West did with that new wealth, namely feed a significant portion of it into helping the self-propelling dynamics the article describes.

The other civilizations, in contrast, had self-perpetuating dynamics that prevented growth and technological progress beyond a certain level, as least for the most part.

That's the central point of the article. But I still feel it should have mentioned America's colonisation and the wealth it brought to Europe. Italy did not had access to American colonies, but was very important for the Renaisance. Yet some historians say it beneffited from absorbing Greek scholars the fled the fall of Constantinople.

There are other factors that may encourage artistic and scientific advancement. The peace of Edo era in Japan (1603-1868), and a Samurai class that had no wars to fight anymore brough many artistic, cultural and scientific inovations.

The Japanese of the era had relativelly high literacy rates, developed mathematics and astronomy (sometimes discovering principles slightly before Europe [1]). The Japenese were also fond of Dutch science books on mechanics and medicine, and were more adept in using firearms [2] than it is usually assumed.

When Europe and the US, now with industrial revolution technology levels, began to harass Asia, Japan was able to modernize quickly and even defeat Russia. But this was only possible because Japan had their own "mini Renaisance" of sorts in the Edo era.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinant#History In Japan, Seki Takakazu (関孝和) is credited with the discovery of the resultant and the determinant (at first in 1683, the complete version no later than 1710).

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo-hiya https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/cc/43/61/cc43... https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/0c/39/79/0c39...

That's why Germany, Switzerland, Italy and all the other countries that didn't have any significant share in colonization did just as well anyway. And Portugal is almost a failed state while they did have huge colonies.

I'd venture a different theory: Germany and Italy were not unified and pacified states at the time (and Switzerland is tiny and doesn't have a coast). In contrast, the European empire builders, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, and the UK were unified, pacified, reasonably large/wealthy and sea-faring.

reasonably large/wealthy

Portugal is small and was quite poor until the colonization started. It did have quite a large maritime coast and tradition, though.

The Netherlands are tiny and a very young country at that time surrounded by much stronger neighbors. With a good fleet defensible though since a lot of parts can be flooded to prevent invasion.

> Portugal is almost a failed state

???

Portugal might be struggling economically (as most of Southern Europe is), but it is by no stretch of the imagination a failed state:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Fragile_S...

The average income in Portugal is almost half of what people earn in neighboring Spain and still there's a ton of people without a job. It's not a failed state but it's more like Greece than Spain for sure.

You can't just take one statistic amongst many and make overarching statements like this. Average brute salary is lower in Portugal (but not half, and then the tax systems are different). Portugal is a smaller market and the cost of living is also lower. Unemployment is much higher in Spain.

The reality on the ground is that both societies are quite similar. I don't know much about Greece -- except that it's the cradle of western civilisation. When did we start being so nasty to each other?

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