Did Europe have that long to wait? Hell, the Aztecs were pretty advanced. Maybe if they started sailing, they could have brought all the diseases of the Americas to Europe and Africa. Then they could have had an adventure in pyramid-building and blood-sacrifice among the decimated peoples of the "Old World"! (Hat-tip: OSC)
European technology was just that much more advanced. It's like joining a game of Civ around turn 60 when your opponents have already researched, traded, and discovered a bunch of tech. When your civilizations meet you will just not have a chance. The whole mediterranean was a meeting grounds for dozens of civilizations, if not more, where for millenia people traded goods and technologies. It was really a matter of luck that the ancestors of the Aztecs picked a far away land that was tough to farm and little animals to domesticate, and no one else around to share information with.
Europe already had a continent with water, life, food, resources, ecosystems, and everything they needed. Wouldn't it have been a hell of a lot easier to stay there rather than sailing off over the horizon?
>The strange thing is that Europe recovered quite fast.
I suspect this has to do with Europe's water-dominated geography. Traveling between Ethiopia and Mali -- two of the largest sub-Saharan "countries" of antiquity -- requires taking a caravan through the desert and/or jungle. But going from England to Poland is a boat ride. So reestablishing communication between distant societies probably happened much faster in Europe, which supported knowledge-sharing and thus scientific progress.
I believe the person you are replying to is saying “discover” relatively rather than Euro-centrically, as they mention a hypothetical Aztecs “discovering” Europe and Africa.
Not an expert, but I'm not sure that's so. Europe had been trading bugs with Asia, the Middle East and north Africa continuously for thousands of years, while the Americas had been largely isolated.
Western culture didn’t develop very quickly - the geography had humans for tens of thousands of years before culture developed quickly. Other parts of the world actually developed relatively advanced civilizations long before Europe.
I think once it began to develop it developed quickly partially due to the geography, but it was also through trade with the Middle East and Asia, which were the sources of a lot of the technology bootstrap priming Europe to develop rapidly. It’s indisputable that once the ball really began rolling Europe brought us to the modern age rapidly. But I’m dubious of the geography argument personally since it was so late in developing relative to other societies, including those in the americas.
China actually was an advanced maritime society, with expeditions across most of the world including to the Americas. In fact in the 1400s China was the world’s most powerful navy.
Maybe the idea is that if it had been there for vastly longer, it would likely have spread up the coast to North America > Asia > Europe over that time?
One thing that’s clear and matches what I have read —
(1) europe is surrounded by a large body of water (Mediterranean in south, Baltic & English Channel to north), enabling fast travel.
(2) Europe is extremely isolated geographically. Mountains, rivers & oceans isolated many cultural groups.
(3) the isolated nature of Europe, combined with access to mass transit (once sailing become prevalent) enabled technological expansion and competition.
(4) combined with massive competition from isolated cultures, once sailing was achieved, Africa and the Americas enabled massive raw resource inflows - creating growth and abundance
Eurasia in contrast consolidated around just a handful of cultures and often had an abundance of food and limited fast travel (via rivers & oceans) throughout history. This makes for less completion and although the stability enabled technological advancement and massive works. It also limited variation in ideas
It's not Europeans. Africans and Asians do better, too. Much of Euro-Afro-Asia is one continent and one ecosystem, in terms of disease, in history and prehistory. If something awful popped up in China in 2000 BC, it made its way to Europe and Africa within a couple centuries, and vice versa. Indeed it seems that resistance to smallpox, influenza and a couple other big ones, compared to the locals, was a major reason why Africans were enslaved and transported to the Americas, rather than the Europeans just relying on the local population (who were both decimated in number at that point, and who tended to die in captivity too quickly to be economically useful).
Well, it would be surprising if the Ottomans had discovered and colonised the Canary Islands (not to mention Cape Verde or the Azores), which were used by Columbus in his voyages to the Americas.
I suppose the question is why wasn't there an empire that spread across the European continent at the time of Columbus.
Given that places like Egypt, India, Mesoamerica, etc were all colonized by Europe despite long histories of advanced civilizations, I don't see how European colonization would imply a place isn't capable of technological advancement.
Of course, but obviously having the same animals as the Europeans (with the exception of Llamas) don't count -- Europeans would have already been exposed to those diceases.
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