re: Africa was better off under European colonial rule - change my mind

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Makes sense. I resent OP for making me feel like I need to defend Africa.

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The book I referenced was written by Peter Godwin. If anyone wants an insider look at what happened in Zimbabwe I can't recommend this book enough.

ETA: In case anyone missed the title. 'When a Crocodile Eats the Sun".

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The portions of “Prisoners of Geography” that discuss Africa are good as well for explaining some of the unique geographical impediments the continent has in regards to civilization and infrastructure development.

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How does the book (or podcast) relate those impediments to the 'civilization' question? The trend of geographic determinism as a broad explanation of development is better than previous explanations, but there are lots of details relevant to deterministic explanations which exist outside just geography if that makes sense.

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European colonialism destroyed Africa.

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Yeah. The architecture made of sticks and cow shite was lost to the world.

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I have long believed that particular folk in the European lineage are indeed "God's Chosen"...in that these said individuals posses - both Genetically (motivated) and Culturally manifested - exhibit and extraordinary ability in their character to envision Truth, and the idea that Love is ultimately the highest calling of the "Children of God".

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Collectivism is as much a product of Western civilization as the notion of individual rights: modern progressivism was seeded in the French Revolution and it’s bastard child is Marxism.

Hubris should not allow us to overlook the reality that we all sin and fall sort of the glory of God.

Yet as we are instructed in Galatians 3:28, Christianity unequivocally proclaims that Greek, Roman, Jew and Gentile are all worthy in God’s economy of salvation.

I need to get a copy of Guns Germs and Steel. I have always meant to read it and just have not made it around to doing so.

Obviously I disagree with nothing in your post. After seeing your reply, it was I that misunderstood. The book I referenced is not nearly as granular as the analysis you provide—it focuses only on certain aspects of geography as they relate to 21st century geopolitical hotspots. It certainly does not go back to the human migration and civilizational trends you describe.

Your knowledge on this subject is clearly far more advanced than mine, so I appreciate the explanation and discussion.

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I need to get a copy of Guns Germs and Steel. I have always meant to read it and just have not made it around to doing so.

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It's a relatively easy read, but some of the claims he makes are due to his desire for larger framework for explanation, which doesn't hold up to a granular analysis. That is to say developing a framework given the pace of new information is exceedingly difficult, so much so that lots of information in the popular historical imagination is not supported by the evidence on hand. That isn't to say there aren't frameworks, one of which I will elucidate in a second, but for some reason it is exceedingly hard to overcome those older notions. I'd argue that Diamond probably overstated some arguments for a few reasons, namely to displace certain notions of development that seem resistant to explanation.

One suggestion seems to be that African groups were so isolated it made 'development' difficult, but there's a large body of evidence that shows that Sub-Saharan Africa wasn't at all isolated from the larger Eurasian monetary economy. They were an integrated part of those networks, with African tribesmen sent to India and China as soldiers and laborers, and were even involved in major drainage projects in southern Mesopotamia. Not only that, one of the great ironies of African history is that the slave trade relied on robust trade networks, the distances of which were equal or greater than European trade networks. Here's an example:



The distance from Timbuktu to Meroe is more or less an equal distance as Lisbon is from Moscow, which certainly doesn't suggest a lack of civilization in pre-colonial Africa. They were part of a broader geopolitical competition, one that is easier to explain in the Eurasian context, probably because of the narratives about The Silk Road, but a geopolitical context that still centers on West Asia as the battle ground. It was the interaction with this network of trade and the limitations posed by Ottoman taxation which drove early European colonial efforts, as there was an express desire on the part of Europeans to circumvent Islamic control of overland trade routes. African kingdoms of the era welcomed the increased competition, working out a number of different treaties promising exclusive trading rights with certain European powers. As the prevalence of overland trade routes decreased, so did the balance of power between African kingdoms and European traders, who were now responding to increased demand for labor in the New World, which of course was the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

That trade caused its own upheaval that resulted in political conflict. A side effect of the disruption of the labor supply was famines in certain regions which were deprived of able-bodied men, owing to the fact that the topsoil of certain tropical areas required land fallowing, which was a labor-intensive process. Industrialization again changed the nature of the trade, and it became illegal in the British Empire. By this time, industrializing states sought raw materials from the continent, and the resupply of labor allowed for the development of newer forms of land-intensive agriculture, like palm oil.

There was also good reason for Europeans to develop infrastructure to the degree they needed, and given the colonial powers created a new geopolitics for the region, there was little reason to connect Timbuktu to Eastern Africa, or North Africa to West, or West Africa to Egypt, which were all robust routes in earlier trade networks. While this isn't an exhaustive example of infrastructure, railroad development during the period shows the degree to which the colonial geopolitics played in what routes were developed, and what routes were not.



If I were to suggest an underrated reason for the uneven development of the region, it would be that European imperial geopolitics incentivized a certain type of centralization, which aided notions of Sub-Saharan isolation, while avoiding the complicated political economy that developed during the period of European-Arab competition after the fall of Constantinople. The immensely interesting period of early interactions between European traders and West African kingdoms gets very little discussion in the larger historical frameworks, even from people like Diamond, and perhaps too much attention is given too the overt colonial period, as it would be impossible for European states to be sensitive to the previous geopolitics of the area when it was that exact geopolitical situation they wished to undo.

They don’t call it the dark continent for nothing.

It’s contribution to mankind is zero, nada....

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They don’t call it the dark continent for nothing. It’s contribution to mankind is zero, nada....

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It’s never to late to learn.


10 African Inventions That Changed The World

LINK

History of Science and Technology in Africa

(First heart transplant, South Africa 1967)
LINK

Great book. Infuriating, but great.

I see similarities to current USA, especially how Mugabe incited a race war to cover for his failures.

LOL