Edit-1700s
In the 1600s the British started the Industrial Revolution. Which lead to Europe colonizing the whole world. I would like to explore an alternate reality where Europe keeps to themselves.
Its an alternate 1600s, Europe decides to use the Industrial Revolution to modernize Europe only, From Portugal to Russia, UK to Greece. They trade with Asia for raw materials and then start working on Science and medicine. Europe pushes ahead, creates electricity, they are in the modern technological era working on space technology.
The rest of the world is living the way they’ve lived to 10K years still dying of diseases like the cold and getting a simple cut can be deadly.
Would you rather live in a world where Europe is reaching space and the rest of the world is still agrarian?
You cannot keep an invention just in your borders and do you imagine these countries as like “Hey Russia its me Britain I made this awesome steam engine and I’m gonna teach you how to make one because we are European you know we love each other please keep it in your borders and I had an agreement with the Austrians they will help us build a great wall of Europe so we can keep our science in our borders”.
Your fictional alternate reality is meaningless as any kind of argument, since it’s fiction. Therefore this just seems like thinly veiled racism at worst, or at best some kind of misplaced apologist bullshit for the horrors inflicted by every colonizing nation ever.
It was terrible for the people of the time, but our modern world wouldn’t be what it was if the Industrial Revolution stayed in Europe
Remember to upvote if the opinion is unpopular.
Eh… This isn’t like, “I think Nutella on my cheeseburger is good” and more like, “US slavery was good for the slaves to learn skills”. Yea, unpopular, but the spirit of the question is malicious and doesn’t deserve a positive response. It reads as someone using this specific forum as a way to just say shitty things without consequences.
If OP had legitimately made a case with specifics, accurate dates, and actually made an argument rather than a statement, maybe it vould meet and acceptability threshold.
Setting aside the fact that you couldn’t even manage to get the dates for the Industrial Revolution right, your entire argument hinges on the laughable presumption that all advances anywhere on Earth outside of Europe were doled out to the inhabitants by Europeans, and that colonized nations, left to their own devices, would not have advanced.
I would go so far as to say that if the age of European colonialism had not happened, the world outside of Europe wiuld be even more advanced, and if anything it would be Europe that was lagging behind - that colonialism was a positive in the long run only for Europe, and was a negative for everyone else.
Europe almost reached modern technology 2K years ago during the Roman empire/Republic. Europe by the 1700s was centuries ahead of everywhere else, next closest being China. In the current age Europe would still be leading unless the whole world happened to copy the Industrial Revolution if the word got out
Yeah, and then Christianity took off and Europe ended up collapsing into ignorance and barbarism that it only managed to pull itself out of by stealing from the rest of the world.
The only quality that made Europe stand apart was a sort of cultural insanity - a loathsome combination of stultifying ignorance, unbridled greed and religious fervor that led vile scumbags to sail to other lands specifically in order to steal, murder and oppress.
And they couldn’t even manage that without first stealing navigation technology from the Arabs.
Some Major Issues:
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The industrial revolution started almost a century and a half after 1600 (in 1760) which was well after European colonization.
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You are assuming that Europe would have developed the same way if they remained isolated. For example, the fundamental ideas which ultimately led to the modern concept of disease (bacteria and virus causing infection) was introduced to Europeans via the Native Americans. Beforehand, Europeans thought sickness was caused by religious superstition. This is why sterilization between surgeries wasn’t really a thing in Europe beforehand. European medicine involved reusing bloody knives to perform surgerys on different people because they didn’t understand the concept of cross contamination.
The knowledge today is not purely the result of European thinkers. Your prediction grossly discounts the contributions to science and technology from other cultures in world.
I’ve never heard the claim that germ theory was a Native American contribution. The wiki page on its development doesn’t mention Native Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory_of_disease
Not exactly germ theory, but the early concepts of contamination which ultimately led to germ theory.
The Native Americans at the time did not postulate the concept of bacteria and viruses, but they understood that sickness was not supernatural and that it was important to sterilize in order to prevent further sickness.
Native American medicine was in many ways more advanced when compared to European medicine at the time. They also introduced things like sun screen, painkillers, and dental hygiene to Europeans.
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My ancestors were thriving in the Americas before colonists came over, did a genocide, and stole their land.
Powhatan should have slaughtered them as they came ashore.
This is an old apologia for colonialism. I would suggest reading some of the works that have come from people from colonized places for the best perspectives on this argument: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/4810-colonialism-as-a-system-for-underdeveloping-africa?_pos=4&_ss=r
There are whole course readings from universities around the world that can help you get up to date.
Only somebody completely devoid of knowledge in this subject could come up with such of vapid assembly of words.