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>> Europeans were always militarily superior to Africans, So this covers a big time span - say 1520s to 1920s - and at other points in human civilisation it w
by lifeisstillgood 5y ago
>> Europeans were always militarily superior to Africans,
So this covers a big time span - say 1520s to 1920s - and at other points in human civilisation it was the reverse. Pretty much the whole Ethiopian Empire thing for example.
But one big reason the Sahel regions were militarily inferior by say 1880 was that in the 1500s Europeans started taking slaves from the Sahel regions because Africans had that immunity against the diseases in the Americas - we shipped so many at such a profit that Africa was losing populations at such a rate they could not develop - constant war feeding a population shifting off continent.
It's an interesting open question what would have happened if Slavery had been banned in the 1500s say.
- BurningFrog 5y agoSure, "always" is overly broad. You touch on a fascinating and little known thing: The transatlantic slave trade arose in part because both European and enslaved native plantation workers tended to die off from Malaria after a few years. Many Africans has some immunity to Malaria - which as I understand it was also brought to the new world by Europeans - so importing them turned out to be a more sustainable solution. And yeah, the dynamics of living on a continent where one of the main industries for centuries is hunting your neighbors to sell to foreigners arriving on ships is very hard for me to imagine.
- lifeisstillgood 5y agoSorry I started a reply but it tried to steer between massively simplified and book-length and I gave up. This is a fascinating history with huge ramifications - and that malaria connection is the certainly under-researched that I know of.