This is something I’ve been wondering for a while and have finally mustered the courage to ask.
On the leftist side of Lemmy there is a pervasive theme of calling Europeans (and by extension white people in general) evil and how the only thing they’ve done is make the rest of the world suffer. And while the latter is plainly observable basically everywhere in the world, does that imply the former is true? Basically, was European colonialism a thing because of forces and convergent processes greater than Europe or would Europeans have done all that regardless of circumstances, perhaps suggesting that they’re more predisposed to such actions than other ethnicities?
I’m not white, but I have definitely noticed that the normalized rhetoric around white people among leftist and especially socialist circles, sound pretty eerily like the racist rhetoric white people use for other ethnicities. Things like the “colonialism runs in their blood” or that “all white people are born colonizers regardless of status.” To me, there are two ways of interpreting such remarks: the most literal interpretation is that white people as a race are indeed intrinsically evil, and their actions throughout history directly reflect this; or the more symbolic interpretation that due to all that’s happened in history, white people today are, while not intrinsically or genetically evil, tainted by the colonialism that has already happened and are therefore more likely to be the exploiters than the exploited due to their historical advantage. The difference between the two interpretations being the question I’m asking, whether Europeans are the oppressors due to circumstance or whether there’s something about them that just makes them more likely to be oppressors regardless of circumstance.
I understand that most of the rhetoric towards white people that I believe could be interpreted as “racist” are made by the direct victims of white colonialism/racism, so I can in no way fault any of them for not considering the feelings of the people who didn’t consider their feelings when they did orders of magnitude worse things to them than insulting them. God knows I’ve made those remarks too. But at the same time, this makes it hard to determine whether those remarks are literal or figurative, and I just feel the need to ask this directly. Not because I feel the need to play tone police for a race I’m not even part of, but because I’m genuinely ignorant of anything about this and want other people’s unfiltered opinions so I can better form my own.
I studied ecology in university so I have a tendency to think of human events in an ecological context (which is probably wrong). In competition between species (or even within the same species), no one in their right mind would call one species evil because it dominated all the other species. Instead, we think of different species as being entirely driven by circumstance. Even when talking about invasive species, the closest analogue to colonialism, many Indigenous people themselves have routinely pushed back against equating invasive species to colonizers. Ecology considers all species to be purely products of circumstance, and rejects the popular depictions of one species harboring an actual hatred for another and actively seeking to wipe them out.
The common notions I hear for comparing European colonialism to ecology (which are almost always not made by ecologists) is that the conditions Europe just happened to give rise to societies that would eventually go on to colonize most of the world just as those same conditions gave rise to the European starling that would decimate native bird populations in North America. The sheltered seas of the Mediterranean meant that Europe developed naval technology capable of reaching far off lands much sooner than the rest of the world, for example. The notion that Europe just happened to be where the most powerful empires arose, and being the most powerful, it was inevitable that they would inflict the most harm on the rest of the world and would be hated because of it.
But human societies are not species and human-human interactions are not strictly ecological. For one, human societies have overarching coordination and collective will that species don’t have, and human societies as a whole often show more characteristics akin to a single organism than a species (though even that is apples to oranges).
Additionally, Europe was not where the most powerful empires were for the longest time. China for example was just as if not more powerful in the middle ages when Europe stagnated, just as if not more expansionist and obsessed with conquest, and its rule over the people just as tyrannical as any European king (I know Westerners tend to romanticize ancient China but I went to school in Mainland China for a bit before immigrating with my parents and my biggest takeaway was learning in history class what a shithole it was to actually live in) but China never had colonies in the European sense. The certainly conquered everyone around them, but never sought to establish their rule in far away lands like Europeans did, and certainly didn’t wipe out entire continents of people to replace them with Chinese. Does that imply that Imperial China was less evil than Imperial Europe? Or are they just as evil but in a different way (land-based conquest instead of sea based)? Or did they just not have the resources to do what Europe did but absolutely would have if they did? I don’t know hence why I’m asking.
All my rambling can basically be summed up as the question in the title, or, somewhat expanded: Did the world come to see white people as a symbol of colonialism and oppression as a result of forces beyond white people’s control? In a parallel universe with a different geography on this planet, would another ethnicity be the universally hated colonizers while white people are the victims of genocide? Do these questions even make sense and are they actually worth answering considering we only have this geography and history to work with?
Yep. The huge advancements in technology brought about by colonialism and capitalism in Europe compelled their naval supremacy, which allowed Europe to dominate trade routes, leapfrogging India and China who were still more of a developed feudal-sort of stage. This led to the Opium Wars, colonization of India and China, and eventually their independence movements that propelled China into socialism and India into its own capitalist system (which is a whole other discussion).
I think you’ve got that backwards. After Rome, it was pretty much a cold, marginal peninsula off of Asia full of starving peasants, until they invented practical seafaring. The wealth that made them a player in the first place came from their ability to travel to the New World and exploit the technological and societal gap present there, and to bypass the silk road.
Europe had practical seafaring since antiquity. European naval technology during the discovery of the Americas was on par with other Eastern Hemisphere naval powers.
The naval technology empowered the discovery, but it isn’t like Europe was special at the time.
Also, it still took a while to bypass the Silk Road. Even when Europe did, it still ran into an issue that China wouldn’t trade for any European manufactured goods, just gold and silver.
No and no. In antiquity they followed the coasts most of the time, and followed really safe routes across mostly-closed seas the rest of the time. Trireme construction was good enough to take rough weather, while it existed, but for one thing they had trouble with navigation.
Chinese boats of the early modern era were leaky and unseaworthy by comparison, if sometimes extremely large for show, and their sails didn’t tack nearly as well.
The Vikings did manage seafaring, but they had a very specific design that was pushed pretty much to it’s limits. You can’t make a clinker-built longship any bigger or better really, and eventually economic conditions meant they stopped bothering with the big expeditions. Later on some of those same techniques made their way into the caravel.
The Polynesians managed it much earlier, and did spread around, but they were otherwise in the literal stone age. It is still pretty curious they didn’t leave more impact on the Americas.
Sort of. There was a decent bit of naval development which enabled the initial slave trade and colonization of the Americas, but they didn’t truly leapfrog India and China until they used the spoils to reach dramatic capitalist development, industrialization, and purposefully direct research and tech into millitary and naval development so as to become uncontestable. This turned trade from being somewhat dominated to fully dominated and uncontestable.