So... Why people in Africa allowed themselves to be colonized?! They got like thousands of people for ten of Europeans...

>I doubt it.

Benin and most of the other west coast kingdoms.

bbc.co.uk/worldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/9chapter2.shtml

historynewsnetwork.org/article/41431

Why doubt it?
Some africans even wrote letter of complaint, stressing the importance of slavery in their culture to the english as these banned the atlantic slave trade.

In the end, these western kingdoms got sadly sacked as the europeans felt strong enough to overthrow them for even cheaper gains.

Interesting. I thought Africans doesn't cooperated with white people.

>implying the slave trade and colonialism are one in the same

What's the king that says they can't ban slavery because they sing their children into sleeps with stories of decimated enemies humiliated by slavery?

Some jews colaborated with the nazis, there's always people willing to sell their souls

Why do people act like only Africans were colonized? Everyone was by Europeans/Americans it's not some shameful thing.

Well, if people are too strong to btfo each other directly money and ideall a poor third party to fuck over are the best ways of forming bonds as amassing capital and power is a desire held by every society and a cornerstone of mutual understanding.

Another example would be the dutch getting along great with the han chinese when it came to fucking over the natives of taiwan.

> Everyone
Japan wasn't. Stay mad everyone else.

curved
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Dunnoh, searched for that too, but forgot his name as it was of course rather exotic.

They get often lumped together, but are both relevant to OPs question, as the intertribal wars and oppurtonist alliances between the european and african factions did not leave space for a united front in africa when the european powers themselves managed to unite for a short moment in the 19th century in order to partition africa.

>America colonizing africa

Thailand resisted too and is rightfully proud as fuck about it.

Inferior genetics

Be that as it may, slavery was in fact benificial to some African entities whereas colonization largely wasn't in any of the natives' best interests barring maybe some individuals.

Korea made it long enough to only get JAPANED so they count too.

id say that you are definitly right except for the colonisation efforts in south africa were only a tiny population of Sans lingered before and the Zulus genocided so many people that the land laid barren and left to claim by a european entity s which may have been egoists but far more benevolent and wealth gifting then the native rulers that came before.

I weep for the ivory coast however, they could have gotten into somewhat more stable and prideful organic nationstates like us europeans rather then colonial abominations doomed to fall to multiculturalist confusion and the ensuing ethnic nepotism and corruption.

See how all these countries are best in an Asia? While Nigeria and Zimbabwe are failed states. It is like some malicious force deliberately ruined future of the entire nations.

guns

I think the case of colonization in SA was vastly different compared to other colonization efforts in Africa that came after. The Dutch that came to colonize the cape went into a whole bunch of nothing and made their own thing whereas many French, Portugese, English efforts took over actual cities and people groups, burning, destroying and looting everyone that stood in the way of their "not manifest destiny"

Yeah, communism.

Yep, Its a shame that we get such a simplified view of colonialism presented in school.

muturzikin.com/cartesafrique/carteafriqueouest.htm

btw, just look at this, a balkanisation-fans wet dream:
muturzikin.com/cartesafrique/carteafriqueouest.htm

Cant embed the sites maps, but it seems to be the most accurate one I could find.

>king of portugal with european traders.jpg

...

you may not know this but how intelligible are these languages from one to another esp. in the green areas? Can these people understand each other? would they be warring tribal factions 150+ years ago?

thanks wizard.

I looked random language up and it seems as if they cannot understand each other and adopt the language of the largest/most powerful tribe in the country as lingua franka for the rest.

Because there was no unified "Africa" in the era of colonization. And you didn't have "Da White Europeans" declaring war on the Africans and moving in and conquering and occupying shit.

Rather, what pretty much always happened is that you'd have a mass of tribes, half of which were fighting the other half, and the Europeans would come in offering supplies or technical advice or mercenary services against their local rivals, in exchange for some concessions.

Usually, they'd support the locally smaller tribes, who would be in trouble if the European aid was withdrawn, which kept hte system somewhat stable.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Conference

Europeans (people living in Europe) made up 25% of the world population immediately after new imperialism. There were many more Europeans than Africans then. A more interesting example is India to England.

We had the Maxim machine gun and they had not.

Whoever made that map is overestimating how valuable Africa (as colonies) was to the imperial powers.

The african kingdoms rekt eachother tying to get more slaves (most of them were POWs) to sell in the slave trade
after constantly warring with one another for like 50 years you cant really resist a technologically superior foe

Also those kingdoms collapsed when the Triangle Trade ended, allowing Europeans to easily march into the kingdoms they had previously been selling guns to for slaves.

>Verily
Shakespeare please, go back to Veeky Forums.

/int/ explained it best.

I still don't get why the Europeans sold their guns so willingly.

You literally have the most powerful military tool in the history of the world and you just.. sell it for some random people?

This is a good one.

Humanity is not known for passing up short term gain due to long term consequences.

If it were, history would be a lot less bloody and we'd have colonized the galaxy by now.

If I were a european trader I wouldnt have given a shit too, You were free, You traded property and if other people didnt have it they should have for a prize.
In the end, the trader wasnt under constant supervision by his otherlands authorities who might have objected to the trade and also a single person might have felt sympathethic or simply indifferent towards his purchasers.

It must have been an exiting adventure back then to trade with cultures so alien to your own.

portugal did it (the early traders worked for the crown, not for themselves), and they knew those backwards natives would never would put them to good use. from the kongo to china, all of them got gifted weapons they couldn't use properly or even replicate with their knowledge. The point was to make them both impressed and dependent on europe.
If you check the early portuguese campaigns/expeditions in the indian ocean, you'll see that even when the enemy was well armed (by venice, no less) they still got beaten

>weapons they couldn't use properly or even replicate with their knowledge
Yeah, good thing that never changed, and the weapons never got so good and easy to use that strategy wasn't such a big deal anymore.

...oh wait.

weaponry evolved constantly, you could give them canons, that by the time they were good with them, you already have far more powerful ones (that they couldn't use). This went on to this day, backward nations still have to rely on foreigners for their weapons and have to adapt their philosophy to whatever they get.
Have in mind that gunpowder came from china and got to india way earlier than europe, but the first combat-worthy guns (canons) were european. The triangle trade had nothing to do with modern countries having guns (especially because at the time, mixed formations like terço/tercio, dominated the battlefield).

You are misplacing things, the modern countries' power came to them as a form of atrittion war in europe:
I give good weapons and support to your protectorates so they no longer need you and, more importantly, they no longer need to help you to survive.
This is late colonialism (and decolonization) at work, and it was done completely on purpose

GUNS

GERMS

STEEL

>Benin
niec :---------D

Unlike the valiant, brave and proud red man, the black is weak, cowardly, unprincipled and stupid. That's why they got colonized.

The biggest issue was disunity. Europeans arrived upon a patchwork of societies with long-held rivalries and existing conflicts within and between kingdoms and tribal states. Just like the Romans in their conquest of Europe, European powers would ally themselves with one group of Africans to subdue another, or help perpetuate conflicts to prevent unification.

This "divide and conquer" strategy was arguably brilliant and absolutely effective. The Zulu or the Sudanese gave the British so much trouble not really because of their technology and tactics, but instead because of their ability to unify against colonialists and repeatedly assault invading armies.

We laugh at Italy for failing to fully conquer Ethiopia, but it wasn't really the fault of the Italians. Ethiopia, as a unified polity with written history going back farther than that of most European states, lacked political divisions which could be exploited for conquest.

Came looking for this.

Even if that was uniformly true, I don't think intelligence is THAT necessary to win a war. Being a soldier or even a commander requires practical, rather than abstract, thinking.

Long-term strategy often requires a sharp intellect, but wars are won on the ground, especially in an asymmetrical conflict.

Guns by themselves don't amount to that much; just look at how increasingly complex (and effective) early modern armies got form the 30 years' war to the Napoleonic wars with relatively similar firearms; the major improvements were in tactics, logistics, drill etc. , not in the actual guns.

I don't think you are thinking this threw. Africa is a hell hole that killed Europeans and European animals in droves due to disease. There was nothing there to be had except labor for the Americas to replace the natives who either resisted colonialism or themselves died of disease.

Also America does the same stuff with it's weapons. It's the best form of colonialism. Dominate trade with weapons tech.

Oh so Europeans were rich and Africans were massively underdeveloped before colonialism started?

I can't tell if you're Tumblr or /pol/, but a society cannot be run on pure white supremacy. Because the creation of a white upper class in every African colony was never feasible, alliances were

Let me give you two case studies, of British Nigeria and Belgian Rwanda.

In Nigeria, British trading companies set up shop along Nigeria's waterways and paid local leaders for protection. Sunni Muslim Emirs in northern Nigeria (particularly of the Hausa and Fula cultures) were given substantial power in exchange for European compliance, simply because they were powerful enough to reign in their millions of subjects but not strong enough to collectively shrug the British yoke. Out of realpolitik and economic necessity, these individuals were allowed to become quite powerful, very comparable to the cooperative princes in India whose descendants still run much of that country.

The Belgian colonies was a different story. Coming onto the African scramble somewhat late in the game, the Belgians acquired Rwanda after white supremacy had already been codified into nascent racial science. Determining the Tutsi to be uniformly superior to the Hutu due to the shapes of their skulls and noses, the Belgians were able to pretty effectively subjugate the Hutu minority without much resistance. The Tutsi were oppressed alongside the Hutu by their Belgian overlords, but because of their elevated social position, they complied. Obviously, this arrangement had horrific consequences once the Belgians were no longer able to protect this favored minority.

It depends entirely on circumstance. British imperialism from the 17th century onward existed entirely to protect business interests. Even India, the jewel of the empire, was never completely subjugated, as direct British rule emerged out of the slow institutionalization of trade networks.

The French, from what I understand, were driven more by nationalism. They wanted to set up a French Empire that could last the test of time, and focused on "Gallicization" -- the semi-forcible, semi-voluntary, largely coercive process of turning Arabs and Africans and Vietnamese people into good Francophone Catholics. The nationalist nature of the post-revolutionary French government caused them to focus on greatness rather than geopolitical realism, as well as the realization that France could never conceivably usurp Britain as the European primate after Napoleon Bonaparte got his ass handed to him twice.

The French interest in Gallicization led to the general obliteration of indigenous institutions in favor of completely foreign structures that, by necessity, had to be run by Frenchmen or Gallicized indigenes. These individuals, such as Ngo Dinh Diem, were often reviled by the populace for "selling out" to conquerors, and their cultural alienation from the majority prevented them from effectively ruling after independence. However, the creation of so many formerly French republics under Gallicized dominion led to the slow but hugely effective adoption of the French language throughout Africa. While the Christianization efforts failed miserably in the Muslim parts of French Africa, French will soon be a fundamentally African language, with hundreds of millions of speakers in that continent.

Why was Africa so behind in civilization than Europe and Asia?

this. I don't get why people on here are suprised that african countries went to shit after the colonialists left.

Applying Western notions of race to the perspective of Africans is ludicrous. Yoruba leaders didn't really see the British as substantially more foreign than their Muslim rivals like the Fula. There was absolutely no African solidarity, because African states (much like those Europe) were acting out of political interest rather than pan-nationalist feels.

Certain African states had been cooperating with Europeans for literally centuries before conquest happened on a wide scale. They had little way of knowing that these trade agreements and protection rackets would eventually become unnecessary.

Entirely white supremacist autism.

I find it funny how African states are in an almost identical situation to Germanic kingdoms after the fall of Rome. African politics, across the span of the third millenium, is going to be incredibly interesting.

>only a tiny population of Sans lingered before and the Zulus genocided so many people that the land laid barren

Source?

It's a logistical nightmare. Even though most of those languages are in the same MASSIVELY rough linguistic group Niger Congo A, the similarities between even neighboring languages is often mostly phonetic.

West Africa is so old and so isolated that languages very quickly diverge. Every conquest by one group over another changed the linguistic makeup of that region. In addition, migrations from Saharan Africa to the tropical coast, or between West Africa and Central Africa, complicated the linguistic patchwork.

The Europeans didn't have much choice. Giving Africans your weapons makes them more difficult to subjugate, but until the mid-19th century there were no plans of widespread African domination.

But the main reason is competition. Abstaining from the arms trade closes off a potentially lucrative source of revenue and a useful relationship with local African states. If Britain didn't sell their guns to the Yoruba, France would instead.

Dang, quality post, thanks for sharing. There's something that intrigues me about India and something that makes me empathize with its people even though I have no connection to it. There's just something there where I see the bedrock of a culture that could turn into something great one day. Is that irrational?

The Sahara Desert is a bitch. There was essentially zero direct connection between Sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean-Mesopotamian sphere. Keeping this in mind, it's pretty remarkable that West African peoples were able to develop metalworking and agriculture entirely on their own.

The exception is the East African Coast, which actually developed pretty cool civilizations due to their location on the Indian Ocean. The Swahili culture is syncretic by nature, being MASSIVELY influenced by the same trade network that brought Sunni Islam (particularly, of the Shafi'i school) to South India and Southeast Asia.

Not at all. "Superpower by 2030" is a meme and we can't expect India to be a substantially developed country within our lifetimes, but the Subcontinent is one of the most culturally rich, intellectually contributive, and historically fascinating regions of the world, comparable not to Italy or France in scope and diversity but instead the entire European continent.

If India stays united, and if the basic tenets of geopolitics don't change substantially, that country could conceivably be the world's strongest in the distant future.

Could Qing China be described as a british colony or was it simply a protectorate of sorts which pretty much gave up nearly all its rights and influence in trade? How would one describe it?

Qing China was an independent state hamstringed by massive foreign influence by competing states. While the British obviously had the longest and most intensive influence on the Chinese Empire, most European powers (as well as the United States and Japan!) exerted their own economic influence, sometimes going so far as to conquer coastal cities for direct administration of trade.

Qing China was not a colony because it was never directly administered by Britain, and it wasn't a protectorate because it wasn't protected. Due to having so many non-exclusive and largely one-sided relations with so many states, Qing China is best described as a victim.

The closest situation would be postwar Germany I suppose.

What caused Japan to be able to resist foreign influence enough as to invite it for the benefits, yet stay in control of it? Was the state just a lot stronger and organized than China's?

Basically because Africans hated each other at least as much as they hated European colonizers. It's hard to resist a superior force when you hate the majority of your neighbors and they hate you, too.

It was smaller so that a) it didn't receive as much attention because Europe was too busy invading China, and b) it could restructure itself faster; China was slow to resist because mobilizing and restructuring a continent takes a long time.

Japan had a long and prosperous period of peace under the Tokugawa shogunate. It pragmatically weakened the old Samurai as a aristocratic class and allowed merchants to accumulate great wealth and creating a good infrastructure within the nation for trade. Literacy and living standard was also pretty good due to peace. Japan was resource poor, without a reputation of an exporter of goods (manufactured or natural) or a major trader in silver/gold, thus limiting its attractiveness as a target for colonization. Also Japan was quite small, and Tokugawa shogunate, despite resentments from some feudal samurai lords, could carry out political decisions quickly and effectively.

Compared to Japan, Qing China suffered several conflicts in the 19th century, the biggest of which the Taiping rebellion wiped out its productive economic heartlands in the south and bankrupted the treasury. The central government also increasingly adopted a policy of laussez-faire administration which caused a very loose control of many regions. Compounded by the fact that the it is a hated foreign dynasty controlling a gigantic land, and that the conservative landed gentry have control in the lands, reforms are very hard to push through. The infrastructure was lacking, peasants were kept poor/uneducated, governmental enforcement of any law was lax, and with a hostile populace working against the central government it was bound to fail.

Because it was a shitty little back water with few resources and beligerent natives.

Then you look at China which is infested with tea, porcelain and tons of natural resources and consumer goods. Its also in the middle of huge political upheavel and easy pickings for development.

It's funny how China always seems portrayed as this stable united, uniformed land with this philosophy of strict hierarchy of control, yet it seems to be one of the nations with the most cases of social unrest and tradition of violent protests. Is this because of the philosophies exported from China or were there legit long periods where the state was this well oiled machine with all the people behind it?

>Japan wasn't
>Implying that's even true after America smacked Japan in WW2, occupied Japan, and overthrew their governmental system.

Ethiopia was never really colonized so there's that.
They didn't have guns, they were hardly united, and all too willing to fuck over other tribes. Just like blacks today are willing to ruin their neighborhoods with drugs and gangs, so were the africans willing to sell out for a couple dollars

Not entirely true, but generally true. Mansa Musa of the Mali empire in west Africa made the pilgrimage to Mecca in the 14th century and brought so much gold that he basically crashed the gold market in Cairo.
The Sahara was quite the obstruction, but to say that sub-Saharan Africa (excluding the east as you said) was entirely unexposed to the Mediterranean-Mesopotamian sphere is just wrong. Obviously there was enough contact that a west African emperor was a devout Muslim, and travel was possible enough that he and thousands of attendants made the hajj.

I think for a long time political power was no more centralized compared to the Byzantines/Abbasid Caliphate. Provincial governors throughout various dynasties tend to do the heavy lifting in administration while Emperor gives out some general policy/disaster relief coordination/military stuff. Sometimes the emperor can get vetoed by the prime minster but this disappeared after Ming. A lot of the more authoritarian stuff I think are introduced in Ming, including restricted freedom of speech, reducing civil administration power in favor of the Emperor alone, and the rigid orthodoxy of neo-confucianism began to dominate intellectual thinking. Qing mostly retained these policies.

Well, to control that much territory and that many people as effectively as it did, China really did have a some remarkably well-ordered governments.

I think some of the reason for China's history being presented as some kind of orderly, continuous procession of good governance is that it's a convenient fiction for Chinese governments to maintain to appear legitimate.

Japan was a relatively centralized state, unlike China, but large enough to resist quick Western domination.

good point but it was kinda more like a bunch of dudes pointing out which woman in the bar they want just so they don't accidentally end up competing for the same woman or go in conflict over it.

Because they knew the natives would never be able to reverse engineer them and mass produce them for a very long time.

>he doesn't say verily

I guess, but it still shows that there was a concerted effort to colonize the entire continent.

Don't want to derail the thread but does anybody know what the leaders of really big slave traders in Africa knew about the practices of slavery in the Americas? Was it even that different from the type practiced in Africa? If they did know did they not understand the consequences of selling everyone in your surrounding areas and that should the people you're selling to turn on you there's nobody to get your back? Is this even the right question to ask?

>he doesn't say 'indubitably'

Wait until you hear about the massive scale of weapon sales to the Ottoman empire from Western Europe. Constantinople, Budapest etc. go pounded into the dirt with European made cannons or cannons cast with European bronze, don't get me started on all the gunpowder and steel they imported from Western Europe.

Oh and during the height of 80 and 30 years war The Protestant Low Countries were exporting boatloads of Cannons to Habsburgs Spain, they were quite literally selling the enemy they fought cannons.

Trade truly transcends all boundaries.

There's a lot of people in here that are assuming Africans even saw themselves as being a united people that could potentially resist European colonization. When colonization was occurring, much of Africa was still tribal. Tribal peoples see their tribe as being one people and the tribe over the hill from them as a different people. We may see them as looking the same but to them, fuck that. So when pale people come in and destroy their neighbors or enslave them, that's a gain to them because their rivals just got taken out of the equation. How much can you blame them then for not realizing the larger picture of what was happening? They didn't exactly have spies or diplomats in Europe that could warn them "these white men are dangerous."

There's also the whole thing of Europeans giving local rulers small amounts of money for the 'rights' to mine things that, to the local people, was useless but to the Europeans was the lifeblood of industry. So there was lots of cooperation in that regard as well as cooperation in the hopes of getting a one-up on rival tribes. That generally lasted only as long as Europeans were willing to play along before going in with troops and setting up their own system to bleed the land dry.

africans were inferior

Then again, no one else was nuked twice.

>even the ocean doesn't want to go into Africa.

slave traders

a.k.a race betrayers

Well, let's just ignore that the difference between aliens with spaceships to America today, is far greater than Britain to the Indians in 1500.

The main reason India and many other places were colonized, while China and East Asia mostly avoided it, was because of their respective disunity and unity.

India was not united. Neither was Africa. Nor the America's.
China, Korea, and Japan were very much one "civilization."
Maybe not nation-states, but civilizations with continual history all the people in the geographic region knew and respected.