we need to look at something astounding that happened over the course of like a hundred years this is the final chapter and what I think is the most mind-boggling chapter in the story of how Europe took over the world the reason why it's so mind-boggling is because this is the part of the story where the map goes from looking like this in 1800 with Europe controlling like 35 percent of the world's land to looking like this by 1914. with 84 percent of the Earth being controlled by the people or the descendants of the people from this once isolated continent in Europe 84 how on Earth did this happen a huge part of this next chapter has to do with this continent the second largest continent on Earth and the part of the world that the Europeans hadn't really carved up yet so this is where the whole story comes together it shows us how technology and different ways of thinking helped these people take over the world and in the process shaped the world we live in today the way that we trade where we get our stuff the language I'm using to speak to right now and most of you understand it even though you don't live anywhere near the place where it was invented I'm telling you this isn't far away history anymore this is the world we currently live in so let me show you the third and final chapter of how Europe stole the world foreign [Music] maps and I'm telling you this is the chapter where the maps get really good cartography really took off okay let's get up to speed on where we're at remember it all started with Spain and Portugal they ramped up this colonialism thing back around 1500 and this led them to divide the world between them until other European countries got in on it too then the real competition started the Dutch created the modern corporation which allowed them to speed all of this up the world quickly turned into a giant Marketplace run by Europeans with boats and guns and incentives to bring profits to the shareholders back home foreign this is all a huge part of the story but I'm telling you when it comes to scale imperialism is just getting started and that's because Europeans are about to level up we're going to call this imperialism 2.0 a new way of taking over the world fueled mostly by technology and a rare cooperation between all of these Empires one British prime minister described this imperialism 2.0 as quote the vulgar and bastard imperialism of irritation and aggression of grabbing everything even if we had no use for it but let me tell you if you're like me and you kind of have a low-key implicit belief that European domination was inevitable and that this was going to happen no matter what I'm here to tell you that it almost didn't happen that's because by the end of the 1700s Revolution was in the air [Music] Empires were losing their colonies starting with a group of Europeans who were done having a king and declaring independence for themselves in the late 1700s soon you had a bunch of Spanish colonies declaring independence and then over here in Haiti you had enslaved people who were organizing and rebelling against their French Masters throwing them out and starting their own country these Empires weren't only losing their colonies back in Europe one ruler even lost his head in all of this the empires were losing their grip and soon they were fighting with one another like never before it was chaos and it totally freaked these European rulers out are they losing their empire are they going to lose their reins on power is the era of abundance and domination coming to an end no we can't let this happen so they start doing something that was kind of unheard of instead of fighting and competing with each other like they've always done the European powers start talking to each other their Empires were in Jeopardy and they needed to collaborate find ways to share power both at home in Europe but also on the world stage soon this new culture of diplomacy and collaboration would turn to focus on the one continent that none of these European powers had carved up yet the new Imperial Frontier certainly full of resources but not yet conquered [Music] I mean the maps tell the story here the maps were like a record of what Europeans knew and didn't know about the world I mean this one British map from 1800s says it all look at this thing Europeans were differently familiar with Africa especially here in the coast where for hundreds of years they had trading posts and of course the Atlantic slave trade but look how they mapped the interior of the continent it literally just gives up and it's like Inland Parts almost entirely unknown which is pretty rare for this time period at this point the Europeans have really mapped a lot of the world but this place was off limits it was the stuff of Legend of myths the caption here on the map says that this interior part of Africa may be considered as absolutely unknown or completely unexplored all we know says the map is that its immense and arid Sands are intersected with complete collections of the most ferocious beasts and most uncivilized men that's all they know [Music] there was a very good reason for this the fact is that soldiers and explorers from Europe who went into this area a lot of them didn't come home up to 40 percent died from diseases like the mosquito-borne illness malaria so much so that this part of the map became known as the white man's grave totally off limits but that soon changed oh [Music] two giant things happen that change everything completely redirect what Europeans can do with their mounting power first these two French guys are able to take the bark of this tree which had been used for a very long time for variety of purposes and isolate a vital chemical called quinine it combats malaria the major killer of Europeans Africa they now have a white man's shield to protect them from the white man's grave the door is slowly creaking open second this guy happens King Leopold II he's the king of this new country called Belgium and it existed for like 40 years it's kind of a minor place in Europe nothing like these OG colonizers so it's like 1875 and King Leopold wants to play with the big boys he wants a colony so he literally goes around and starts asking these major Colonial powers for like some of their land like he goes to the ogs Spain and Portugal he's like hey guys I know you're in Decline can I have one of your colonies and they're like no so then he goes to the British and he's like hey guys I know you have new any maybe you don't have any plans for it you could give it to me and they're like no Leo don't you realize how hard we worked to steal this land we're not going to give it to you as a handout so King Leopold decides to take matters into his own hands he turns to the map and decides this part of the map the parts Unknown where none of the colonizers have arrived to yet it's a prime place for his Colony King Leopold sets his sight on the white man's grave a quick reminder that this is kind of the fantasy of the Europeans who haven't explored this in reality at this point Africa looks a lot more like this but in the mind of King Leopold and other Europeans it's a big blank canvas with unlimited possibilities foreign sends explorers to like the dead center of this blank canvas and they're armed not only with some of the latest and greatest weapons but also with medicine that Shields them from these killer tropical diseases these Belgian explorers arrive and are able to make agreements with the locals Lane claimed to this land King Leopold now has his own little colony in the center of the white man's grave and of course they start mapping it this is a map from a bunch of Belgian cartographers and explorers when they first arrive to this center part of Africa very little detail here at the beginning this is 1880. they basically got this River some of the offshoots but they don't really know what's going on in here yet this becomes the frame that Leopold uses to build his colony foreign of course this freaks the French out because they're like hey what's Belgium doing in Africa why are they exploring all this land so they decide to send their own explorers to claim their own bit of land after all they've got the medicine it's not nearly as dangerous and the belgians are doing it well of course now the British are waking up they're sending people too and even the new kid on the Imperial block Germany is chipping in and now suddenly we've got to scramble on our hands [Music] see the European powers let's learn from our mistakes instead of the old days where we always had to fight over things in this era of Revolution and warfare remember that we're trying to be better about talking to one another coordinating remember until it's 1884 and all these big Africa hungry European Empires get together in Berlin I mean this is amazing painting of just them all sitting here looking at this big beautiful map which would be like an amazing activity to do until you realize what's actually happening here you've got the chancellor of Germany you've got the OG colonizers Portugal explaining this place to Belgium and France and Italy and you've even got the new country the United States who showed up kind of new to all this Imperial stuff but quickly learning how power really works on the international stage basically anyone in Europe who didn't have an Empire yet got in now oh and crucially they didn't invite any African leaders and to be clear this painting isn't like exaggerated like it's not a political cartoon this is literally a bunch of European dudes in a room in Berlin in 1884 discussing and coordinating how they're going to carve up and take this continent and they decided that there was going to be one big rule for this new Scramble for Africa no pretending none of this only on the map fake imperialism thing that the pope arranged for Spain and Portugal a few hundred years previous you actually have to control the land if you're going to claim it so they divide up the map on who gets what they leave the conference and they get to work the French start moving in quickly from West Africa the British begin taking over Sudan and expanding North from down here in South Africa to take over all of this land the Germans really start establishing themselves here and over here Italy starts occupying all this land up here in the north and east and Leopold well he got his Colony 77 times the size of Belgium here it was as a blank canvas when they first started exploring in 1880 here it is 14 years later little Belgium down here giant Congo up here the blueprint has filled out the conquest is complete with his new Colony King Leopold of course went on to do horrible things exploiting pillaging the resources from this place and wreaking horrible havoc on the people and it is horrific and it is horrendous and I made a whole other video that kind of goes into it more I'll link to it and go to the sources in the description please okay all of these Empires were carving up this map coming in mapping it very beautifully it's like literally the opposite of what it was it was unknown and now it's totally known pillaging the resources bringing it back home making record profits etc etc and all of this this carving it happened really fast foreign but wait a minute hold on pause how does this make any sense like it made sense when it was all like on water and there were ships and there was domination and trading ports and all of that but this this is an incredibly logistically ambitious thing to do like this was actually a central question for me that led me to make this series because I just didn't understand how these countries in a matter of a few years could completely carve up the second largest continent well the answer to that question isn't that surprising these Europeans now had a leg up they had new tools remember they had invented capitalism to make them Rich that gave them time to do science which gave them technology that they used to make their capitalism better and more effective more productive this cycle repeated itself over and over and over giving Europeans a further and further leg up technologically until soon they had stuff like this a steamboat you didn't have to worry about the wind anymore to keep going you could just steam your way all the way up African rivers and the old African queen or the railroad quick way to transport food and troops like you can see this map all of this red is either railroads that they put in or railroads that they were constructing at this time this allowed Europeans to level up not just in Africa but everywhere I mean here they are in India the British quickly taking over this entire subcontinent of what today's India and Pakistan and Bangladesh with this massive complex rail system that they built basically in no time they also invented the telegraph which could now relay messages in a matter of minutes instead of weeks I mean this political cartoon really personifies how powerful this was and of course what we've been looking at this whole time they made Maps big beautiful juicy maps showing the geography and the people and all of the land that they had conquered in addition to technology these Empires had also perfected the art of allying with local power holders and turning the people against each other divide and conquer which allowed a small group of Europeans to control millions of locals and of course they had these [Music] these refined killing machines that allowed small groups of European soldiers to rip through truly formidable African armies like look at this painting from Sudan where the British used their guns to slaughter 10 000 enemies with just a few hundred losses and hear this casual caption showing that these Savages were now mowed down by these modern weapons of war clearing way for civilization now it wasn't this easy everywhere descendants of white Dutch settlers held off the British for a long time down here in South Africa and the Ethiopians were able to hold off the Italians from conquering their land making it the only place in Africa to never be colonized but listen in the midst of all this Bloodshed we have to talk about something that doesn't fit cleanly into our Narrative of good versus evil because the presence of these Europeans in this continent also brought really positive things remember those French Dudes that discovered the treatment for malaria well that was tested in the field in French Algeria a colony it changed medicine forever giving us our modern understanding of mosquitoes and the diseases they spread the scramble into Africa helped push forward our understanding of health and disease and medicine these and tons of other medical developments and help these Europeans conquer land but it also brought Innovation that we still use today that has saved countless lives okay so technology was a major defining Factor but it wasn't just technology once again we see in this chapter what we saw in other chapters that Europeans had to develop new sophisticated mental inventions that allowed this all to go down the popular story that they were telling themselves at this time was that all civilization could be ranked according to the level of development and look according to this analysis they placed themselves at the top and they could tell themselves very easily that they were the enlightened people of the world this new colonizing story was the most sophisticated and tantalizing yet and it's one that's still kind of embedded in a lot of our brains still that the enlightened civilization had a burden to bring civilization to the rest of the world and for that they kind of needed to stay on top and control and the reason why this story was so believable and tantalizing is because at this time it was being blended with actual real objective science that was being done by Europeans like this guy Charles Darwin someone who changed the way that we think about the natural world he just put out a book about how animals evolve into hierarchies with different capabilities and traits well if that applies to all animals then it must apply to humans themselves and their societies and their civilizations so then they got into the field with their maps and they start Gathering observations that confirm this story and soon they're measuring people's skulls all around the world they're keeping notes they're developing theories and terms they're writing academic papers all of this to define a pretend set of pseudo-scientific ideas the idea that we're all part of a different race all with different natural capabilities and that is what must explain why some people have the resources in the technology and others do not like the previous stories that Europeans told themselves this one was intoxicating think of all the generations that passed where this story could be ingrained into the minds of the people but again remember that like I'm not saying that these Europeans are telling themselves this story every day we're now talking about the great great great grandchildren of like the original colonizers the individual people didn't have the grand plan in mind to go carve up Africa they were just responding to what they knew what they'd been told was real what they wanted to believe it was a way of life it was a way of thinking and if we think that we're somehow exempt from a similar type of mental model that we don't see but that dictates our Behavior we're tricking ourselves I mean listen to one of these British imperialists Cecil Rhodes he says we happen to be the best people in the world with the highest ideals of decency and Justice Liberty and peace and the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for Humanity okay Cecil has made up his mind okay so let's look at the map in like the early 1900s Africa looks like this completely carved up by European powers over here the Dutch had conquered the entire Indonesian archipelago the French completely taking over this part of Southeast Asia but the real Kingpin in all of this taking over land stuff was the British Empire in addition to all this stuff they had in Africa they occupied the huge Indian subcontinent they also had a few of these important ports like Hong Kong and Singapore I mean I can't go over all of the stuff they took over because it's just too much at the peak of their empire they ruled over 412 million people which was a ton for that time their domination had spread to almost 25 percent of the globe making Britain this rainy set of islands in Europe the biggest empire that ever existed in doing so they spread their people their ideas their economic system their Fringe language to every corner of the world including where I'm sitting right now because remember the U.S is
just one expression of the British Empire the branch of the Empire that went on to become the most powerful country in the world to influence how the World Order would look by 1914 Europe had successfully taken over the world there were deathly Rich compared to the rest of the globe and their ideas both good and bad were deeply embedded in the International System but suddenly all of this technology all this industrialization that made them so effective turned away from conquering Faraway lands and was turned on each other over the next 30 Years hundreds of millions of people are killed in the two most destructive Wars ever made possible by all the same things that allowed Europeans to take over the world sophisticated weapons and technology that Europeans are now turning on each other the so-called sophisticated race is now slaughtering one another on an unprecedented scale these wars didn't do the image of the Civilized Europeans any good and Western schooled local Elites decided that they didn't want to be ruled by Foreign forces anymore they were able to Rally their people around a Common Language and birthed national identity that didn't include being ruled by white people from some Far Away continent and they pushed the colonists out sometimes peacefully but most often with Force the Europeans had built this insane Global project for more than 400 years and yet they saw it crumble in a matter of decades so today the map has been severely redrawn former colonies are now mostly independent countries there are still a ton of weird idiosyncratic holdovers from the colonial period I've talked about those many times and I will continue to talk about them I want to finish this up finish this video and finish this series up with my last thought here which is something that the map doesn't tell us much about thank you even though all these countries became independent and they can claim their own sovereignty their own borders their colonizers are gone they didn't actually not only were there loads of borders that were literally drawn by colonizers I mean see basically all of my previous work but by the end of this it was the Europeans that had tied the whole world up into an interconnected system that still kind of echoed the old one the Dutch invention of the shareholder Corporation didn't go away private companies didn't suddenly stop looking to the same far-off places to find resources to find labor to feed increasing demand among their people back home and European rulers and their offspring didn't stop using their big metal guns and their technology to get what they wanted in Faraway lands occasionally talking to each other and occasionally fighting with each other fighting to control land to control people to control ideas and perhaps most powerfully the idea that our enlightened way was indeed the best way we will stand with the new leaders of Iraq as they establish a government of by and for the Iraqi people certainly has not gone away [Music] and yet if it were only that simple a simple Narrative of good and bad greedy Europeans take over the world and do anything to stay ahead that would be a lot easier in some ways but it's not Europe taking over the world has also thrust Humanity into an age of peace and prosperity where people live longer suffer Less in a lot of ways have more food to eat I mean the very moral lens that you and I are using right now to evaluate the good and bad of this history that was a lens that was cultivated and developed by the same cultures that pillaged and subjugated their way around the planet these ideals of justice and equality and human rights and representation social equality and self-determination those ideas permeated the globe alongside the colonizers who carved it up and yet it was this Conquest that put these people on top of the whole system giving us the power and the advantage the default power holders in our world [Music] three parts have been a story of how an isolated group of farming people some of them my ancestors left their Shores to explore discovering a vast world that eventually they would find a way to control and in the process setting the rules for how things work today what's slightly scary to me about this is how easy it is to look back on this whole history and feel like it was going to happen this way no matter what that it was inevitable that of course Europeans took over the world they were always more Adept they were bound to control the planet but if there's anything I've learned diving into this broad tour through European imperialism is that this idea is just hindsight bias this didn't happen because of some Superior DNA or because God wanted these people to take over the world but rather it happened because a bunch of people happened to be at the right place that allowed them to start a chain of millions of little decisions that pushed them to do whatever they could to procure more and more resources they got ahead because of Lucky circumstances and yet today in our model world we continue to do whatever we need to to stay ahead while simultaneously believing that it was always going to happen this way [Music] it's over it's it's over I mean the series is over but the year is over I deserve this not only is it the end of the Europe series it's the end of the year and what a year it has been by the way this video is not sponsored by anyone probably because we're in a recession and so I'm going to take this time to just reflect a little bit on what this year has meant for me as a Storyteller and a journalist and for our team and what we are gonna do next I think for me the big thing I learned this year was that we can build a big operation like for a long time it was just me kind of pushing buttons on a laptop and like making stories and this year it actually became a team we now have lots and lots of people making really really cool stuff a very talented team and we're doing journalism on a level that we've never done we go really deep on every fact that we say on this channel and that requires a lot of work sometimes that feels really tiresome but a lot of the time that feels exciting that we on YouTube can be doing like hardcore journalism and fun stuff too obviously we got to do a few in the field documentaries this year which was really amazing I went to Paris and Korea and Switzerland we printed a lot of amazing maps and showed you what Maps were like over the years and what they were used for oh and my hair got really long because I decided for the first time in my life not to cut it and that's making my whole no shampoo thing a little more complicated maybe I'll make a video about that anyway all right I ate a lot of Doritos like a lot of Doritos like I really like Doritos even after I know how they're made but in my mind this is kind of just the beginning like I want this to be the beginning I want like four years from now to look back and be like oh yeah 2022 that was the year that we really started to ramp up and that gets me to the thing that I'm really excited about that we launched this year which is a community on patreon called The Newsroom a place where people like you support us and what we're trying to do here and allow us to grow more and more and especially during economic downturn and unpredictability this work that we do relies on community support on people like you showing up and supporting us and it's our Newsroom supporters that are allowing us to do better work to do more of it and I'm very grateful for that in addition to supporting independent journalism Newsroom members also get access to a bunch of cool stuff like a behind the scenes Vlog and extra video every month there's a lot of really talented interesting people behind the scenes and every month you get a vlog where you see how it's all done you get access to music from our composer Tom Fox you get access to my scripts occasionally we do q and A's where we get to chat I do polls where I get story ideas it's become a really cool community of supporters and just a kind of a sounding board for cool ideas oh and here's a big one we've started publishing our videos over on nebula which is a Creator owned platform where you can get our videos a week early there's a link in my description that explains all that if you want to support the channel and you're like a production person then we have Luts and presets which help us color our videos and photos and if you don't want to support the channel and you just want to keep watching um that's fine too I'm not here to tell you to give me money I'm here to make cool stories and I hope that you're learning from these videos and I appreciate you being here in the first place so let's raise a glass to a wonderful year of learning and growth and amazing Stories and look forward to a 2023 that I hope is going to be full of even more growth not only growth in the number of people that are here but also a growth in our or desire to like understand this world to understand the story of how we all got here and how it works today I will continue to be the Curious Storyteller who tries to bring those stories to you in the best way possible I appreciate all those who are here supporting and cheers to a great 2023 of curiosity and a lot of maps bye everyone foreign [Music]
2022-12-30