Global path dependence

The question

Why is the world the way it is today, with America and Europe leading, and the majority of the rest of the world behind, how did Europeans conquer the world?

I hear a lot of talk and complaints about colonization, but why didn’t Africa or the Americas colonize Europe instead of the other way around? One side had steel, swords, guns, horses, oceangoing ships, writing systems, and centralized kingdoms, the other side had mostly stone and wooden weapons. To understand how some societies won the geographic lottery, we need to rewind the clock to about 11,000 BC.

Same starting line

At that point, humans everywhere were remarkably similar, they were Homo sapiens with basically the same brains, the same cognitive abilities, and the same potential. There were minor differences like skin color, body type, or adaptations to local climates, but a baby born in Europe had no advantage over a baby born in Australia, the Americas, or Africa, everyone was a hunter-gatherer. So if everyone started at roughly the same place, how did things diverge so dramatically?

The IQ myth

Most ignorant people say well, Native Americans and Africans had lower IQs and that’s why they never caught up with Europe.

But modern IQ tests measure abstract reasoning, literacy, and mathematical concepts taught in schools, they were designed by academics to predict success in industrialized education systems. A researcher spent years working in New Guinea, and one thing that struck him immediately was that people there were exceptionally observant, inventive, and mentally sharp. To survive you had to know which plants were poisonous, how to read the weather, how to track animals, and mistakes would get you killed. If you gave a New Guinean farmer an IQ test designed for an American suburb, he’d fail, obviously, he has never seen the references or types of problems the test assumes. But if you gave a Harvard graduate a New Guinea “IQ test” and made him track an animal through the forest or navigate without a GPS, he’d fail with flying colours too.

Geography determines which societies can develop agriculture, and agriculture determines everything that comes after. The societies that figured it out got a massive head start by thousands of years, and by the time Europeans crossed the Atlantic with guns and steel, they had a 5,000-year advantage.

Why hunter-gatherers couldn’t just catch up

Why couldn’t hunter-gatherers develop their own complex civilizations?Because they have to stay mobile, they follow herds and track seasonal plants. If food moves, they move, and that mobility creates constraints.

Everyone is in food-gathering mode. Calories are tough to come by, and they take a tribe’s time and effort. When you’re constantly on the move, you can’t accumulate possessions, you can’t store food long term, everything you own has to be carried on your back, that means no heavy pottery, tools, or building materials. A nomadic mother can only carry one child while she’s also gathering food and hauling possessions, so hunter-gatherer women spaced births out about four years apart. Settled farmers spaced births about every two years, that’s half the population growth rate right there, and over centuries that difference compounds into massive population gaps. If you break your leg in a settled farming village, you heal, but break your leg as a nomad and you’re a burden the group can’t afford, either they leave you behind, or the whole group slows down and risks starvation. The same goes for the elderly or the sick. And forget about developing complex technology that requires time to tinker, experiment, and fail, it’s time you don’t have when you’re spending every day searching for food. The first societies to stop moving were the first to start building. Agriculture allowed people to settle down, accumulate surplus food, and that surplus changed everything.

The plant jackpot

You might be thinking, okay, so why didn’t everyone just figure out agriculture at the same time, how hard can it be to plant some seeds?

As it turns out, it’s really hard. Agriculture didn’t happen everywhere at once, it happened in a handful of specific places, and those places shared something important, they hit the plant and animal jackpot. Most wild plants are inedible, poisonous, or so low in calories that they’re not worth cultivating. Out of hundreds of thousands of plant species on Earth, only a few dozen ever made good crops. The Fertile Crescent had a whole bunch of them. The region stretching from modern-day Egypt through Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and down into Iraq and Iran held wild wheat, barley, peas, and lentils growing naturally, and those weren’t finicky plants, they had large seeds, predictable growth cycles, and they could be replanted easily. China got lucky too with rice and millet, both solid crops that could support dense populations.

The Americas eventually developed corn, but wild corn, called teosinte, was basically useless. It took Native Americans about 3,000 years of selective breeding to turn it into something that resembled modern corn. Think about that, while one group spent thousands of years slowly improving a single crop, people in the Fertile Crescent were already building cities. Sub-Saharan Africa had sorghum, a decent crop, but Africa had fewer plant species to choose from overall. The Sahara also created a massive barrier that slowed the spread of agriculture and information from the Fertile Crescent. Australia essentially got nothing that could be farmed. About 33 of the world’s 56 most valuable wild grasses grew in the Fertile Crescent, that’s why agriculture started there first, they had the raw materials.

The animal jackpot

Plants are only half the story, animals matter just as much. There are lots of species, but only a few are easy to handle. Throughout human history, only about 14 large mammal species have ever been successfully domesticated. There are strict requirements, it has to grow fast and breed in captivity, and it needs a calm enough disposition so it won’t kill you.

Again, Eurasia hit the jackpot with sheep, goats, pigs, cows, horses, donkeys, camels. That’s seven of the big 14 right there. South America had llamas and alpacas. North America, Africa, and Australia had zero.

It’s not like people didn’t try. Native Americans desperately wanted to domesticate bison. Africans tried with zebras and antelope, but it didn’t work. Zebras look like stripey horses, but they’re vicious, they bite and kick hard enough to kill a lion. Even today, with all our knowledge and tech, we still can’t domesticate zebras on a broad scale. Horses are trainable, zebras just aren’t wired that way. This wasn’t a failure of effort or ingenuity, it was biology and luck.

East west vs north south

Geography shaped one more crucial advantage. Eurasia runs east west. You can travel about 5,000 miles from Portugal to China and stay at roughly the same latitude, same climate, same growing season, same day length. Wheat domesticated in the Fertile Crescent could spread to Europe, India, and China. Farmers didn’t have to reinvent agriculture, they could take what worked in one place and plant it somewhere else.

Africa and the Americas run north south. Try taking corn from Mexico and planting it in Canada, it doesn’t work, different growing seasons, different climates. Crops hit climate-zone barriers and stop spreading. Africa has the same problem, especially with the Sahara cutting it in half, that means thousands of years of agricultural knowledge that never spread. While Eurasian farmers were swapping seeds and sharing innovations across an entire continent, American and African farmers were often stuck starting from scratch.

Surplus builds empires

Once agriculture takes hold, everything changes, because now there’s a food surplus, and that surplus builds empires. When 20 farmers can feed a hundred people, not everyone needs to spend the day hunting and gathering. Surplus gives you extra calories and extra time, it creates specialists. In a hunter-gatherer band, everyone hunts and gathers, there’s no room for someone who sits around thinking about better tools. Once you have agriculture, you can afford people who don’t produce food. One of the first things you need with surplus food is a way to store it permanently, then you need people to guard it from animals or other tribes, someone has to organize distribution, and the basics of government start to emerge. Later, professional armies conquer neighbors, and those conquests bring more land, more resources, more people, civilization grows.

Competition and connectivity

Here’s where political structure becomes crucial. Eurasia was fragmented in a way that actually helped ideas spread. It wasn’t one giant unified empire, but competing kingdoms, city-states, and feudal territories connected by trade and migration. When one kingdom invented something useful like better plows, bronze weapons, or gunpowder, that knowledge spread. Merchants carried innovations along routes, craftsmen moved between territories, and with important technology, you either adapted or someone took you over with it.

The east west axis meant those innovations could travel thousands of miles without hitting climate barriers. Gunpowder invented in China reached Europe, steelmaking techniques developed in the Middle East spread to India and Europe. The Americas didn’t have that same connectivity. The Maya developed writing, but it never spread to the Inca or the Aztecs.

China had the opposite problem of too much unity. When China’s emperor decided to halt oceanic exploration in the 1400s, that decision stuck for the entire empire. In Europe, when one kingdom stopped exploring, others continued. Spain’s rivals couldn’t afford to let Spain monopolize the New World. Technology builds on itself. Eurasia moved from stone tools to copper to bronze to iron. When Cortés arrived in the Americas in the 1500s, the Aztecs were still using stone-age tools. They had obsidian blades, which weren’t terrible, but against steel swords it wasn’t even close. That wasn’t because the Aztecs were dumb or lazy, they started late, they didn’t have Eurasia’s 5,000-year head start. The Fertile Crescent got agriculture around 8500 BC, Mesoamerica didn’t get it until around 3500 BC.

Put that in modern terms. Imagine the United States being attacked by a civilization just a hundred years younger, the 1926 US Army attacking modern America, it wouldn’t be a fight. Now reverse it, imagine a society 5,000 years more advanced attacking us, I can’t even fathom what that looks like. That’s the situation the Incas, Native Americans, and many African societies faced when Europeans arrived, they were fighting enemies millennia ahead of them.

Germs, the deadliest weapon

But the most fearsome thing Europeans brought to the Americas wasn’t guns, steel, or horses, it was germs, Europe’s invisible and unintentional weapon.

Scholars generally agree that over 90% of the indigenous population of the Americas died from disease after European contact. If you lived in a village of a hundred people, within a generation only a handful would still be alive. Smallpox killed more Native Americans than all European weapons combined.

Some empires collapsed before Europeans even showed up. The Inca emperor Huayna Capac died of smallpox in 1527 without ever seeing a Spaniard. The disease traveled faster than the conquistadors, spreading through trade routes and wiping out populations before Europeans arrived to conquer them.

By the time Pizarro marched into Peru, the Inca Empire was already in chaos. A smallpox epidemic had killed the previous emperor and sparked a civil war over succession.

Why not the other way around?

Why didn’t Native American diseases wipe out the Europeans, why was it a one-way street? Europeans brought smallpox, measles, flu, typhus, plague, tuberculosis, and more. The main disease Europeans got from the Americas was likely syphilis. The answer goes back to domesticated animals. Sheep, pigs, cows, and the rest weren’t just food and labor, they were disease factories. Eurasians lived intimately with their animals for thousands of years, same structures, daily handling, shared air, and diseases leap from animals to humans. Smallpox jumped from cattle, flu morphs from diseases in pigs and ducks, measles came from cattle and sheep. Native Americans had fewer domesticated animals and never lived in close quarters with them the same way, so they never developed these diseases.

But animals alone weren’t enough, you also needed cities. Diseases like measles, smallpox, and tuberculosis are crowd diseases, they need large, dense populations to keep circulating. Measles, for instance, needs on the order of hundreds of thousands of people. In a band of 50 hunter-gatherers moving through a forest, there aren’t enough bodies for measles to survive. Agriculture created that density. Thousands of people packed together were the perfect breeding ground. Over centuries, these diseases killed millions across Europe, Asia, and North Africa. But if you survive them once, you’re often immune for life. Over thousands of years, Eurasians developed resistance, the Americas had no protection like that.

When Europeans arrived with these invisible plagues, Native Americans had zero defenses. The geographic lottery didn’t just determine who had steel and guns, it determined germs as well, and that turned out to be the deadliest weapon of all.

Closing

I started by asking why Europeans took over the world that doesn’t mean it will last forever. I will go deeper into the American and African continents next. Stay tuned, Arigato!