Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "History Scope" channel.

  1. "99% of the people worked in the fields" is an inane invention. Just for starters, pretty much every place always had at least 1% tax collectors, priests and witch doctors.
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  2. Smallpox. The end.
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  3. I met Princess Elizabeth, the current ruler of the Hohenzollern Empire, in an elevator in Tokyo. She's a journalist. She modestly does not use the title "Empress."
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  4. Spain and Portugal conquered South and Central America from the mid-14th century onward, not the "early 19th century" as this fool says at around 5:18. (and not "sailed the ocean blue in 1492" as the jingle we were taught in school misinformed us. Yes, Columbus sailed in the years leading up to 1492, but others had been around Cape Horn for at least 150 years by then. Of course the Mongols had populated the entire joint a few thousand years earlier, but that's merely the main story...). Typical YouTube: accurate to within five hundred years...
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  5. This is amazing: a guy on YouTube who doesn't think that a sample of one Proves Everything(tm.) that he claims!
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  6. It is not true -- it is wildly untrue -- at 2:43 that "for most of human history 99% of the people worked on farms." For all of human history, and for many generations before history, the centre of human wealth has been trading villages -- and today the villages have names like "Wall Street," "Nippon Steel," "Tesla," etc. I.e. now, as always, wealth comes from slivers of society working together in knowledge-intensive community. Farms? A lot of people, as much as a few dozen percent, watched the animals and the plants grow up. At harvest time everybody in the villages went out to help the peasants bring in the crops. Basic reading for anybody who believes the old myths: anything by Jane Jacobs. "Cities and the Wealth of Nations" is one good place to start -- or just Google her up. Enjoy!
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