Comments by "Stephen Jenkins" (@stephenjenkins7971) on "The Origins of European Imperialism" video.

@mattchensan This is a very dumbed down explanation. Chinese and Ottoman imperialism were every bit as monstrous and genocidal as European imperialism; the literal only difference was that both stretched as far as they could in accordance to their technological and administrative limits or were contested by other powers. Meanwhile Europe found the opportunity to conquer a comparatively weaker powers in the Americas completely uncontested which in turn gave them the technological and administrative capacity to later conquer swaths of the world without stretching themselves too far. In short, the difference is the scale, not the concept. If China had the capacity and removed the cultural snobbery of being the "Middle Kingdom" (a belief that made them believe that there was literally nothing of value outside of China) then they'd likely be pillaging across continents too. Every society that had the power and capability to abuse others, always did so.
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@hamzamahmood9565 He bashed the US infinitely more than he bashes China, so you're kinda preaching to the choir here.
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@mattchensan Yep, because they practically erased most of the peoples when they conquered up to their modern territory. They were more akin to Russia's imperialist push eastward or the US' imperialist push westward than they were European vast conquest. Just because there was a lack of explicit plantations didn't mean genocide/mass murder/enslavement didn't occur. Ancient Chinese didn't see fit to talk about much about that in their history, though, so we don't know the names of the victims. Again, the Chinese obsession with the "Middle Kingdom" in believing that nothing of value was outside of China as well the complete lack of ability to conquer regions outside of their administrative zone was the issue. Just like the Romans were not able to conquer Germania despite being "right there", neither could the Chinese -so they were reduced to forcing economic imperialism via tributary relations rather than outright conquest which became required that Middle Kingdom cultural justification as to why they didn't expand much. Much like how racial superiority was created to justify Europe's rapid expansion via conquest; the Middle Kingdom idea initially justified the same before it morphed into a reason to maintain the status quo. It's literally the reason why the Qing were so arrogant against an imperialist British Empire which so utterly outclassed them in the Opium Wars -the belief that foreign barbarians were nothing compared to the might of the Middle Kingdom. China's form of colonialism, again, is akin to the American and Russian model -expansion via the destruction of other peoples and re-integrating them into your society. It's almost as European colonialism.
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"present all sides without too much bias" Sorry, wut? In a video about the US-Mexican War, his title was "how the US stole Mexico". Nothing about that screams presenting all sides. He's always been like this.
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Wouldn't say locked out, but the Ottomans definitely massively raised tariffs which convinced certain European powers to cut them out if possible.
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@yolo8283 Thnx for correcting me, but pretty much everything else I said was factual.
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@kushastea3961 Ah yes, so because previous empires were not strictly led by Han, that suddenly means that the modern China in no way shape or form has such racist concepts, amirite? I really don't have to frame anything, everyone was as racist as white people during chattel slavery. I ain't saying anyone is special. "china abolished slavery in han dynasty " Which is why the Ming Dynasty had so much trouble actually stopping slavery that it had to do it piecemeal. Heck, during the Taiping Rebellion the dude that called himself Jesus Christ actually managed to abolish slavery entirely in his province. Remind me how China totally abolished slavery again? Chinese historians have a bad habit of ignoring the absolutely atrocious things they have done for the sake of saving face, so we don't actually know exactly when chattel slavery was abolished in China -but it was at least after the 1860's. Likely an end result of the destruction wrought by the Chinese Civil War and the birth of the CCP's rule under Mao where such blatant slavery was no longer tolerated. It ain't like I said anything particularly mean to China either, every nation has some bad stuff in their history, I just find the blatant denial of it by the Chinese to be hilarious 🤣
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