Comments by "Luredreier" (@Luredreier) on "Premodernist"
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@@esotericschizochad3664 lot of that technology we have developed in Europe was developed due to us having large population centers.
Something that's not as feasible in most of Africa.
You have a lot of areas where you're more likely to get diseases there then here, so people would die if too tightly packed...
People did in Rome too, but a lot of people there didn't end up there out of free will...
In drier areas water is less reliable then here so you can't easily farm and use irrigation like you could with areas with reliable rainfall and rivers etc.
In the middle east you needed the support of the centralized authorities to farm, they controlled the water supply and had the available labour to build out advanced irrigation systems.
And therefore also the power to form large armies to control the surrounding lands...
Europe had all of our sea trade making cities useful since you could have people specialize and sell their specialized goods long distance so even if the local farmers didn't need their goods a given day distant ones might, so you could have a broader customer base supporting each artisan so they didn't necessarily have to produce good themselves too.
And that's made it more sensible for farmers to want to bring goods to market where they could get products from artisans in many different cities all at once.
In Africa large areas where landlocked with difficult terrain.
If you where to tap into such long distance trade networks, why not just use the camel?
Roads just didn't make sense back then, because there just wasn't enough large population centers to justify them.
And without the need for harbours you could have more and smaller scale trading locations, so again, no need for the wheel.
At least that's my take on it...
And like seriously, you're saying that those roads where made by Europeans.
But look back at Europe during Roman times.
It's not like we all had roads back then.
Here in Norway we preferred skiing and transportation by ship, and the first road intended for wheeled transportation wasn't made till 1625 by the order of our king at the time.
If our farmers had their way, it would never had been built because it just wasn't useful enough for the effort any single one of us would have to put in.
And Germanic tribes during the Roman times didn't have miles of roads either.
Nor the Brits etc...
The Romans made theirs to speed up their armies in order to conquer more land and get more slaves etc...
That's just not a need most of the world have.
Yet by saying that those first roads in Africa where made by European you're implying some kind of superiority of us as a people and that's just bs.
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