steviedeluxe

I suppose that if you look at it from the point of view of the native peoples in Australia or North America, then yes, as much of their population and cullture was wiped out. Same goes further south in the Americas, with the Maya and Aztec cultures totally destroyed.
But can we redress the balance with better medical techniques, planes, cars and longer life expectancies?
Would the world have been left in a better state if the UK, Spain, Portugal, France etc never embarked on building empires?

Pocaloca

Wow, good topic Stevie! I'm off out now but will give it some thought. How far back do we go?

Domino

too late, we have passed that point and moved on into another time line

IMO if it hadn't been us then it would have been others, after all don't forget the that if we hadn't been searching, expanding, looking for more trade then we wouldnt be where we are now, just a little island in a cold part of Europe.
But how far do we go back, look at Spain's history with the Phoenicians and Greeks, Romans and Moors - were they also bad news ??

And don't forget the impact Religion had on many indigenous peoples.

steviedeluxe

Well I'm thinking of after the Middle Ages, so we include various western European countries...("triumph of the west" and all that). The subject is big enough.
I realise we can go back to the spread of Islamic empires, or even the Roman or Persian empires, but they are surely meat for another thread?

Pocaloca

Well, those European empire builders wiped out whole populations, either deliberately or via the diseases they spread to which the local people had no immunity. So we will never know what those people might have been capable of, left to their own devices.

Some of the civilisations in the Americas were incredibly advanced, the Aztecs for example with their floating gardens. They grew enough food to support their populations in what was basically an inhospitable swamp, and had leisure time to create amazing works of art. I'm sure if the conquistadores hadn't marched in and slaughtered them all for their gold, they would have continued to make amazing technological advances.

Or maybe they would have gone the other way and decided to conquer Europe, because we had some mineral they craved? If any Europeans survived, we might still be making human sacrifices to pacify the fertility gods!

Dick Dasterdly

After all that went before it's very significant how many ex-colonies of their own free will chose to retain close connections with the UK via the British Commonwealth, which is the envy of virtually every country worldwide, whereas most other ex-colonies could not wait to totally free themselves from the shackles of such as Spain and France.

Domino

I don't think you specifically include (or exclude) any period in your original posting

But most of us as individuals and/or nations look on what has gone before as the example we wish to exceed.
Take Hitlers 3rd Reich, it would have taken alot to have exceeded the 1st Reich which was from 962-1806 although the 2nd Reich was from 1871-1918 which is what he wanted to exceed, hence the re-use of the railway carriage for the capitulation of the French, which was seen as the ultimate disgrace. and it was surely the 2nd he was trying to emulate and exceed.

Back a couple of hundred years or so it was a territorial move that was done to imprint on the rest of the world the might of the nation. Hence the millions of maps printed with Red to mark the British Empire.

I don't believe the return of nations to their own devices in the latter half of the last century have proven to be a good thing, in retrospect, but was expected by other nations without that millstone.

Were the Western Empires totally bad news ?
I think not, they brought alot of stability to the world, developed markets for products and people who assisted nations to grow much faster than they ever would have if left to their own devices.

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Fredbargate

Was it not man from Africa that conquered the world?

sujee

What did the Romans ever do for us ?

Domino

unless you start to believe the finds of 1923 in China.......

if God landed in his spaceship and dropped off some lab rats, would he have just left them in one place or seeded the planet ??

although considering the ancestry of parts of Africa they seem to have been less conquering and less dynastic than Europeans. Perhaps something to do with the cold weather ?

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Domino

concrete
aquaducts
central heating
brick houses instead of sticks and straw
numerology
language

as you say, what did they do for us - not a single I-pad, I-phone, PC, laptop, digital watch in there, although they did give us tablets to write on, just an early version with no storage.

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Lynn R

Have we not got enough present and future problems to be thinking about, or is that just too scary a prospect so we might as well go back to the history books instead?

Beaverstate

Agreed, Civilization(s) are never static. Some ascending, some descending. Still true...

jimenato

I don't think you meant numerology

Domino

well perhaps not,
but as Rome is according to one train of thought a place where the Greeks set up home before the volcano that wiped out Atlantis they would have taken the Pythagorean numerology principles with them