What I find of interest is the European _desire_ to expand
and dominate additional territory, if only in the available
peripheries. Western Europe, as noted, got first Iceland
and Greenland, later on the Americas and later yet Australia
and New Zealand and eventually India and Africa. Russia
moved into Siberia and through the Caucasus region. Arguably,
this involved technologically superior cultures supplanting
less developed ones or more populous states obliterating
demographically smaller ones through sheer weight of numbers
-- a process facilitated by disease in the Americas.
The Chinese and the Arabic cultures-- Ottoman and Indian--
on the other hand, had ceased to expand long before this.
Logically, Siberia was just as open to Chinese expansion
as Russian, but this doesn't seem to have happened; in
other directions, Japan, Mongols, and various South
East Asian states blocked Chinese growth-- I don't know why.
The Moslem states were restricted by Europeans (decisively
after 1683 or so) to the west, Russians to the north, Chinese
to the east, Africa was available, but the Arabs did not
attempt to conquer it; they settled for trade. Neither
Chinese nor Moslems were apparently aware of Australia.
My suspicion is that the sophisticated non-European powers
would not have occupied Australia even if aware of it, nor
would they have colonized the Americas if the discovery had
been theirs. They would have settled for trade with the
natives. This MIGHT have something to do with land holding
practices.
In Moslem states, and to some extent Russia, land belonged to
the crown/state and might be bestowed upon the nobililty in
life estates; on death of the holder, the property reverted
to the state. In Western Europe, lands bestowed by the crown
were permanently alienated (although a sufficiently unscrup-
ulous monarch could manage to grab it back by executing the
landholder for treason or other pretext). Power and prestige
and rank in Western Europe were strongly linked to land
possession, rather than wealth per se. I think this is
accidental-- it's the way feudalism happened to develop,
but one might imagine something else happening. But for
whatever reason, Western Europeans had a lust for possesion
of land which was unique in the Old World.
Finding the Americas was like hitting Bingo for the Europeans.
Gold, potential slaves, land.... everything was there for
one with enough nerve and enough willingness to be violent.
And the Europeans, after centuries of warfare among themselves
and with the Moslems, were accustomed to violence. Piracy
was pretty damned close to their normal operating procedure
(and perhaps among the Japanese as well, who are often
regarded as being rather European-like). And in the Americas,
the conquistadors had technolgical superiority, an ideological
edge, and the advantages of superior morale. The natives,
destroyed physically by disease and emotionally by the apparent
easy successes of the invaders, put up little resistence. How
different it would have been if immediately after 1492 the Europeans
had attempted to carve up China or India in the same fashion!
Anyhow, the notion that one gains land as a grant after helping
the state conquer land from other states seems imbedded in
European thought. It goes back to Charlemagne, I would imagine,
and perhaps to the Germanic tribes which overthrew the Western
Roman Empire. Feudalism, in turn, seems to be the byproduct of
weak central government; perhaps the ultimate failure of the
Chinese to dominate the world could actually be traced to the
strength of the Emperor and Imperial bureaucracy, which led
ambitious men to plot against the emperor and to indulge in
civil war rather than conquer and rule nearby aborigines.
Or so I speculate.
-- Mike Shupp Graduate Student Department of Anthropology California State University, Northridge ms44278@csun1.csun.edu http://www.csun.edu/~ms44278/