How Europe Stole Africa (so quickly)

(light orchestral music)

- We need to look at something astounding

that happened over the course of like a hundred years.

This is the final chapter,

and what I think is the most mind-boggling chapter,

in the story of how Europe took over the world.

The reason why it's so mind-boggling

is because this is the part of the story

where the map goes from looking like this in 1800

with Europe controlling like 35% of the world's land,

to looking like this by 1914.

(light orchestral music)

With 84% of the Earth being controlled by the people

or the descendants of the people

from this once isolated continent in Europe.

84%, how on Earth did this happen?

A huge part of this next chapter

has to do with this continent,

the second largest continent on Earth

and the part of the world that the Europeans

hadn't really carved up yet.

So this is where the whole story comes together.

It shows us how technology and different ways of thinking

helped these people take over the world,

and in the process, shaped the world we live in today.

The way that we trade, where we get our stuff,

the language I'm using to speak to you right now,

and most of you understand it

even though you don't live anywhere near the place

where it was invented.

I'm telling you, this isn't far away history anymore.

This is the world we currently live in.

So let me show you the third and final chapter

of how Europe stole the world.

(orchestral music)

Another video, another set of beautiful printed maps.

And I'm telling you,

this is the chapter where the maps get really good.

Cartography really took off.

Okay, let's get up to speed on where we're at.

Remember it all started with Spain and Portugal.

They ramped up this colonialism thing back around 1500

and this led them to divide the world between them

until other European countries got in on it, too.

Then the real competition started.

The Dutch created the modern corporation,

which allowed them to speed all of this up.

The world quickly turned into a giant marketplace

run by Europeans with boats and guns

and incentives to bring profits

to the shareholders back home.

(playful music)

This is all a huge part of the story,

but I'm telling you, when it comes to scale,

imperialism is just getting started

and that's because Europeans are about to level up.

We're gonna call this Imperialism 2.0,

a new way of taking over the world,

fueled mostly by technology and a rare cooperation

between all of these empires.

One British prime minister described

this Imperialism 2.0 as,

"the vulgar and bastard imperialism

of irritation and aggression,

of grabbing everything even if we had no use for it."

But let me tell you, if you're like me

and you kind of have a low key implicit belief

that European domination was inevitable

and that this was gonna happen no matter what,

I'm here to tell you that it almost didn't happen.

That's because by the end of the 1700s

revolution was in the air.

(light orchestral music)

Empires were losing their colonies,

starting with a group of Europeans

who were done having a king and declaring independence

for themselves in the late 1700s.

Soon you had a bunch of Spanish colonies

declaring independence.

And then over here in Haiti you had enslaved people

who were organizing and rebelling

against their French masters,

throwing them out and starting their own country.

These empires weren't only losing their colonies.

Back in Europe, one ruler even lost his head in all of this.

The empires were losing their grip

and soon they were fighting with one another

like never before.

It was chaos and it totally freaked

these European rulers out.

Are they losing their empire?

Are they gonna lose their reigns on power?

Is the era of abundance and domination coming to an end?

No, we can't let this happen.

So they start doing something that was kind of unheard of.

Instead of fighting and competing with each other,

like they've always done,

the European powers start talking to each other.

Their empires were in jeopardy

and they needed to collaborate,

find ways to share power both at home in Europe,

but also on the world stage.

Soon, this new culture of diplomacy and collaboration

would turn to focus on the one continent

that none of these European powers had carved up yet.

The new imperial frontier.

Certainly full of resources,

but not yet conquered.

(whimsical music)

I mean, the maps tell the story here.

The maps were like a record of what Europeans knew

and didn't know about the world.

I mean, this one British map from 1800s says it all.

Look at this thing.

Europeans were definitely familiar with Africa,

especially here in the coast,

where for hundreds of years they had trading posts,

and of course, the Atlantic slave trade.

But look how they mapped the interior of the continent.

It literally just gives up

and is like inland parts almost entirely unknown,

which is pretty rare for this time period.

At this point, the Europeans had really mapped

a lot of the world,

but this place was off limits.

It was the stuff of legend, of myths.

The caption here on the map says that

this interior part of Africa "may be considered

as absolutely unknown or completely unexplored.

All we know," says the map, "is that

its immense and arid sands are intersected

with complete collections of the most ferocious beasts

and most uncivilized men."

That's all they know.

(light music)

There was a very good reason for this.

The fact is that soldiers and explorers from Europe

who went into this area,

a lot of 'em didn't come home.

Up to 40% died from diseases

like the mosquito-borne illness, malaria.

So much so that this part of the map

became known as the White Man's Grave,

totally off limits.

But that soon changed.

(playful music)

Two giant things happen that change everything,

completely redirect what Europeans can do

with their mounting power.

First, these two French guys are able

to take the bark of this tree,

which had been used for a very long time

for a variety of purposes

and isolate a vital chemical called quinine.

It combats malaria, the major killer of Europeans in Africa.

They now have a white man's shield

to protect them from the White Man's Grave.

The door is slowly creaking open.

Second, this guy happens.

King Leopold II, he's the king of this new country

called Belgium, and it existed for like 40 years.

It's kind of a minor place in Europe,

nothing like these OG colonizers.

So it's like 1875, and King Leopold wants to play

with the big boys.

He wants a colony.

So he literally goes around and starts asking

these major colonial powers for like some of their land.

Like he goes to the OGs, Spain and Portugal,

and he's like, "Hey guys, I know you're in decline.

Can I have one of your colonies?"

And they're like, "No."

So then he goes to the British and he's like,

"Hey guys, I know you have New Guinea,

maybe you don't have any plans for it.

You could give it to me."

And they're like, "No, Leo.

Don't you realize how hard we worked to steal this land?

We're not gonna give it to you as a handout."

So King Leopold decides to take matters into his own hands.

He turns to the map and decides this part of the map,

the parts unknown, where none of the colonizers

have arrived to yet, is a prime place for his colony.

King Leopold sets his sight on the White Man's Grave.

A quick reminder that this

is kind of the fantasy of the Europeans

who haven't explored this.

In reality, at this point,

Africa looks a lot more like this.

But in the mind of King Leopold and other Europeans,

it's a big, blank canvas with unlimited possibilities.

So Leopold sends explorers to like the dead center

of this blank canvas.

And they're armed, not only with some

of the latest and greatest weapons,

but also with medicine that shields them

from these killer tropical diseases.

These Belgian explorers arrive

and are able to make agreements with the locals,

laying claimed to this land.

King Leopold now has his own little colony

in the center of the White Man's Grave.

And of course, they start mapping it.

This is a map from a bunch

of Belgian cartographers and explorers

when they first arrive to this center part of Africa.

Very little detail here at the beginning.

This is 1880.

They basically got this river,

some of the offshoots,

but they don't really know what's going on in here yet.

This becomes the frame that Leopold uses

to build his colony.

(light music)

Now of course, this freaks the French out

because they're like, "Hey, what's Belgium doing in Africa?

Why are they exploring all this land?"

So they decide to send their own explorers

to claim their own bit of land.

After all, they've got the medicine,

it's not nearly as dangerous,

and the Belgians are doing it.

Well, of course now the British are waking up.

They're sending people, too.

And even the new kid on the imperial block,

Germany is chipping in,

and now suddenly we've got a scramble on our hands.

(tense orchestral music)

"But wait," say the European powers,

"Let's learn from our mistakes.

Instead of the old days where we always

had to fight over things,

in this era of revolution and warfare,

remember that we're trying to be better

about talking to one another?

Coordinating, remember?"

So it's 1884 and all these big,

Africa hungry European empires get together in Berlin.

I mean, there's amazing painting

of just them all sitting here,

looking at this big beautiful map,

which would be like an amazing activity to do

until you realize what's actually happening here.

You've got the chancellor of Germany,

you've got the OG colonizers,

Portugal explaining this place

to Belgium and France and Italy,

and you've even got the new country, the United States

who showed up kind of new to all this imperial stuff,

but quickly learning how power really works

on the international stage.

Basically, anyone in Europe who didn't have

an empire yet got in now.

Oh, and crucially, they didn't invite any African leaders.

And to be clear, this painting isn't like exaggerated,

like it's not a political cartoon.

This is literally a bunch of European dudes

in a room in Berlin in 1884

discussing and coordinating how they're going to carve up

and take this continent.

And they decided that there was gonna be one big rule

for this new scramble for Africa.

No pretending.

None of this only on the map, fake imperialism thing

that the Pope arranged for Spain and Portugal

a few hundred years previous.

You actually have to control the land

if you're gonna claim it.

So they divide up the map on who gets what,

they leave the conference,

and they get to work.

The French start moving in quickly from West Africa.

The British begin taking over Sudan

and expanding north from down here in South Africa

to take over all of this land.

The Germans really start establishing themselves

here and over here.

Italy starts occupying all this land up here

in the north and east.

And Leopold, well, he got his colony.

77 times the size of Belgium,

here it was as a blank canvas

when they first started exploring in 1880.

Here it is 14 years later.

Little Belgium down here, giant Congo up here.

The blueprint is filled out, the conquest is complete.

With his new colony, King Leopold, of course,

went on to do horrible things,

exploiting, pillaging the resources from this place

and wreaking horrible havoc on the people.

And it is horrific and it is horrendous,

and I made a whole other video

that kind of goes into it more.

I'll link to it and go to the sources

in the description, please.

Okay. (intense orchestral music)

All of these empires were carving up this map,

coming in, mapping it very beautifully.

It's like literally the opposite of what it was.

It's unknown and now it's totally known.

Pillaging the resources, bringing it back home,

making record profits, et cetera, et cetera.

And all of this, this carving,

it happened really fast.

(intense orchestral music)

But wait a minute, hold on, pause.

How does this make any sense?

Like it made sense when it was all like on water

and there were ships and there was domination

and trading ports and all of that,

but this, this is an incredibly,

logistically ambitious thing to do.

Like this was actually a central question for me

that led me to make this series

because I just didn't understand how these countries,

in a matter of a few years,

could completely carve up the second largest continent?

Well, the answer to that question

isn't that surprising.

These Europeans now had a leg up.

They had new tools.

(upbeat music)

Remember they had invented capitalism to make them rich.

That gave them time to do science,

which gave them technology that they used

to make their capitalism better and more effective,

more productive.

This cycle repeated itself over and over and over,

giving Europeans a further

and further leg up technologically,

until soon they had stuff like this, a steamboat.

You didn't have to worry about the wind anymore

to keep going.

You could just steam your way all the way up African rivers.

- Or the old African queen.

- Or the railroad, quick way to transport food and troops.

Like you can see this map,

all of this red is either railroads that they put in

or railroads that they were constructing at this time.

This allowed Europeans to level up,

not just in Africa, but everywhere.

I mean, here they are in India.

The British quickly taking over this entire subcontinent

of what today's India and Pakistan and Bangladesh

with this massive complex rail system

that they built basically in no time.

They also invented the telegraph,

which could now relay messages in a matter of minutes

instead of weeks.

I mean, this political cartoon really personifies

how powerful this was.

And of course, what we've been looking at this whole time.

(upbeat music)

They made maps.

(orchestral music)

Big, beautiful juicy maps showing the geography

and the people and all of the land that they had conquered.

In addition to technology,

these empires had also perfected the art

of allying with local power holders

and turning the people against each other.

"Divide and conquer,"

which allowed a small group of Europeans

to control millions of locals.

And of course, they had these.

(orchestral music)

These refined killing machines

that allowed small groups of European soldiers

to rip through truly formidable African armies.

Like look at this painting from Sudan

where the British used their guns

to slaughter 10,000 enemies with just a few hundred losses.

And hear this casual caption

showing that these savages were now

"mowed down by these modern weapons of war,

clearing way for civilization."

Now, it wasn't this easy everywhere.

Descendants of white Dutch settlers

held off the British for a long time

down here in South Africa,

and the Ethiopians were able to hold off the Italians

from conquering their land,

making it the only place in Africa to never be colonized.

But listen, in the midst of all this bloodshed,

we have to talk about something that doesn't fit cleanly

into our narrative of good versus evil.

Because the presence of these Europeans in this continent

also brought really positive things.

Remember those French dudes that discovered

the treatment for malaria?

Well that was tested in the field

in French Algeria, a colony.

It changed medicine forever,

giving us our modern understanding of mosquitoes

and the diseases they spread.

This scramble into Africa helped push forward

our understanding of health and disease and medicine.

These and tons of other medical developments

help these Europeans conquer land,

but it also brought innovation that we still use today

that has saved countless lives.

(light music)

Okay, so technology was a major defining factor,

but it wasn't just technology.

Once again, we see in this chapter

what we saw in other chapters.

That Europeans had to develop new,

sophisticated mental inventions

that allowed this all to go down.

The popular story that they were telling themselves

at this time was that all civilization

could be ranked according to the level of development.

And look, according to this analysis,

they placed themselves at the top

and they could tell themselves very easily

that they were the enlightened people of the world.

This new colonizing story

was the most sophisticated and tantalizing yet,

and it's one that's still kind of embedded

in a lot of our brains still.

That the enlightened civilization had a burden

to bring civilization to the rest of the world.

And for that, they kind of needed

to stay on top and control.

And the reason why this story

was so believable and tantalizing

is because at this time

it was being blended with actual real objective science

that was being done by Europeans.

Like this guy, Charles Darwin,

someone who changed the way that we think

about the natural world.

He had just put out a book about how animals evolved

into hierarchies with different capabilities and traits.

Well, if that applies to all animals,

then it must apply to humans themselves

and their societies and their civilizations.

So then they go out into the field with their maps

and they start gathering observations

that confirm this story.

And soon, they're measuring people's skulls

all around the world.

They're keeping notes,

they're developing theories and terms,

they're writing academic papers,

all of this to define a pretend set

of pseudo-scientific ideas,

the idea that we're all part of a different race,

all with different natural capabilities.

And that is what must explain

why some people have the resources and the technology

and others do not.

Like the previous stories that Europeans told themselves,

this one was intoxicating.

Think of all the generations that passed

where this story could be ingrained

into the minds of the people.

But again, remember that I'm not saying

that these Europeans are telling themselves

this story every day.

We're now talking about the great, great,

great grandchildren of like the original colonizers.

The individual people didn't have the grand plan in mind

to go carve up Africa.

They were just responding to what they knew,

what they'd been told was real,

what they wanted to believe.

It was a way of life.

It was a way of thinking.

And if we think that we're somehow exempt

from a similar type of mental model that we don't see

but that dictates our behavior,

we're tricking ourselves.

I mean, listen to one of these British imperialists,

Cecil Rhodes.

He says, "We happen to be the best people in the world

with the highest ideals of decency and justice,

liberty and peace.

And the more of the world we inhabit,

the better it is for humanity."

Okay, Cecil has made up his mind.

(orchestral music)

Okay, so let's look at the map

in like the early 1900s.

Africa looks like this,

completely carved up by European powers.

Over here, the Dutch had conquered

the entire Indonesian archipelago.

The French completely taking over

this part of Southeast Asia.

But the real kingpin in all of this taking over land stuff

was the British Empire.

In addition to all this stuff they had in Africa,

they occupied the huge Indian subcontinent.

They also had a few of these important ports

like Hong Kong and Singapore.

I mean, I can't go over all of the stuff they took over

'cause it's just too much.

At the peak of their empire,

they ruled over 412 million people,

which was a ton for that time.

Their domination had spread to almost 25% of the globe,

making Britain this rainy set of islands in Europe

the biggest empire that ever existed.

In doing so, they spread their people,

their ideas, their economic system,

their fringe language to every corner of the world,

including where I'm sitting right now.

Because remember, the US is just one expression

of the British Empire,

the branch of the empire that went on

to become the most powerful country in the world

to influence how the world order would look.

By 1914, Europe had successfully taken over the world.

(light music)

They were deathly rich compared to the rest of the globe.

And their ideas, both good and bad,

were deeply embedded in the international system.

But suddenly, all of this technology,

all this industrialization that made them so effective,

turned away from conquering faraway lands

and was turned on each other.

(cannon explodes)

(orchestral music)

Over the next 30 years, hundreds of millions of people

are killed in the two most destructive wars ever

made possible by all the same things

that allow Europeans to take over the world,

sophisticated weapons in technology

that Europeans are now turning on each other.

The so-called sophisticated race

is now slaughtering one another

on an unprecedented scale.

These wars didn't do the image

of the civilized Europeans any good.

And Western-schooled local elites decided that

they didn't wanna be ruled by foreign forces anymore.

They were able to rally their people around common language

and birth to national identity that didn't include

being ruled by white people from some faraway continent.

And they pushed the colonists out,

sometimes peacefully, but most often with force.

The Europeans had built this insane global project

for more than 400 years,

and yet they saw it crumble in a matter of decades.

(tense orchestral music)

So, today, the map has been severely redrawn.

Former colonies are now mostly independent countries.

There are still a ton of weird, idiosyncratic holdovers

from the colonial period.

I've talked about those many times

and I will continue to talk about them.

(light music)

I wanna finish this up,

finish this video and finish this series up

with my last thought here,

which is something that the map doesn't tell us much about.

(light music)

Even though all these countries became independent

and they can claim their own sovereignty, their own borders,

their colonizers are gone.

They didn't actually.

Not only were there loads of borders

that were literally drawn by colonizers,

I mean, see basically all of my previous work.

But by the end of this

it was the Europeans that had tied the whole world up

into an interconnected system

that still kind of echoed the old one.

The Dutch invention of the shareholder corporation

didn't go away.

Private companies didn't suddenly stop looking

for the same far off places

to find resources, to find labor,

to feed increasing demand among their people back home.

And European rulers and their offspring

didn't stop using their big metal guns and their technology

to get what they wanted In faraway lands.

Occasionally talking to each other

and occasionally fighting with each other.

Fighting to control land, to control people,

to control ideas, and perhaps most powerfully,

the idea that our enlightened way was indeed the best way.

- We will stand with the new leaders of Iraq

as they establish a government of,

by, and for the Iraqi people.

- Certainly it has not gone away.

(light music)

And yet, if it were only that simple,

a simple narrative of good and bad,

greedy Europeans take over the world

and do anything to stay ahead,

that would be a lot easier in some ways,

but it's not.

Europe taking over the world

has also thrust humanity into an age of peace

and prosperity where people live longer,

suffer less in a lot of ways,

have more food to eat.

I mean, the very moral lens

that you and I are using right now

to evaluate the good and bad of this history,

that was a lens that was cultivated and developed

by the same cultures that pillaged

and subjugated their way around the planet.

These ideals of justice and equality

and human rights and representation,

social equality and self-determination,

those ideas permeated the globe

alongside the colonizers who carved it up.

And yet, it was this conquest that put these people

on top of the whole system

giving us the power and the advantage,

the default power holders in our world.

(light orchestral music)

These three parts have been a story

of how an isolated group of farming people,

some of them my ancestors,

left their shores to explore,

discovering a vast world that eventually

they would find a way to control.

And in the process, setting the rules

for how things work today.

What's slightly scary to me about this

is how easy it is to look back on this whole history

and feel like it was gonna happen

this way no matter what,

that it was inevitable.

That of course Europeans took over the world.

They were always more adept,

they were bound to control the planet.

But if there's anything I've learned

diving into this broad tour through European imperialism

is that this idea is just hindsight bias.

This didn't happen because of some superior DNA

or because God wanted these people to take over the world,

but rather it happened to because a bunch of people

happened to be at the right place

that allowed them to start a chain

of millions of little decisions

that pushed them to do whatever they could

to procure more and more resources.

They got ahead because of lucky circumstances.

And yet today in our modern world,

we continue to do whatever we need to to stay ahead

while simultaneously believing

that it was always gonna happen this way.

(light music)

It's over.

It's over.

I mean, the series is over,

but the year is over.

I deserve this.

Not only is it the end of the Europe series,

it's the end of the year

and what a year it has been.

By the way, this video is not sponsored by anyone,

probably because we're in a recession.

And so I'm gonna take this time

to just reflect a little bit on what this year has meant

for me as a storyteller and a journalist

and for our team and what we are gonna do next.

I think for me, the big thing I learned this year

was that we can build a big operation.

Like for a long time it was just me

kind of pushing buttons on a laptop

and like making stories.

And this year, it actually became a team.

We now have lots and lots of people

making really, really cool stuff, a very talented team.

And we're doing journalism on a level that we've never done.

We go really deep on every fact that we say on this channel,

and that requires a lot of work.

Sometimes that feels really tiresome,

but a lot of the time that feels exciting.

That we on YouTube can be doing like hardcore journalism

and fun stuff too, obviously.

We got to do a few in the field documentaries this year,

which was really amazing.

I went to Paris and Korea and Switzerland.

We printed a lot of amazing maps

and showed you what maps were like over the years

and what they were used for.

Oh, and my hair got really long

'cause I decided for the first time in my life

not to cut it,

and that's making my whole no shampoo thing

a little more complicated.

Maybe I'll make a video about that.

Anyway. (romantic music)

I eat a lot of Doritos.

Like a lot of Doritos.

Like I really like Doritos,

even after I know how they're made.

But in my mind, this is kind of just the beginning.

Like I want this to be the beginning.

I want like four years from now to look back and be like,

"Oh yeah, 2022.

That was the year that we really started to ramp up."

And that gets me to the thing

that I'm really excited about that we launched this year,

which is a community on Patreon called The Newsroom.

A place where people like you support us

in what we're trying to do here

and allow us to grow.

More and more, and especially during economic downturn

and unpredictability,

this work that we do relies on community support,

on people like you showing up and supporting us.

And it's our Newsroom supporters that are allowing us

to do better work, to do more of it,

and I'm very grateful for that.

In addition to supporting independent journalism,

Newsroom members also get access to a bunch of cool stuff,

like a behind the scenes vlog,

an extra video every month.

There's a lot of really talented,

interesting people behind the scenes.

And every month you get a vlog where you see

how it's all done.

You get access to music from our composer Tom Fox.

You get access to my scripts.

Like occasionally we do Q&As where we get to chat.

I do polls where I get story ideas.

It's become a really cool community of supporters

and just a kind of a sounding board for cool ideas.

Oh, and here's a big one.

We've started publishing our videos over on Nebula,

which is a creator-owned platform

where you can get our videos a week early.

There's a link in my description that explains all that.

If you wanna support the channel

and you're like a production person,

then we have LUTS and Presets,

which help us color our videos and photos.

And if you don't wanna support the channel

and you just wanna keep watching,

that's fine, too.

I'm not here to tell you to give me money.

I'm here to make cool stories

and I hope that you're learning from these videos

and I appreciate you being here in the first place.

So, let's raise a glass to a wonderful year

of learning and growth and amazing stories,

and look forward to a 2023 that I hope

is gonna be full of even more growth.

Not only growth in the number of people that are here,

but also a growth in our desire

to like understand this world,

to understand the story of how we all got here

and how it works today.

I will continue to be the curious storyteller

who tries to bring those stories to you

in the best way possible.

I appreciate all of those who are here supporting,

and cheers to a great 2023 of curiosity

and a lot of maps.

Bye everyone.

(light upbeat music)

(gentle music)