17/08/2026
(August 16, 2026) Why did the Europeans dominate the world after 1500’s and the Asian and African nations did not? It had EVERYTHING to do with what the political leaders of these continents ALLOWED or PROHIBITED. It also had everything to do with free international trade, what today we call free enterprise and international commerce. At the core was the monopoly of the trade routes between Europe and Asia. The Asian power that controlled the geographical bottleneck between Europe and Asia was the Islamic Ottoman Empire of Asia Minor, today Turkey, and the Middle East, and the only European connection they allowed through were the merchants of Venice, Italy thanks to Marco Polo traveling to China. Africa was already under the control of Islam, and it was “convert to Islam”, become a slave, or die for the African people, which is still going on today. The evils of genocide and slavery suppressed what hope the African people had because of their Muslim masters. The Europeans brought Christian missionaries that gave Africans hope and established hospitals and humanitarian care. The result is Africans embraced Christianity from its beginning in nations like Egypt and Ethiopia eventually to all parts of the continent, even more than many European nations.
However as there was money to be made, neither European nor Chinese merchants wanted to deal with the “Muslim middlemen”. There were plenty of “admirals” and sea adventurer in Spain, Portugal, and later England, France, and the Netherlands that were willing to go to sea and find “direct” routes to Asia to trade. It also was the case, there were Chinese “admirals” and sea adventures that wanted to reach Europe, and they had developed the ships capable to reach Europe the same as the Europeans had developed to reach Asia.
The reason Europeans dominated the sea and China did not was for one reason only: The European kings commissioned their sailors to travel to reach Asia, while the emperor of China forbid his sailors to travel because he feared the Chinese people would become enriched and no longer want an emperor, ending his reign and the future of his family. The Chinese navy was prohibited on pain of death to sail beyond the South China Sea. That meant European commerce and later the science and technology of Europe which emerged from Newton, Galileo in the 1600’s and the Industrial Revolution of the 1700’s would make Europe the dominate continent of the world. It was the accomplishment of individuals and the economics of free enterprise “capitalism” that improved the world. The Europeans did colonize the world, but they did spread their science and technology rapidly to the colonies and future nations they created. Colonialism ended because of World War I, when the kingdoms and empires of Europe basically destroyed each other with the spread of democracy and independent nations completed by the 1970’s.
While socialist and communist harp on colonialism, the true legacy of colonization is the independent nations created improved because of the science and technology determined by the DEGREE to which they practice free enterprise capitalism. The young people of these “third world” are often the most motivated students of science and technology, more than the children of Europe or America. The irony is the motivated third world students want to migrate to America because of economic opportunity, but this is also causing a “brain drain” in their native countries that are preventing improvement of these economies.
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Blaming the world’s or a country's problems on white people is intellectually lazy, historically sloppy, and morally wrong.
Europe absolutely has a complicated colonial past. Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and others built empires, exploited resources, fought wars and imposed their power on other peoples. That history should not be erased or romanticized.
But history did not stop there. The former colonies became independent nations.
They chose their own leaders, built their own institutions, wrote their own laws and charted their own economic paths.
Decades later, it makes little sense to explain every failure in the developing world by pointing back to Europeans and saying, “white people did this.”
The more useful question is, what kinds of systems actually produce prosperity?
The West’s greatest contributions were not a skin color.
They were ideas and institutions, property rights, representative government, the rule of law, scientific inquiry, individual liberty and free enterprise.
Capitalism, for all its flaws, has done more to expand opportunity and raise living standards around the world than any centrally planned alternative.
Countries that protect property, encourage investment, reward work, educate their people and maintain stable institutions tend to do better than countries plagued by corruption, tyranny and economic chaos.
That is not a racial argument. It is an argument about culture, incentives, institutions and choices.
And that is exactly why collective racial guilt is such a dead end.
It teaches people to search for inherited villains instead of asking what policies create safe streets, strong families, productive businesses and rising wages.
Judge people as individuals. Judge governments by results. Judge economic systems by whether ordinary people become freer and more prosperous.
But stop pretending skin color is a serious explanation for the condition of the modern world.
What do you think, has blaming “white people” become a substitute for talking honestly about governance, culture and economic policy?
