The Chinese and the Mayans didn't care. Europeans did. We now have trump!

One of the factoids that I share with students is how India and China were the richest countries on the planet for the longest time.  Not only rich, but advanced in scientific and literary fields also.  Math, astronomy, metallurgy, whatever it was, well, they had it all.

Yet, they didn't seem to have had a great deal of interest in exploring the rest of the world in order to colonize them.

Trevor Noah joked about this in one of his bits, where he asks the audience to imagine Jamaicans, living in the paradise that the Caribbean is, going to cold Europe to colonize the people and the land.

The world changed in 1492.  Jill Lepore writes that "it is a little surprising that it was western Europeans in 1492, and not some other group of people, some other year, who crossed an ocean to discover a lost world."

Lepore gives us an idea of some of the other groups of people:

The Maya, whose territory stretched from what is now Mexico to Costa Rica, knew enough astronomy to navigate across the ocean as early as AD 300.

(A quick comment/question: Why is Lepore using the "AD" instead of "CE"?)

Lepore adds:

The Chinese had invented the compass in the eleventh century, and had excellent boats. Before his death in 1433, Zheng He, a Chinese Muslim, had explored the coast of much of Asia and eastern Africa, leading two hundred ships and twenty-seven thousand sailors. But China was the richest country in the world, and by the late fifteenth century no longer allowed travel beyond the Indian Ocean, on the theory that the rest of the world was unworthy and uninteresting.

Similarly, the Middle East and North African Muslims couldn't care about the rest of the world because they already dominated trade--Mediterranean and continental.

Trevor Noah's Jamaicans serve as wonderful metaphors.  The world outside of Europe was happy and content.

Europeans, on the other hand, were not.

It was somewhat out of desperation, then, that the poorest and weakest Christian monarchs on the very western edge of Europe, fighting with Muslims, jealous of the Islamic world's monopoly on trade, and keen to spread their religion, began looking for routes to Africa and Asia that wouldn't require sailing across the Mediterranean.

Columbus discovered America!

Between 1500 and 1800 roughly two and a half million Europeans moved to the Americas; they carried twelve million Africans by force; and as many as fifty million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease.

The genocide, the rape of cultures, and more that they don't always teach in school!

I suppose white supremacy was also born!

By the end of the 19th century, China and India had been reduced to lands of beggars by white colonialists and imperialists, and the material and cultural riches of Central and South America had been wiped out by Europeans.  Two decades into the 20th century, the Middle East was carved into prizes for Europeans.  And Africa was raped and plundered--even by the tiny Belgians.

These truths are setting up the book well.  Looks like it might be a depressing read.  After all, all these truths have given us trump and his 63 million.  I hope Jill Lepore will give me plenty to be cheerful about too.