There might be some small merit to analyzing “why, 500 years ago, was sub-saharan africa not as built up as Europe, China, or India were at the same point in time” where you could point to environmental factors making large scale, bureaucratic, agricultural states with long range logistics and trade more difficult but even that relies on the incorrect assumption that Africa didn’t also have that, which it did. It may not have been the same as those systems were on the Asian continent (including Europe, despite Europe being a relative backwater) and the Indian subcontinent, but there were still large scale trade networks and large agricultural civilizations mining iron and forging steel.
And of course everything after that is explained by “European imperial powers did it, with guns and/or the threat of guns and/or local comprador fucks collaborating with European empires for personal gain at everyone else’s expense.”
The thing is 500 years ago northern Africa was arguably more developed than Europe was at the time, had thriving mineral trades, and African goods were regarded as being of exceptionally high quality
Remember that the richest man in recorded history was an African king
There might be some small merit to analyzing “why, 500 years ago, was sub-saharan africa not as built up as Europe, China, or India were at the same point in time” where you could point to environmental factors making large scale, bureaucratic, agricultural states with long range logistics and trade more difficult but even that relies on the incorrect assumption that Africa didn’t also have that, which it did. It may not have been the same as those systems were on the Asian continent (including Europe, despite Europe being a relative backwater) and the Indian subcontinent, but there were still large scale trade networks and large agricultural civilizations mining iron and forging steel.
And of course everything after that is explained by “European imperial powers did it, with guns and/or the threat of guns and/or local comprador fucks collaborating with European empires for personal gain at everyone else’s expense.”
The thing is 500 years ago northern Africa was arguably more developed than Europe was at the time, had thriving mineral trades, and African goods were regarded as being of exceptionally high quality
Remember that the richest man in recorded history was an African king