It is why things like chattel slavery, non-cooperation, and extreme levels of greed were not as concentrated elsewhere but heavily relied upon in European development.
The abundance of resources, good weather, lack of famines, and access to open uninhabited land probably also played a defining role in the development of these less hostile civilizations.
When the Chinese visited Africa on trade missions, the idea of mass theft of resources never crossed their minds. The idea of selling drugs and destroying a society for profit was a confusing concept to the leaders of many groups. A great example of this is in the correspondences between the Chinese leadership and Queen Victoria.
I doubt many of these groups expected the people they traded with in good faith to turn around and attempt to destroy these relationships through force and theft.
In my opinion, this is why the last 200 years of western development was so fruitful. If Europeans had stayed in Europe they would not have been as prosperous. It is the wealth taken, industries destroyed in other countries, and trade flows re-routed that created this boom. Much of it done to fuel conflicting war machines in Europe.
We are now at a new stage of development on this planet where smash and grab is no longer as possible (due to nukes). The idea of win-win relationships still seems alien to Europeans dealing with outsiders. This is where a group like the Chinese will outperform tremendously and re-secure their position as global economic leaders in a large portion of this planet.
In many scenarios, the Chinese would rather be poor than suffer reputational damage from this kind of uncivilized activity. We are entering a world where long term reputation and thinking matters, and the Chinese approach will be heavily rewarded.
I'm not sure how long the reputational damage incurred by Europeans will affect their ability to do business around the world but I strongly believe this history will be detrimental to future European development. We can see the beginning of it with the recent rapid movement towards de-dollarization and de-euroization where energy trading and some other commodities are concerned.
I know this can be an uncomfortable truth for some in the west but I expect 90% of planet will be in agreement here, so the message should probably not be ignored.
Also even the assertion that there was a reputation loss on Europe, while plausible is actually not true. Most of the colonies still prefer to trade with their old colonial masters. This is true for the portuguese, the Spanish and the French and English. For example Portugal(ex colonial master) goes toe to toe with China as the importer source of Angola. If reputation is so important it has an inverse correlation to what you assert. No way the portuguese can have a negative reputation and still compete with the Chinese. Its the other way around. The only way the portuguese can compete is because there is a past connection and perhaps reputation.
The reason the Chinese thrive in Africa is the same why they thrive every where else: they have boatloads of goods and personnel and provide it cheaper than anyone. No reputation there, pure economics.
On the contrary, local communities are distrustful of the chinese(which is amazing and defies reason but so the human societies go). How weird are we humans that we privilege relations with our previous oppressor rather than someone who can be better but we know nothing about.
https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/AGO/Yea...
The return of fuel to conflicting European war machines is also starting to occur as the harvesting of Asian and African wealth has started to marginally slow down mainly due to Chinese and some Indian activity. This greed was never really dealt with on a civilizational level in Europe, it just changed forms and still needs to be addressed.
The reason the Chinese thrive in Africa is because they have been an honest trading partner for over 1000 years. Many of China's non-western trading partners trust them more than any other group with close to similar economic scale. This is not a popular truth in western media because the ruling capital class that funds those orgs understand what this trend means in the long term.
>How weird are we humans that we privilege relations with our previous oppressor
On the contrary, on the surface it seems trade between colonized countries and their oppressors is voluntary but it's not the case. Central and South Americans violating European harvesting of wealth will still be sanctioned, couped and/or assassinated, the same is true for most African countries (For example, France by itself assassinated 22 African presidents in the last 40 or so years, they still harvest the wealth of 1/3rd of all African countries). This is the continuation through financialization I spoke of earlier and the arrangement is obviously not enjoyed by the majority of the people that regularly lose their popular liberative leaders and are kept in poverty to continue satisfying European greed. This activity is only recently being interrupted by Chinese trade expansion... De-dollarization/de-euroization and attempted re-routing of global trade are just the beginning of the chains being removed from the rest of the world.
Another commenter, asserts that language similarity seems to be the predictor for trade partner preference. I think he is right. It plays an outsize role, much bigger than reputation, like asserted in your post.
> For example, France by itself assassinated 22 African presidents in the last 40 or so years, they still harvest the wealth of 1/3rd of all African countries)
Yes France is still a very active colonial master with massive intervention in ex-colonies but you can't be serious if you think post-war France is rich and developed because they harvest natural resources. I would actually say that France's activities in Africa are actually detrimental to it's own good and are the product of an old style doctrine of influence and national prestige(again similar to Portugal). This in opposition to a doctrine of market based competition, where they already excel with highly advanced products. The main advantage i can concede is that they brain drain their ex-colonies. That is the real damage, and it was arguably the reason ex colonies have so much difficulty in getting up. Their best minds migrate to the Europe. Not by force mind you, pure market economics and convenience like the language. My master thesis advisor was a Cote-de-Ivoir dude that would have been a great asset in his country. He is black and i am ethnically Portuguese, so the racial dynamics of white over black does not apply. Of course he never left Europe after getting his degree. That is the real damage, but not really some chain or cruelty like you mention. Just people doing their best to improve their lives.
Life is full of unintended consequences and sometimes, greed is actually best, not the least because it is simple and has predictable emergent phenomena. A bounded problem like greed is better than an open world of rainbows of good feelings.
There are two types of greed, zero-sum and win-win. Greed, to the point of becoming detrimental to societies around you, is objectively anti-human and this is the version (zero-sum greed) I'm discussing.
>Yes France is still a very active colonial master with massive intervention in ex-colonies but you can't be serious if you think post-war France is rich and developed because they harvest natural resources.
I mentioned France as an example but similar activity can be seen in Britain, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and other European countries.
Africa is still the largest net creditor to Europe (meaning they fund European economies, sort of a backwards charity). The natural resources extracted continent wide are some of the most valuable in the world. Take a quick look at the mining operations in the background of many African conflicts and you will see the European fingerprint. This is true from the West, Central Africa all the way down to South Africa. Most European gold, platinum, diamond, cobalt, nickle, boxite, manganese, uranium, copper etc wealth is extracted from these countries at extremely low prices or even free due to the financial colonization activity I mentioned earlier through central banks and other means.
Keeping Africa poor and underdeveloped is the only way to create a price ceiling on these valuable resources. This is why the underdevelopment of African countries was a western priority for so many decades. So much so, that the 2nd UN secretary general was assassinated over this specific issue.
>https://www.history.com/news/dag-hammarskjold-death-plane-cr...
This is also why China has suddenly become an enemy in Western media and among the western ruling class. They are violating this economic requirement that provides welfare to Western economies. Their accelerating activity over the last 10-20 years gives Africans direct access to international markets and routes around predatory European nations...this allows actual free market price discovery to occur (aka the core of capitalism).
I understand why many western commoners would want to deny this problematic history but the ruling and international banking class is very aware of these facts. They know where their bread is buttered.
Portugal started the discoveries by conquering Ceuta. I cannot find a better source than this [1] but the attack of Ceuta and thus the start of the discoveries was kind of pure pillage driven with the religious justification as a backdrop. Portugal had just recovered from the black plague and a new monarch dynasty just came into power. Things were ripe. To attack Ceuta, the portuguese needed to invest imensly in ships and ship craft. From this investment and the success of the ceutan campaign it became an obvious advantage to continue persuing naval superiority, the rest is history.
Mind you that the kingdom of Portugal was very scared of projecting itself as a threat to the other European powers and it especially needed to assuage the English that such naval power was not to be employed against them. The portuguese kings were quite aware they would not be tolerated in the great European game. So there was really not much choice than trying something new, and it paid off.
I sometimes think that we live in such a similar times regarding space exploration. Whoever gets the logistics and trade stations of asteroid mining and spaceborne manufacturing right will be a new "naval power" with access to massive amounts of resources. Leaving the local earth powers bickering with each other.
So to the first question, Portugal was around Asia because it was too small to compete with the European powers, Spain likewise. So they turned away from Europe, saw the opportunity and literally split the world in half. The territories to the west of around cape verde were to be Spanish and the ones to the east portuguese. This was defined in the treaty of Tordesilhas[2]. The reason that Brasil became a portuguese colony is by luck(dude Bartolomeu Dias expects to find the way to India and instead lands in brasil. Sheer luck and risk taking.
Finally to show the irony of history, Portugal lost its independence to Spain due to ridiculous circumstances. The first thing the Spanish did with the United portuguese and spanish armada was to use it to unsuccessfully blockade England. Exactly what the enterpreneuring kings did not want and feared. When Portugal recovered its independence it no longer had the naval power to maintain its vast trading network, barely recovering Brasil from the Dutch. Other territories in Asia, especially around the Malaca strait were no longer sustainable. Even so besides Brasil, the portuguese presence overseas was very coastal and limited Precisely because it did not have the size nor tech for full on land presence. Again brasil was special, and probably Brasílians in HN can give you a better more accurate perspective. These dudes called bandeirantes would be given lots of power over any new land discovered, so human greed and need carved one of the largest countries in earth. The inland mapping and presence of the portuguese territories, with the except of Brasil, only started around the 1800s but by then England was already a major super power and she literally would declare war if the portuguese continued claiming the Land between Angola and Mozambique, which clashed with the English ambitions of Cairo to cape Town connections.
[1]https://observador.pt/especiais/ha-600-anos-ceuta-ha-500-afo...