How could Europe overtake actual civilizations such as india or china?
How could Europe overtake actual civilizations such as india or china?
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LaChinx burned down their ships because their government feared the merchant class would overtake the state-run trade channels
It was actually because merchant ships were never as large, the treasure ships were built on government revenue and expense to flex chinese wealth on the barbarians. Once stepenaggers came knocking again, the government needed the funds being put into shipflexing into military shit.
There were several reasons
Guns
India had rockets (like actual explosive missiles used in warfare, not meme fireworks) when the British came
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpowder_weapons_in_the_Ming_dynasty
By not being soulless bug people stifling any kind of independent thought. China was brought down by a private company ffs, not even a military
Most Chinese ships flat bottomed (though a few of them did have keels) and had worse rigging than European ones
About Muslim and Indian ships in the Indian ocean, though sometimes fairly big, Marco Polo remarked how they were fragile and hastly built, the planks were sewn with coconut fiber instead of nailed together
>Marco Polo remarked how they were fragile and hastly built, the planks were sewn with coconut fiber instead of nailed together
This is also stated by Procopius
Ok Chang.
Big dick energy
Because being first isn’t important. Adapting is.
China was a barely functioning mess of a state and India wasn't even India yet
>China
>India
>Civilized
Ahahahhahahahahahahah
They just followed their own religions more closely.
*Religion (Christianity)
>In 1637, an English traveler named Peter Mundy described a warjunk he saw near Guangzhou. It had two decks of cannon ports with protruding guns, but Mundy noted that it could carry only light ordnance and judged it flimsy compared to European cannon ships. Statements by Ming and Qing officials suggest that Mundy was right. Although the Chinese had once built huge vessels, by the 1500s European vessels were acknowledged to be larger and more solid than their Chinese counterparts.
>As a book of military strategy published in China in 1646 puts it, “The red-hairs [i.e., the Dutch] build their ships tall as mountains and sturdy as an iron bucket, so solid that they can’t be destroyed. . . . Ultimately, there’s no way to stand up to them. With great ease they traverse the outer seas without worry of being defeated or damaged.” Another Ming official quipped, “Dutch ships are like mountains; ours are like anthills.”
>The Dutch also seem to have had an advantage in navigation: an ability to sail close to the wind. A seventeenth-century Chinese scholar who traveled to Taiwan and had friends who sailed the seas wrote that Dutch ships “have sails that spiral like a spider’s web, receiving wind from eight directions, so there is nowhere they go that is not favorable. Compare this with Chinese sails and masts. When they encounter a contrary wind, they must bend over to the left and then to the right, leaning dangerously, and thus, winding and wending, they must slowly make their way dangerously forward. The two kinds of ships are as different as heaven and earth.”
Chinese cannons being so shit was probably due to the fact that their walls had been so autistically thickened through millennia that high-caliber guns didn't fit into chinese warfare anyways.
Yeah...about the Dutch...
>obligatory butthurt diaspora
They outnumbered the Dutch twenty to one and still spent nine months besieging a single fort, which they could only take when a German officer defected to their side and taught them how to build European siegeworks.
>At this point—it was the fall of 1661—he realized that the Dutch might hold out indefinitely. He understood that he would have to capture the fortress. But how? He tried various tacks, but each time he built a new cannon position, the Dutch responded by putting up a new position of their own. It was a slow dance of sandbags. To be sure, Zheng’s commanders were learning. Each new cannon position was better than the last. Yet the Dutch were still able to block each one.
>Finally, in December 1661, Zheng had a stroke of luck. A German man, fond of drink, and perhaps frustrated by the fact that alcohol cost the equivalent of five hundred dollars for a six-pack, defected to the Chinese side. He was a high officer who’d fought not just in the colonies but also in Europe. He helped Zheng Chenggong design proper siegeworks.
>They were impressive, constructed so as to protect each other from Dutch counterfire and target a Dutch redoubt that stood on a dune overlooking Fort Zeelandia. Zheng Chenggong had tried capturing this redoubt before, understanding that it was the key to Zeelandia, but his attempts had all been thwarted by Dutch engineers and artillerists. The new siegeworks, however, were effective. When his cannons opened fire the Dutch were helpless. The Dutch governor wrote in despair, “We couldn’t shoot the enemy anywhere, and so he happily thundered on by himself, and we watched with sadness and grief as our redoubt was destroyed.” Shortly thereafter the governor surrendered.
You usually need a 10-1 advantage to lay sieges in the first place, so 20-1 versus a technologically superior opponent isn't that bad.
Proof?
For one, the point if fortifications in the first place is that they're force multipliers. If a fight between an attacker and besieger was equal, then there wouldn't be a point to building them in the first place.
Name a single successful siege where the attacking army didn't have numerical superiority or didn't win through trickery or betrayal.
3-1 is the consensus defender's advantage chink shill
That's in open battle, not in sieges.
It's not surprising. Europeans had much better sailing technology.
>actual civilizations such as india or china?
lol
lmao
More Dutch funnies.
>In 1661, for example, three Dutch ships fought against sixty Chinese junks off the coast of Taiwan. It was a gory battle. Hundreds of Chinese soldiers tried to board the Dutch ships but were shot at until “blood flooded out from the gutters.” Chinese historians have suggested that the Chinese won the battle by using fireboats, as Zheng Zhilong did in 1634, but this is not the case. In fact, the Dutch used guns to fight off wave after wave of attackers, and just as the battle was ending and the Chinese were withdrawing, a careless Dutch cannoneer allowed a spark to get into the largest Dutch ship’s powder room. The vessel was blown to bits. It’s quite likely that without this accident the Dutch would have defeated the Chinese, or at least held them of.
>This perspective on the superiority of Dutch vessels is corroborated by other battles. One of the most telling occurred in 1663. The Dutch had allied with the Qing to expel the Zheng family from their bases in China. The Zheng had hundreds of vessels, and the Dutch had just fifteen, but upon seeing the Dutch fleet the Zheng sent a letter to the Dutch begging them not to attack: “Our ships cannot fight against your ships. . . . Please, we ask that you and your ships not support the Qing against us but sail to another place.” Thus, the Zheng admitted that the Dutch ships were superior. The Dutch demurred, attacked the Zheng, and managed to scatter their fleet. After the victory the main Qing commander wrote admiringly to thank the Dutch admiral: “I watched your ships from a mountain top and rejoiced to see how with their thundering cannon they made the rebel ships flee. . . . I shall not delay to inform the emperor quickly, by special post . . . that the Hollanders are brave and daring in their attacks on our mutual enemy.”
Isn't the indian civiliazation a british invention?
In India they offered themselves to collect taxes for local rulers with tax evasion problems. Having superior weapons made the difference.
>actual civilizations
your premise is flawed, wumao
cope and seethe
interesting thread OP, I was always curious about these super large chinese ships and why they didn't rule the seas
Better technology
Feudal fragmentation and decentralization. States had to constantly try to one up each other and because Europe was split up into more states, the continent as a whole was better developed.
India was as fragmented as Europe for most of its history
China was never as advanced as Europe
During Ming Dynasty, there were Iron Age at best
Racial superiority.