Ukraine's European Revolution?

[Iormlund]

Like how in EU2 I'd go full narrowminded so I could build cities throughout Siberia and the Pacific coast and end up hopelessly behind in tech.

Yeah, but all that manpower. You ended up with 2 million soldiers or something like that.

[alfred russel]

The coast of east Africa was pretty well-known by all kinds of mariners in the Indian Ocean.  But it wasn't run over by the continental conquerors that bound Eurasia together (not that they would have been able to engage in a long campaign of conquest in Africa anyways).  Not isolated, but distant.

If large parts of sub saharan africa are so distant they don't have writing or the wheel until colonialization, that is fairly isolated.

[alfred russel]

Like how in EU2 I'd go full narrowminded so I could build cities throughout Siberia and the Pacific coast and end up hopelessly behind in tech.

Yeah, but all that manpower. You ended up with 2 million soldiers or something like that.

Paradox clearly didn't fully grasp that the Atlantic Ocean keeps Western Europe abnormally warm for the latitude, allowing for higher populations (and manpower) than the more distant parts of eurasia at similar latitudes. Paradox isn't the only one struggling to grasp this. 

[Syt]

Ca. 20 Ukrainians protested in front of the HQ of UniCredit Austria, a major bank where many Ukrainian government members have accounts. And Yanukovich owns a holding company in Vienna.

Well, could be worse. It's not like Chechen hitmen in Kadyrov's pay came here to evade investigation. Oh, wait.

[Malthus]

Like how in EU2 I'd go full narrowminded so I could build cities throughout Siberia and the Pacific coast and end up hopelessly behind in tech.

Yeah, but all that manpower. You ended up with 2 million soldiers or something like that.

Paradox clearly didn't fully grasp that the Atlantic Ocean keeps Western Europe abnormally warm for the latitude, allowing for higher populations (and manpower) than the more distant parts of eurasia at similar latitudes. Paradox isn't the only one struggling to grasp this. 

In England, I was amused by one fellow who insisted that Toronto just *had* to be further north than London, because Toronto was all cold in the winter. 

London: 51.5072° N

Toronto: 43.7000° N

London is further north than Thunder Bay: 48.3822° N

[Neil]

The coast of east Africa was pretty well-known by all kinds of mariners in the Indian Ocean.  But it wasn't run over by the continental conquerors that bound Eurasia together (not that they would have been able to engage in a long campaign of conquest in Africa anyways).  Not isolated, but distant.

If large parts of sub saharan africa are so distant they don't have writing or the wheel until colonialization, that is fairly isolated.

I think you have a weird picture of early Africa in your head.

[alfred russel]

The coast of east Africa was pretty well-known by all kinds of mariners in the Indian Ocean.  But it wasn't run over by the continental conquerors that bound Eurasia together (not that they would have been able to engage in a long campaign of conquest in Africa anyways).  Not isolated, but distant.

If large parts of sub saharan africa are so distant they don't have writing or the wheel until colonialization, that is fairly isolated.

I think you have a weird picture of early Africa in your head.

You should read up a bit on sub saharan african history. You can start with this article, which has the first heading titled "historical isolation".

http://www.essential-humanities.net/world-history/sub-saharan-africa/

[garbon]

That seems like a pretty shitty page. Not surprised that such a high level summary lacks nuance.

[Neil]

The coast of east Africa was pretty well-known by all kinds of mariners in the Indian Ocean.  But it wasn't run over by the continental conquerors that bound Eurasia together (not that they would have been able to engage in a long campaign of conquest in Africa anyways).  Not isolated, but distant.

If large parts of sub saharan africa are so distant they don't have writing or the wheel until colonialization, that is fairly isolated.

I think you have a weird picture of early Africa in your head.

You should read up a bit on sub saharan african history. You can start with this article, which has the first heading titled "historical isolation".

http://www.essential-humanities.net/world-history/sub-saharan-africa/

Your source isn't very good, and your reading of it doesn't help.  If you did anything more than scan for the word 'isolation', you'd see that even your source goes on to talk about extensive trade on the east coast of Africa across the Indian Ocean.

[alfred russel]

Your source isn't very good, and your reading of it doesn't help.  If you did anything more than scan for the word 'isolation', you'd see that even your source goes on to talk about extensive trade on the east coast of Africa across the Indian Ocean.

There was trade on the east coast, especially in the northern parts. However, large parts of the continent are not along the eastern coast, and the trade links were not enough for innovations to penetrate much of the continent. Thus, both the article, and I, described it as "isolated."

Here is another source, the mother of all sources, wikipedia's article on sub-saharan africa, in the lead in to the history section:

The wheel was barely used in Sub-Saharan Africa into the 19th century, its adoption only occurring after the arrival of Europeans as they explored the region and then moved to exploit it. Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia were the only African countries to innovate systems of writing; only Ethiopia invented the plow.

[garbon]

Here's one of the articles that wheel page cites.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1159117?uid=3739832&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21103367974747

Points out interactions with cultures with wheels (and suggest widespread knowledge) - so lack of wheel use isn't because of "isolation."

[alfred russel]

Here's one of the articles that wheel page cites.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1159117?uid=3739832&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21103367974747

Points out interactions with cultures with wheels (and suggest widespread knowledge) - so lack of wheel use isn't because of "isolation."

Without buying the article, I can't read where the author was going. I've generally read three theories why the wheel wasn't widespread in Africa:

1. Isolation
2. It wasn't suitable to the area, hence not adopted (it seems as though that is where your article was going)
3. (an outdated view) Racial reasons

I think that 2 and 3 don't fly. After the colonial era, the wheel was widespread (as were a host of other technologies). It would seem that if 2 and 3 were valid before colonialization, they should be valid after as well.

My view (and the view of others) is that isolation is the most logical answer, but with the caveat that the wheel is a more complex part of technology than most assume. You need some version of roads/paths, some manufacturing expertise, ideally some draft animals (which are now widespread in Africa, now that the isolation has ended, but even without wheelbarrows are quite useful), and ideally economic technology that makes manual labor of transport uneconomical.

So basically, the concept of the wheel isn't enough to have widespread implementation of the wheel, you would also need an array of other technologies for it to happen. And so while large parts of sub saharan Africa may have been exposed to the concept of the wheel, and in some cases employed it on a limited basis, the rest of the technologies weren't there. That is consistent with what was seen in meso america, where the concept of the wheel was found to be employed on toys, but doesn't seem to have been employed elsewhere.

[garbon]

Here is some more:

http://www.animaltraction.com/StarkeyPapers/Starkey-HistoryAnimalTractioninAfrica-97-draft.pdf

Animal power for cultivation and wheeled transport in sub-Saharan Africa
Ethiopia, together with a few neighbouring parts of the Horn of Africa, is exceptional in sub-Saharan Africa,
since farmers have been using animal power for tillage for thousands of years. However, in most sub-Saharan
African countries, animal traction for tillage and wheeled transport was introduced during the colonial period.
The process of introduction and adaptation is still continuing.

There are various factors that may be responsible for the late adoption of plows in sub-Saharan Africa. In much
of the continent, different tribal groups have specialised in animal-rearing and in crop production. Thus many
crop-growing farmers did not own potential work animals. Moreover, many traditional farming systems have
been based on bush-fallow rotations. The bush is cut down and burned, and seeds or tubers planted in the
cleared area. There is no need to till the land with a plow. In any case this would be difficult since the soil is full
of roots. Seeds can be scattered or planted in small pockets, for which a simple digging implement is
appropriate. In farming systems with long periods of bush fallow, weeds do not present major problems.
Provided the fallow periods are long, such systems can be quite productive in terms of yield per unit of human
labour. It is only when human population pressures necessitate short fallow periods, that it becomes justified to
clear the land of roots and stumps and to plow. Thus, in much of sub-Saharan Africa, the necessary social,
environmental and agricultural conditions to favour the use of plows have not really existed. Indeed, there are
still parts of Africa where the plow is not really economically justified. The failure of animal traction to spread
into some semi-humid areas in recent decades, is partly explained by the lack of the appropriate preconditions
(Starkey, 1986a and 1992; Pingali, Bigot and Binswanger, 1987).

Another important constraint on the spread of the plow in precolonial times was the presence of tsetse flies and
trypanosomiasis in virtually all lowland areas. The relatively low human populations that obtained almost
everywhere in Africa meant that hunting pressure on wild animal vectors was insufficient to eliminate
reservoirs of trypanosomiases. Pastoral cattle that can survive when well-fed or moved regularly by expert
herders have a much accelerated death rate from disease when subjected to work-stress (Blench 1987). It is
possible that both wheeled vehicles and plows were introduced experimentally in prehistory, but failed due to
disease constraints. Increased human population in the colonial era following improved health-care both
allowed major clearance of regions of bush and eliminated large populations of tsetse vectors. This helped to
make animal traction a viable proposition in many areas.

African ports and islands
Traders and colonial powers had contact with Africa's offshore islands and ports, before the hinterland was
colonised. In most countries, the use of animal-powered wheeled transport was first introduced in coastal and
river ports in the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuries (Law 1980). In a few cases where social,
economic and ecological conditions proved favourable, the use of animal-powered transport gradually spread
from the coastal region, through the activities of traders, settlers, missionaries and the administering authorities.
Animal-drawn cart technology spread inland in South Africa (and neighbouring territories), French West Africa
(from Saint Louis) and in East Africa. However, with the notable exception of South Africa (and nearby
countries), the introduction of animal power for agriculture was largely a twentieth century phenomenon.

At any rate, I think it is hard to suggest that Sudan, West Africa, Horn of Africa and the coast of East Africa were isolated (regions as noted in your overview link) - given how much contact they had with other societies in the pre-colonial period.

[alfred russel]

Garbon, animal power for agriculture and wheeled technology are incredibly useful in all countries of Africa today. There are also a large number of pastoralist tribes that have lived off of cattle for centuries. The idea that plowing isn't useful, or that cattle can't take the weakening due to disease: it is hard to accept. Both may be true in places--but that can't be generalized about sub saharan Africa.

Second, for the wheel to be incredibly useful, you don't need draft animals. A wheelbarrow is quite useful, for example.

Third, you are ignoring the lack of writing systems.

It is important not to overstate the connections that were present. The Portuguese considered Ethiopia the lost kingdom of Prester John when they first found them ~1500. Harar and Timbuktu were secret cities that Europeans couldn't find. The basic geographic features of Africa were still being mapped in the mid 1800s.

Many of the contacts were east African trading cities on the coast of Africa. Even in the era of the Ottoman Empire, these were not very well documented outposts.

Was sub saharan Africa completely cut off from Eurasia? Of course not. But it was quite isolated, and technologies and ideas that had long been adopted elsewhere were not present. Hence when the Europeans came, and the technology deployed, populations exploded with improved production capabilities.

[Queequeg]

AR, I really think you'd enjoy Acemoglu's Why Nations Fail.  Acemoglu's one of the hottest, most cited economists around, and it makes some really interesting contrasts with the pseudo-Diamondy stuff you are talking about.  Also, he's an ethnic Armenian from Turkey.