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Weirdly I've never heard of anyone in an Anarchist society begging for less Anarchy.

@@SomasAcademy yeah, cause they haven’t GOT a society where they overthrew the government. When you get that state where you have no police, no infrastructure, welfare, public maintenance or surplus of food you’re looking around like “oh…so what the fuck do we do now?”. And then the pillaging, murder and r@ping begins. You go back to what it was like during ancient days. I love it when feminists call themselves “anarchists” because a functioning government and healthy free market are the only things keeping us from going back to the time when women had no real rights and were used as breeding stock. You’d be removing the very boundaries that protect you. A liberal, democratic, capitalist nation like in America, Western Europe and southeastern asian nations like Taiwan and japan are literally the safest places for everyone because they coddle you all with every luxury and amenity that the masses can afford. Anarchists would upend that and whatever the hell they’d replace it with would be unbridled chaos.

I will definitely be discussing Fumiko's relationship with Pak Yeol! I've seen Anarchist from Colony, and will probably be using some clips from it for visuals if doing so doesn't trigger copyright detection lol

Yeah, unfortunately more specific dating methods aren't always available to archaeologists so you end up with broad ranges lol

@@SomasAcademy For sure

No, "wheels would have significantly increased productivity but were not adopted due to tyrannical rulers and this stifled economic productivity" and "wheels would not have increased productivity due to environmental factors, and alternative means of transport were used to achieve comparable economic productivity" are not, in fact, the exact same point. Similarly, "Sub-Saharan Africans had no incentive to develop agriculture, so they just hunted and gathered" is not the same point as "almost all Africans engaged in agriculture," and "the Sahara cut Sub-Saharan Africans off from the rest of the Old World" is not the same point as "people regularly crossed or went around the Sahara, making Sub-Saharan Africa a fully integrated part of the Old World." If you think I didn't refute a single point he made, you are the one who is "confused."

"He even describing the sahara as an ocean with seperating isolated communities like you did." I said the opposite. I literally explicitly, directly made the opposite argument. I presented his argument about the Sahara isolating communities, and then explained that it didn't do so. I genuinely have no idea how you could come away with the conclusion that I had described the Sahara as an ocean separating isolated communities. "He mentioned that the wheel wasnt widely used not because there was no knowledge of wheels but that other factors made certain beneficial technologies like the wheel less beneficial and therefore less necessary." He presents knowledge of wheels as first arriving with Europeans, hence my explanation that this was not the case, and he does not state that other factors made the wheel "less beneficial and therefore less necessary," but rather that other factors, specifically institutional factors, prevented Africans from adopting wheels despite the obvious economic benefits that would have come from their use. "He also didnt say that there wasnt any farming done in Africa, just that it was less productive than other agricultural regions in the world" As presented in the video, he claims that there was no incentive for agriculture and that where agriculture "would have been possible" it was easier to hunt and gather. "Would have been possible" suggests that despite the possibility, it was not practiced due to it being "easier to hunt and gather." Elsewhere in the EE video, he compares Sub-Saharan Africa to pre-colonial Australia, which he states was "also" isolated and occupied by hunters and gatherers, i.e. suggesting that Sub-Saharan Africa was occupied by hunter-gatherers like Australia. So, yeah, he does suggest that there was no farming in Sub-Saharan Africa. His point about lower efficiency in modern African agriculture is presented as an explanation for why Africa never developed agriculture itself, which as explained in the video, it actually did. "This seemed more like you wanted to showcase what you learned about Africa without trying to do what Economics explained was doing which was answer the question why is Africa behind the rest of the world economically, technologically, and politically now since the industrial, political, and economical revolutions are now penetrating every corner of the world faster than ever." The purpose of this video was to correct historical misconceptions presented in EE's video. Answering the question of why Africa is relatively poor in modern times fell outside of the scope of this video, as it is subject to debate and a matter of evaluating the relative weight of a variety of potential contributing factors. I intend to make an additional video actually tackling that question, but the purpose of this video was to correct misconceptions, not to present an argument.

1. You should finish watching the video before commenting, I discuss the higher efficiency of maritime transport later. The analogy between the Sahara and a sea is in regards to seas as uninhabited central points around which cultural connections are formed via regular crossings, not in terms of the quantity of goods transported per crossing. 2. Yes. FINALLY - the purpose of this video was to correct historical misconceptions, answering a question about modern economics is a much more complicated feat and fell outside of the scope I wanted to cover. However, I intend to make a future video discussing the topic. Stay tuned.

The lack of navigable rivers in Africa has been heavily overstated; while several major rivers become rapids as they approach the coast, making it impossible to sail up the rivers from the sea, they are largely navigable in the interior, and boat travel was extremely common throughout Africa.

​@@SomasAcademyFair enough, but access to open water is kind of the central crutch. I didnt mean to imply Africans cant travel and trade among themselves. Its just that the ability to transport bulk goods en masse from the interior out into open water is probably the single most influential factor for a country's development and wealth accumulation, along with free and open markets. Furthermore, deep water ports that accompany those tributaries are every bit as important, and from my not to good memory, the only great spot for a deep water port on the whole west coast of Africa is at the mouth of the?.... ohh I forget, but Its the river that comes out of Nigeria, I think. Point is, ya gotta get them bulk goods created by large scale industry situated within the interior to market in the east, where the people to sell to are 10000 to 1 compared to who you can reach on your local river system. Such are the reasons for western europes outsized wealth over eastern europe, and Argentina's former cushy set up, before the state destroyed the place over the past century. Tbh, Im only repeating what I've primarily read from Dr. Thomas Sowell on why Africa still strugles, but I have heard the hypothesis elsewhere before, as your knowledge of it indicates. Btw, just wanna say, Ive really been enjoying the channel thus far. Dont mind me too much, I was kinda being a smart***. You make compelling points, and without the use of the typical ideological narratives one hears that are tendentious at best. Your seaming impartiality is greatly appreciated. Hope Im not speaking too soon. Its hard to find good historical content on Africa, as you've noted, which is a shame bc the continent is like the worlds biggest mystery box. Ive always had particular interest in what societies may have existed in the Sahara when she had green savanna and the worlds largest inland lake systems.

​@@SomasAcademyI know its a long way off, but just imagine what Africa will become when the Great Rift Valley finally breaks off and floods

Listed at the end of the video, though the last one is obscured by the endcard (it's "Exhibit III: The Pharaoh of the Joseph Story" by Benjamin Edidin Scolnic in "If the Egyptians Drowned in the Red Sea where are Pharaohs Chariots?")

@@SomasAcademy thanks also are you Christian

@@SFayeLewis No problem, and no I'm not Christian.

That fell outside of the scope of this video, which I wanted to keep very focused on matters of historical fact rather than interpretation. I am planning to make a follow-up that actually tries to answer that question.

Me, an Asian, post-college, non-liberal with a good job.

Nothing that can be explained in a pithy comment without wildly oversimplifying, I'm planning to cover it in a future video.

It's not my analogy, it's a fairly old and popular one. In any case, the analogy is not meant to be about the quantity of goods traded - as mentioned later in the video, boats are more efficient than any type of land transport - but about the overall amount of interaction; people couldn't bring as much with them per trip, but there were a lot of trips bringing a lot of people who interacted with each other and traded ideas and culture as well as goods.

@@SomasAcademy ah yes you did talk about boats more later on. Good vid I subscribed. What do you think of Thomas Sowell’s ideas about African history btw

@@captainwheelbarrow649 From what I've seen, Thomas Sowell's understanding of African history is quite weak. I'm planning to discuss the historical circumstances behind modern African poverty in a future video, and that one will probably illustrate why I say that, though it's not going to be a response to Sowell in particular.

What do you mean by this?

@@SomasAcademy i noticed the same thing you did when he talked about wheeled transportation or how he claimed there wasn't any

@@DarkPuppy9 Well it's true that wagons were absent from much of Sub-Saharan Africa, for the reasons I discussed in the video (though there were some, in the Kingdom of Axum for example wagons wouldn't have been unusual). EE's mistake is A. thinking there were never any wheels, and B. attributing this to institutional forces rather than practical reasons.

@@SomasAcademy yeah i was being kinda flippant

The EE video compares Sub-Saharan Africa's level of isolation to that of pre-colonial Australia.

@@SomasAcademy no EE didn't. the only quote in the transcript with "Australia" in it is: "Indigenous Australians were also largely separated from the early exchange of technologies, and they too remained as mostly self-sufficient groups of hunters and gatherers until Western colonies were established there." which just sounds like a categorical comparison, rather than a comparison of degree. in other words, these two are comparable in that EE believes they both faced the same kind of struggle, i.e. high barrier of entry to trade. Not that one's level of isolation was comparable to the other. there's just not enough that EE said about Australia to be able to confidently conclude the latter was what he meant.

​@@GeekOverdose I mean considering they're saying that the degree of isolation was such that they think Sub-Saharan Africans, like Australians, were "mostly self-sufficient groups of hunters and gatherers" I don't think this is a meaningful distinction in this case lol. I don't see how someone could be aware that Sub-Saharan Africans were integrated into trade networks with North Africa and Asia across the Sahara, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean, practiced Islam and Christianity, studied treatises on Greek and Islamic philosophy and cosmology written in the Arabic script, and built cities that served as intellectual hubs for Islamic study, while still thinking that they were "seperated from the exchange of technologies" and "mostly self-sufficient bands of hunter-gatherers." Like, I can get where YOU are coming from with the idea that Sub-Saharan Africa could have less trade with Eurasia than different regions of Eurasia did with each other and that this argument wouldn't be refuted by the data I presented in the video, but I think you are being overly charitable to EE's argument by interpreting that as the direction they were coming from given the words they use and the surrounding context.

No, of course it was difficult to cross, but once people had the means to cross it they did so regularly. Moreover, while there was more danger than crossing a grassland - if you get seperated from your caravan in a grassland you're a lot less likely to die - your camels are gonna move about the same speed either way. It took approximately 3 times as long to cross the grasslands of Inner Asia as it did to cross the Sahara, for instance, so if the latter is a barrier then so too is the former.

I talk about that afterwards.

@@SomasAcademy Well you kind of touched on it, but I think it would have been better to just say that it’s a flawed premise. Saying that the use of the wheel globally declined with infrastructure is weak because it implies the wheel was ever really useful, and it undersells the infrastructure that was made in Africa.

​@@Sodier402 The arguments I make are dependent on the content of my sources.

Planning to cover it in a future video. In brief, Africa was much more extensively colonized than Asia, which involved the heavy reshaping of many African economies to focus on the production of a small range of raw materials for export. This made many African countries heavily reliant on continued production of raw materials in order to bring in money and on imports for fulfilling many needs and demands, which results in limited capital accumulation (because with infrastructure and workforce experience all focused around a small existing range of industries, any attempt to pivot would require heavy investment in infrastructure and training, and result in significant loss in immediate profits without a guarantee of recovery). In contrast, countries that were never colonized or colonized only in part of for a brief time (like Japan, China, Iran, etc.) had much greater economic diversity, which lends itself to higher self-sufficiency and greater ease of branching into new industries (although this isn't a guarantee of wealth, as seen in examples like Afghanistan, North Korea, and Ethiopia, which were never colonized but still ended up poor due to policy decisions, geographical factors, and/or geopolitical circumstances). You can see an illustration of this in how many of the poorest countries in Asia are also those that were colonized for the longest, like the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos. Since African countries also gained their independence more recently (for reference, India, a country that is still relatively poor on the global stage, gained its independence in 1947, 10 years before Ghana kicked off the wave of decolonization that brought independence to most African colonies, which only ended in 1980), African countries have had less time to built up diversified economies. This process has also been slowed down by policy requirements mandated as a condition for aid by institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund; as a precondition for loans and assistance, many African countries have had to promise not to practice any state interference in the economy, up to and including things like fertilizer subsidies. By contrast, some of the wealthiest economies in Asia like Japan, China, and the Four Asian Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore) engaged in heavy state investment in order to build up certain industries, a practice that would most likely be highly beneficial for building up industry and economic diversification in Africa. Unfortunately, African leaders that have tried to pursue similar policies coincidentally kept getting overthrown in coups by people who immediately turned around and cut deals with the IMF and World Bank.

@@SomasAcademy Thank you for the thoughtful reply. Just a few thoughts. Malaysia and Indonesia were colonized for more than 350+ years. Only Laos is on the list of Asian countries with a per capita GDP > $2500 and it was colonized for 60 years. Not sure why you chose Ghana as a marker, but Liberia had 200 years to improve the lives of its people and instead wiped out 90% of its GDP in less than two decades resulting in a per capita GDP 1/3 that of Ghana. IDK that the World Bank was ever against fertilizer subsidies. In Malawi however the opposition accused the government of manipulating the fertilizer subsidy program coupon system to secure votes while the government accused opposition parties of stealing the fertilizer. 6 leaders have arguably strived to “build up industry and economic diversification” in Africa: Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Paul Kagame, Meles Zenawi, John Magufuli and Alassane Ouattara. Only 1 was overthrown. Many African countries have depended on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank as their main sources of finance for major developmental and investment. Meanwhile the African Monetary Fund has been coming soon since 2014. Hope your channel continues to grow! 👍

@@SomasAcademy Thank you for the thoughtful reply. YT seems to limit the length of posts so apologies for splitting this up. Just a few thoughts.

Malaysia and Indonesia were colonized for more than 350+ years. Only Laos is on the list of Asian countries with a per capita GDP < $2500 and it was colonized for 60 years.

Not sure why you chose Ghana as a marker, but Liberia had 200 years to improve the lives of its people and instead wiped out 90% of its GDP in less than two decades with a per capita GDP 1/3 that of Ghana.

Not the ewes and Ga people, they migrated from the north east Africa with major similarities of ancient Hebrew culture.

Happy birthday!

@@SomasAcademy Thank you!

I'd agree with your main point, but disagree with the idea that Europe was "backwards" or a "backwater" for similar reasons to why I would reject the idea of Africa being "behind" historically - if you look at Africa, Asia, and Europe at any point in history before the Early Modern period, I would argue (as John Thornton does in "Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World") that while all were different, none of them was more or less "advanced" - each one was working with different conditions to achieve a fairly sustainable, "feudalist" norm (with lots of variation between groups within each of these continents as well as between them). It is only with the Early Modern Period and Europe's transition to a new economic system closer to modern Capitalism that we see a qualitative shift where Europe started to become more "developed" (which only truly came to a head in the late modern period with the Industrial Revolution). I'm nitpicking a bit though, 100% agree with your main point, just disagree with some of the framing in there!

@@SomasAcademy Backwater is somewhat of a exageration, but the heigths of the Bizantine, Chinese, Persians and Indian Kingdoms were such that is kind funny how things turned out in the end. The Chinese were able to have cities with over 1 mil people whilst places like London, Paris or Florence barelly crossed the 100k. The oriental arrogance is not that unwarrented.

The analogy is being used to make a point lol, listen to the substance

Anyone who's gone sailing or knows about boats before basically the 18th century can point out that's a pretty big distinction and a comparison worth interrogating. There's a reason why the silk road stretched across Eurasia since the 2nd century BCE but trade or even movement to the Americas across the same distance of ocean didn't occur until much later. If you're gonna draw a comparison you need to be accurate. The Sahara was navigable and there's been trade and movement across it for centuries longer than we've been navigating oceans.