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" Lets also not ignore the role Christianity played in promoting equal rights for women and the abolition of slavery."
God condones slavery in the Old Testament, and Christianity has been the NUMBER ONE justification for treating women as minors throughout the ages. It was always church doctrine that women are inferior to men, like children, and have a duty towards men.
Part I: Why Eurasian countries conquered the rest of the World
The key factor was geography and biology. There are many many more plants that can be used to farm and animals that can be tamed in Eurasia than in the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa or Australia. This meant that soon many different parts of Eurasia (Egypt/Mesopotamia/China) were inventing farming. Differences in plants meant that there was only 1 or 2 areas of real farming in the Americas (Central America and the Andes), few areas in Africa and no areas at all in Australia.
The second factor was the difficulties of communication caused by geography. The Americas and Africa are on a North/South axis. Due to dramatic climate changes when one moves over the continent, it is almost impossible to spread agricultural plants or animals around (an example would be, the Aztecs invented the wheel, but they never could get some Llamas from the Andes). On the other hand, Eurasia is on a East/West axis, this meant that when Egypt invented farming, it was easily transferred to Europe, when China invented farming it was easily transferred to south-west Asia. This also meant technology spread far far more easily in Eurasia than in Africa or the Americas.
The result of this was that Eurasia's population is HUGE. Apart from Black Africans and the few native Americans left, almost everyone is either Eurasian or descended from Eurasians. Big Eurasian populations meant cramped cities and periodically, plagues would wipe us out. The result was that we aquired a certain resistance to plague-style diseases (while still being subject to tropical diseases).
Hence, when Spagnards arrived in central America, what happened? They had steel armour and swords and more importantly, they wiped out the natives by coughing on them. Like rats they killed (it is estimated) 95% of the Natives with typhus, smallpox and cholera. When Europeans went to Africa, diseases didn't work because the tropical climate was very hostile to whites, hence the conquest of that continent was far more difficult and only lasted some 100 years (whereas descendants of Eurasians still rule the Americas).
Part II: Why Europe?
It is far more difficult why it was the European part of Eurasia which did the conquering, and not say, China. China certainly could have, in the late 14th Century China had a massive fleet of huge ships which went around discovering south Asia and east Africa. China, at the whim of the Emperors, decided to abandon all such exploration attempts (IE, China was too unified!). In Europe, division meant that a man like Columbus could go see many different rulers for the money to explore (Genoese and other Italians rejected him before the Spagniards agreed).
I would argue that Europe's explorations changed the economic culture. Prior to that, much of it was based on zero-sum assumptions. IE, it was thought that to be rich you had to make your enemy poorer. This wasn't terribly productive, it meant nations were constantly trying to land-grab and plunder. With colonization came an investment mentality which changed the way people thought about becoming wealthy.
However, there is still much debate between historians as to why it had to be Europe.
Part III: Why not Christianity?
Can it really be argued that Christianity is the cause for the West's huge success in conquering and dominating other cultures? If that were the case, one would expect that Western dominance would arise would be constant after the rise of Christianity. That was not the case.
A mere 100 years after the official adoption of Christianity in the western Roman Empire, the millenia old empire died. In the Orthodox Eastern Roman Empire, things fared better. Soon after, the Arab muslims made their rise taking much of Anatolia, Sicily and Iberia. Islam seems to have strengthened the Arabs immensely, not so for the Christian Romans.
Important to note that during these days of Islamic strength Europe was the backward rump of Eurasia. We had nothing to contribute to the world, mathematics and science were dominated by Islamic countries. Meanwhile, the Pope found that the only way to stop Christians from killing each other was to encourage them to rampage across the Holy Land. Thus we have the Crusades, a succession of senseless and failed wars against Muslims, Jews and Eastern Christians. Saladin, in the hope of appeasing the barbarians, gave Jerusalem to the Christians. He took it back after the Christians tried exterminating/evicting all the Jews and Muslims from the city (gee, what modern day situation does that remind me of).
Europe only became important in the 16th century when the age of exploration began and Europeans discovered the world. This was in part caused by the intellectual revolution of the renaissance. This was largely a rediscovery of the West's rational pre-Christian Roman and Greek thought.
In short, Christianity does not seem to have brought any strength to the West. Christianity coincided with the Fall of Rome, but I don't think it was a real factor. The rise of Arab civilization from a peripheral people in desert-peninsula to the 300 million souls we have today coincided with the rise of Islam. The rise of the West meanwhile was related to a rediscovery of pre-Christian thought. I think this shows that either Christianity is unrelated to the West's strength, or alternatively, that whenever Christianity is strong, we are weak (see middle ages, Spain following the Inquisition, or the 30 years war).
"Durch Nacht und Blut das Licht"
[ Edited by Angelfire at
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