[barry-cotter]

The Industrial Revolution was why they were able to colonise the world. Being much, much more productive means you can afford a lot more bullets/cannon/artillery/small arms and you need less of your population as a share growing food. Europeans were better at war than anyone else because Europe was always at war somewhere. It was geographically fragmented enough that any one power becoming hegemonic never happened again after Rome. The difference wasn’t big enough to explain conquering most of the world though. They Sikhs came very close to defeating the British and Japan was almost certainly outproducing Europe in firearms by the end of the Sengoku Jidai.

The Industrial Revolution made European conquest possible.

[anovikov]

Conquest went in 3 main stages.

Spain and Portugal did it first, long before Industrial revolution (which Spain had much much later and only halfway, and Portugal never had at all). They did it because they could: finishing reconquest of their territories from Arabs in the late XV century, they only saw foreign expansion as continuation of the same trend: Christendom acquires more land from the infidels, with divine assistance, they saw it as their natural life role and mission and same thing they kept doing for 700 years before, just on land.

Then, Netherlands, UK and later France acquired some territories - Netherlands for the purpose of trade (was before Industrial revolution and industry wasn't involved), UK because of religious issues - to push out people of "wrong" religions, like Puritans, as far away as possible, and France, well, because they saw it was going fashionable and they sort of felt compelled to do the same not properly realising why (resulting in the most ridiculous and useless empire imaginable).

Finally, Germany did it when they got so belatedly reunified after 1870 - they simply happened to grab some colonies from France because they won the Franco-Prussian war. Also never figured what to do with those.

In every case, only with the latter part of British colonialism, industry played some role (when colonies were used as source for industrial raw materials e.g. cotton from U.S. South), or market to sell them (India). Military capabilities brought forward by industrialisation, never had a role properly.

[qwytw]

> Netherlands for the purpose of trade (was before Industrial revolution and industry wasn't involved),

That's arguable. I mean they didn't have the steam engine, but besides that the Dutch economically was relatively industrialized according by most other metrics (high urbanization, high amount of energy usage (wind, peat, water), relatively very high labor productivity etc.)

Trade allowed the Netherlands to acquire huge amounts of capital but unlike some other countries (e.g. Spain) they didn't waste it and instead invested into dramatically increasing the productivity of their economy .

[ameister14]

The UK did not acquire territories because of religious issues and to push out Puritans. It was economics. Your explanation in general is a massive oversimplification - most of the time, governments weren't intentionally driving colonization. England favored economic growth with corporations running the show.

Jamestown, for example, was not founded by the government of England but instead by an investment company in search of riches. The Puritans as well; the government didn't put them on a boat, they bought a charter from the Virginia Company.

[qwytw]

For quite a while the North American colonies weren't really that valuable economically compared to the ones in the Caribbean or Asia.

British colonies were somehow able to attract massive amounts of settlers and eventually became self sustainable. The Dutch, French and others could never achieve that and mainly relied on the fur trade with the Native populations.

[ameister14]

I wouldn't say "massive" amounts of settlers, certainly not for the first hundred years or so. The huge migration was in the 18th century.

For example, Virginia, the most populous colony at the time, had about 58k people in 1700 but over 530,000 by 1780.

The colonies as a whole grew by about 245,000 people in the 17th century and 2,550,000 in the subsequent 80 years, before the American Revolution. I should mention, however, that these numbers include the number of enslaved persons, about 575,000 people in 1780. That's a growth from around 6% of the total population in 1700 to over 1/5 of the total population of the colonies and around 40% of the population of Virginia in 1780.

It's not that much of a mystery how the British colonies became financially successful; most of it was due to location and slavery. It's the same reason that, while the French and Dutch were not as much of an economic success in their North American colonial holdings, they (and the Brits) were a huge financial success in the Caribbean. By importing people enslaved in Africa to work sugar plantations and not worrying about the death rates, the investors and colonial powers were able to make a substantial profit.

edit - obviously there are a lot more layers to that.

[anovikov]

Right: the government of England had a problem with religious sects and needed to push them out somewhere. That created demand on the part of Puritans who didn't want to get hanged at home, to emigrate, and King happily approved it because it meant good riddance.

[ameister14]

Allowing someone to move there is different from acquiring territory for that purpose.

[anovikov]

Well, with those territories not having defensible or Christian state, from standpoint of XVII century, those were exactly the same: those lands were "empty" and those settlers, by settling there as royal subjects, claimed it for the Crown.

If they settled in some country rules of which they'd find obliged to obey - either because it was Christian, or because it was too strong to ignore with their forces - they couldn't claim land and instead, will become immigrants, then of course it's not colonisation.

[ameister14]

The lands were claimed for the Crown years earlier in the first grant to the Virginia Company, which gave them lands ranging 100 miles inland from the coast and from the 34th to 45th parallels. (http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/1600-1650/the-first-virg...) It's why they made the Popham Colony. The first wave of Puritans to migrate weren't even living in England at the time, they had already moved to the Netherlands.

[fakedang]

Why is the French Empire the most ridiculous of them all? France was the most powerful and most feared European kingdom at the time. It was natural they start colonizing to exert influence against rivals abroad, when they had a coast and a navy, lest they end up like the truest useless empire (Austria and the HRE).

[anovikov]

Because they failed to either enrich themselves through robbing the colonies, or develop the colonies, or bring the culture there (ok people in Cote d'Ivoire indeed, eat baguettes and quiches but it looks more like a sad joke than like France).

Compare to the British colonies and dominions: brought British culture and legal system (even to territories where local population always dominated), developed them economically, and yes, robbed them too, making good profit.

French system, for comparison, was an utter failure. Only benefit it provided was a good network of anchorages and coal bunkers for the French Navy.

[Retric]

That line of thinking only goes so far, industry also allows one to simply buy resources from foreign locations without the bother of conquest and administration. It’s really a combination of many factors including Europe’s relatively high population that made it both viable and desirable.

[inawarminister]

And tbh the European demographics expansion between 1500-1800, before industrialization properly spread out from Britain [0], was the Columbian Exchange.

Potatoes unlocked lots of land in the northern part. And the other unsung botany, too.

And the ability to send surplus men (and women) to an empty (because of disease) continent instead of having them warring against each other like pre-Columbian Europe and East Asia (looking at Sengoku) is also decisive...

[0] Remember one reason why Britain was able to fight Napoleon even when the entire continent was conquered was because of industries.

[qwytw]

> was conquered was because of industries

And control of the global trade networks. The same reason why the seemingly insignificant Netherlands (population and area wise) were able to maintain its position as a global superpower throughout most of the 17th century before being replaced by Britain. Of course it's a bit baffling that that happened after England and Holland ceased being rivals because a Dutch army invaded Britain, overthrew it's government and put their Stadholder on the English Throne..

[WastingMyTime89]

Britain was mostly able to fight because the French fleet was sunk which shielded them from a massive invasion and Russia weakened France. By themselves they wouldn’t have done much.

[Wildgoose]

Britain sank the French fleet. How is that "not doing much?" Britain expelled France from Egypt. Britain powered the Pensinsular War. By themselves.

[inawarminister]

And, well, most of the Coalitions were almost exclusively funded by generous British subsidies. To Austria, Prussia, Sweden, Russia, and a couple dozen of minor powers. Industry made Britain able to afford that.

"In terms of soldiers the French numerical advantage was offset by British subsidies that paid for a large proportion of the Austrian and Russian soldiers, peaking at about 450,000 in 1813."

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_in_the_Napole...

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

The timing is wrong though. Industrial Revolution started in 1760. By that time the British had already laid the foundation for their rule of India, and the other powers also were well on their way to colonization.

In fact, looking at the timing, one could almost make the argument that the Industrial Revolution was the effect of colonization and exploitation of the rest of the world and not the cause.

[blululu]

The Watt steam engine is roughly contemporaneous with the Battle of Plassey and the British ascendency over Bengal, but the Watt steam engine is not the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It built upon cultural and technical innovations from 50 years prior. The British had been engaged in a radical period of industrialization since the start of the 16th century.

[ameister14]

The British absolutely had not engaged in a 'radical period of industrialization' from 1500 on. That's just not correct.

The major corporate movement didn't even start until the 17th century.

[qwytw]

The Dutch did though and they later kickstarted the industrial revolution in Britain.

[ameister14]

That's arguable, but sure. Even there it was more in the late 16th century, which makes sense given Spanish priorities prior to independence. Britain absolutely copied the hell out of it.

[uncletaco]

I don't know about that. A lot of people forget that the biggest war the British fought in the late 1770s and early 1780s was the first Anglo-Maratha war (which they lost) and their dominance wasn't really established until after the second and third Anglo-Maratha wars in the early 19th century.

[jackcosgrove]

This is the traditional view, but opinions have shifted recently. European colonization was driven mostly by the population boom accompanying the industrial revolution. The military advantage was real in the late 18th and 19th centuries, but that was brief compared to the timeline of the traditional explanation of Europe always being at war.

For example Ming China was the first gunpowder empire and was militarily competitive with if not superior to the European countries of the time. Qing China was caught resting on its laurels after it had accomplished the millennia-long Chinese goal of subduing all neighboring regions. In the case of China's defeat by European powers it was a combination of European ascendency and Chinese military stagnation at the time.

[qwytw]

Well European powers were already well ahead in their 'quest' of subjugating the entire world in the 1500s and 1600s. Obviously they couldn't directly challenge China and some other Asian states at the time yet but the trend was pretty clear.

However Europe still lagged both economically and population wise behind Asia at the time and industrialization hadn't really started.

[eternalban]

Strong disagree with this. Merely increasing population doesn't mandate colonialist response. [It could have ended in internal revolts of hungry dispossesed mouths.] There was a socio-economic pathway open to these new people not available to their forefathers: participation in the capitalist economy and possibility for upward social mobility.

It was capitalism and accompanying political restructuring (from feudalism) that released and focused that demographic, intellectual, and technical 'potential'. Would a tiny "aristocratic" minority be able to scale up empire without making emerging (secular, technical including finance) social classes partners in the fruits of empire?

(Convince yourself: Consider demographic and socio-economic trends in China 1990 to 2010. Was it population growth or the socio-political change that catapulted its economic power?)