Third World is the First World and vice versa

[aware of emptiness]

Hi, I am just new to this discussion board (just signed up today), although I've been intrigued by Alternative History for a while....

Recently I've heard of Jared Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel" theory that it was Europeans who were able to conquer the "world" due to their early advantage in agriculture and geography.

I've always wondered about alternate scenarios where Europeans do not have the head start and the countries that are Third World in OTL are the more fortunate ones.

What about a case where places that are incredibly poor in our timeline (eg. Southeast Asia, South America, Africa etc.) are in fact the rich ones and the rich countries in our timeline (eg. Europe and North America, Japan) are the poor ones. What conditions would lead to such a reversal of wealth in our world? How far back would the POD have to be? What would such a world be like?

[Straha]

IF you want a poor europe have islam conquer it.

[Tom Veil]

This takes you most of the way there without making any changes except for the Earth's axis of rotation.

http://www.worlddreambank.org/J/JAREDIA.HTM

[Flocculencio]

Hi, I am just new to this discussion board (just signed up today), although I've been intrigued by Alternative History for a while....

Recently I've heard of Jared Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel" theory that it was Europeans who were able to conquer the "world" due to their early advantage in agriculture and geography.

I've always wondered about alternate scenarios where Europeans do not have the head start and the countries that are Third World in OTL are the more fortunate ones.

What about a case where places that are incredibly poor in our timeline (eg. Southeast Asia, South America, Africa etc.) are in fact the rich ones and the rich countries in our timeline (eg. Europe and North America, Japan) are the poor ones. What conditions would lead to such a reversal of wealth in our world? How far back would the POD have to be? What would such a world be like?

Welcome to the board- the trouble here is that it's not just that Europeans and Asians had a head start. The thing is that it's the underlying factors that gave Eurasians that head start.

These include factors like the following:

-Large East-West axis of Eurasia ensuring that any domesticated crop could easily be cultivated and spread across a wide range of terrain unlike, say, in Africa where tropical crops couldn't grow properly in Southern Africa forcing the Bantu into a herder lifestyle until they recieved corn and wheat from European traders. In Asia, wheat, for example, could be grown all across the huge east west axis from France to Northern India to Manchuria.

-The relative abundance of domesticable animal species in Eurasia. Horses, for example, are domesticable while zebra are not. This also proves a problem in Africa since Horses cannot travel overland across the tsetse fly belt and thus were unavailable to cultures south of it until they were introduced through the sea route.

Thus, the reason why Eurasian cultures got their head start was mainly because of the geography involved and the factors that arose from that. You can't replicate those factors in the historical Third World since the geography is all different.

However, A lot of modern less-developed countries were actually extremely rich and powerful regions in their time (e.g. India, SE Asia) and Europe's dominance over them has less to do with the geographical conditions than with political and philosophical conditions.

For example, a lot of people on this board say that you could get a dominant China by averting the Mongol invasion that brought down the Song Dynasty which may have had the potential to be on the verge of an Industrial Revolution. Also, without the effects of the caste system and the Islamic invasions from Persia, the disunited Indian cultures might also have successfully replicated the cnditions that brought about development in Europe. Now those factors are probably going to be more of interest to you in this.

However, it's a pretty big topic. I'm sure if you look around you'll be able to find quite a lot of threads on the Sung Industrial Revolution (China unlike India is quite popular here so you won't find nearly as much on India). So yeah, it's a helluva huge topic and you've got a huge choice of philosophical and political PODs. :D

[Wendell]

IF you want a poor europe have islam conquer it.
And vikings pillage the rest.