😲🎁 The American Surprise that changed everything

How Europe's discovery of the New World made humanity richer — but not because of colonization or exploitation

Quote of the Issue

“And the sea will grant each man new hope, as sleep brings dreams of home” - The Hunt for Red October

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I have a book out: The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised is currently available pretty much everywhere. I’m very excited about it! Let’s gooooo! ⏩🆙↗⤴📈

• Amazon

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• Books-A-Million

• Target

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• Bookshop

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The Essay

😲🎁 The American Surprise that changed everything

I have to credit my fellow Substacker Noah Smith for deftly framing the issue of how imperialism/colonialism/exploitation contributed to the Rise of the West.

As Smith goes on to explain in an essay, the notion — prevalent in both socialism and some right-wing political thought — that nations amass wealth primarily through plunder and exploitation of other nations is a terrible misconception. He points out that no country was truly rich by modern standards until the latter half of the 20th century, despite plenty of historical imperialism and exploitation. Rather, the real source of modern wealth is the advent of industrial production and modern science that was made possible by human ingenuity and hard work. The modern world was made possible by wealth creation, not extraction. (More from me on this in my recent essay, “Colonialism isn't why Israel is rich and it's neighbors aren't.”)

“The world does not contain a fixed lump of wealth that gets divided up among the people of Earth,” Smith writes. Wealth redistribution in a world far poorer than this one doean’t get you a chart that looks like this:

That said, 1492 was a momentous year of exploration — or exploitation as those anti-West types, anti-capitalists would put it — that helped set in motion a cultural change of historical and long-lasting importance, one termed the “American surprise” by historian Daniel Boorstin in his book The Discoverers.

Yes, the Vikings were the first Europeans to settle, at least for a time, in the New World. But. Boorstin explains, that doesn’t equate to “discovering” America in any meaningful sense. While their journey across the perilous Atlantic demonstrated physical bravery — not mention excellent seafaring skills — their fleeting presence left no lasting cultural impact on America nor expanded European conceptions of the wider world:

Was there ever before so long a voyage (L’Anse aux Meadows is a full forty-five hundred miles as the crow flies from Bergen!) that made so little difference? There was practically no feedback from the Vinland voyages. What is most remarkable is not that the Vikings actually reached America, but that they reached America and even settled there for a while, without discovering America.

Not so with Christopher Columbus and his accidental discovery of a landmass across the Atlantic between Europe and Asia.