This week I saw this new video by Johnny Harris, and in it, he's lying to you. The video looks amazing. It has map roll porn and it's also wrong.
He simplifies events, screws up the timeline, and he's rewriting history. As a historian, it's painful to watch. Since leaving Vox, Johnny Harris has become a YouTube god.
Just putting his name in a title guarantees views. What? But with these views also came criticism.
He's been accused of putting out propaganda, not citing sources, and today of simplifying history so much it's harmful. So what's this video actually about? Johnny Harris discusses a subject that has been the base for countless of books and academic discussion.
How did some countries from a relatively unimportant region in the world just rise up and dominate everyone else? It's a big question. A 500 year project of moving people and weapons and germs and language and violence.
And the outcome still influences our world today. So it's extra important to get the facts right. Don't get me wrong.
I love Johnny Harris. He has inspired millions, including me. He's pretty much the reason map animation exists on YouTube and he promotes therapy.
I'm a giant fan of therapy. I like that. But he pushes storytelling far beyond the limits.
Let me explain. Johnny sets the stage for his video. Europe was.
But the fact is, there wasn't an abundance of anything in Europe. Instead, Europeans were just farmers, barely scraping by constantly in debt to a few rich landlords. Life in Europe was scarce and miserable.
That really pissed off people in the comments. He then goes on to talk about empires that, according to Johnny, were doing just fine in this time. Meanwhile, there was a bunch of other empires around the world that were thriving.
All of these empires were trading with one another, making all of them even richer. They all had better everything than Europe did and miserable Europeans. Eventually wanted in on all the trade.
So what goes wrong here? Well, let's start with the whole wretched place and landlord thing. Jonny voices this general idea about Europe in the Middle Ages.
Everything was shit and everyone went to bed without dinner. That sounds bad, right? Well, the time period he discusses saw a lot new technological innovations that made agriculture way better.
With all this innovation, there was a lot more food and the population of Europe grew a lot. Between the year thousand and 1340, the population of Europe grew from about 38 million people to 73 and a half. And then the Black Death killed 30% of Europeans.
But this Black Death actually made things a lot better for the survivors. It meant the end of serfdom in Western Europe. That landlord thingy Johnny Harris is talking about.
Why? Well, labor was really scarce and that meant that workers had a much better bargaining position against their landlords. Of course, this didn't happen everywhere at the same time, but even so, generally seen, the situation of the farms in European states definitely wasn't worse than those in the Empires Johnny Harris mentions.
So then Johnny says there were no shiny things in Europe. There wasn't an abundance of anything in Europe. But trade with the empires he mentions really existed for a long time.
Since Roman times, there was the Silk Road, you know, this network of roads, shipping lanes and towns that connected Asia with Europe. Just sometimes the trade broke down for a bit. This is what happens when the Ottomans conquer Constantinople in 1453.
They come in and introduce higher taxes. So Portugal and Spain, they didn't really search a route over land. They wanted to cut out the middlemen entirely.
So the exploration of Spain and Portugal actually had a long, long history. Also, when he describes Europe in this time, he completely ignores one of the most pivotal moments in this time period, the Renaissance. This is a period after the Crusades where knowledge from the Middle East was brought back.
Scholars in the Italian states saw Roman and Greek texts in new light. This led to flourishing culture improvement in architecture and art. I mean, the map that Johnny shows with the world.
Yeah, that was rediscovered in the Renaissance. Okay, so Europe wasn't this awful place. There were shiny things, but Europe was geopolitically isolated.
And yes, they did want in on the trade in the East. So Johnny then goes on to explain why Spain wanted in on all the trade because of Portuguese action. Portugal's work around was literally to go around the continent of Africa, and suddenly the Portuguese are dressing in luxurious fabrics.
Okay, so now Spain sees Portugal hitting the jackpot and they're kind of jelly they want in on this, too. They need to establish their own trade route to Asia. Okay, so the Portuguese, they were flaunting their goods.
Spain wanted in on the trade. Let's look at a timeline here. So Columbus leaves in 1492.
What is the first time the Portuguese actually managed to reach India? Right. So, no, the Portuguese were not successful in reaching India by sea until Columbus was well away.
Well, were on to Columbus. This is what Jonny Harris says. They listen to a pitch from this Italian sailor, and this sailor wants them to fund his new startup called What If We Sailed West to Get to Asia instead of east?
Super promising name, remember? Okay, I actually kind of like that joke. And he is right.
The world did look like this. There were maps around from people that thought Asia was really close by. Take this map from Toscanelli.
It shows Japan within reach. Columbus used this and other calculations to say Japan is only 2500 sea miles away, whereas in reality it's more like 10,000. Columbus was actually cherry picking proof.
And even though these maps existed, the general consensus still was that people didn't think you could reach Asia by sailing west. It was just too far away. And they were totally right.
So Spain was like, Yes, great idea. High risk, high return. Do it.
Columbus. Columbus put his findings before Spanish experts of the court twice, and he was rejected twice. Only the intervention of the Spanish king made it possible for Columbus to get his boats.
Probably because he felt low risk, potential high reward. I mean, this Columbus dude is so sure he's right against all odds. He has a lot of confidence.
Okay, now we move on to one of the most contested points for me in this video. And for that, I'm going to put on my Johnny Harris debunk hat. It's a moment he says Columbus changed the world.
This big epiphany. And this is where the biggest light bulb moment of the century goes off in this guy's head. Change of plans, boys, says Columbus.
We're going to claim this land Columbus realization was instead of trading, they could actually just claim land for themselves. And this changed everything. After all, no one was making any resistance.
This moment is the foundation upon which all European imperialism grows. So, Johnny, he admits in the comments that he totally dramatized this event. I don't know why, because the truth is actually way more interesting than his dramatized version.
As many people have said in the comments: his contract actually said he should claim land he encountered and that he would become some sort of governor of these lands. But even if we got Johnny some slack for story purposes, he is still wrong. Let me tell you why.
Okay. So before Columbus went sailing, there were basically two kinds of colonial expansion that existed. The first was the Portuguese way.
You could plug into existing trade routes by showing up, occupying some land build forts and trading posts. This is what the Portuguese were doing in Africa. Take the fort of Elmina that they built.
They did this because there was a lot of resistance from locals and B. every one died in the interior of Africa. Seriously.
Still in the 1800s, up to half of the colonies could die in certain places. It's a fun field trip. The second kind of colonialism is not that well known.
Since the early 1400, Spain had a colonial project going in the Canary Islands. This has been called Europe's first genocide. Over the course of a century due to Spanish wars and enslavement the population of the Canary Islands dropped from estimates of 50 to 80000 to just a thousand Canary Islanders.
The Spaniards faced a lot of resistance, but eventually they made the islands into a plantation economy. Does that sound familiar? This is a thing historians have called a template for Spanish conquests in the new world.
So this kind of colonialism already existed when Columbus went to the Indies, and he really didn't care if the people were subjugating to Columbus or you had to conquer them by force. So what did Columbus realize when he was on his first trip? Well, his initial idea when he was selling out was to plug into existing trade networks, just like the Portuguese did.
Remember, his pitch had been he would find the rich Asian cities the spices, the cloth, the house with gold roofs. And what did he find of all these things? Nothing.
So Columbus actually got nervous. He had to tell his bosses something about this trip. How was he going to make this successful enterprise from the initial idea of Portuguese trading posts?
He switches to the Spanish style of colonialism that they had developed on the Canary Islands, where they use locals or import other people to start the plantation economy. So this is the big epiphany, according to Johnny Harris, but it's not something Columbus came up with. It followed from a need to make something of this voyage, followed from experience of Iberian powers that were already colonizing parts of the world for over a century.
Imperial ism wasn't developed there and then with Columbus, and it was also not developed in encounters with the New World. That's because history is almost never decided by big men or women and their ideas. The truth is always more nuanced, and there's always more history to a story.
Columbus also definitely never said the following. Forget trade with the East, said Columbus. There's a bunch of land that we can go take over in the West.
Because he died believing he'd found islands east of Asia. So in his mind, he was in the east. Okay, so after this, Jonny says that Spain and Portugal quickly conquer the empires.
This is how it all started. Under this new paradigm. Both empires expanded very quickly, forcing the Spanish and Portuguese languages across the ocean.
And I do want to highlight something here. Jonny doesn't really delve into this, and maybe he will do it later. I want to tell you something about how the Spanish actually became so successful.
One important reason that the Spaniards were able to conquer the empire was they found so quickly. It's that they befriended local factions that were angry at the most powerful factions around. The Spanish were really trying to exploit domestic divisions.
If you explain this story in a way that the Spaniards didn't really have any help at all, it makes them seem like these powerful European warriors that were destined to take over. It directly feeds into later ideas of the racial superiority of Europeans over all other peoples. And if you do this, you also make these people look like one blob of uncivilized tribes.
But these people had allegiances, politics and agency. They chose to support the Spanish, something that didn't really work out for them. In the end, but they chose so themselves.
Okay, so my rant is almost over. I am going to tell you why this was so bad in a bit. But first, I want to compliment Johnny on the start of the series.
I saw quite a lot of people in the comments complaining about him as a kind of a social justice warrior about how conquest and subjugation of people was normal in all of history. This is true. But I still think we have to talk more about European colonialism and the legacy of it for two reasons.
First, the scope and then the ideology. European powers dominated almost the entire globe. They raped, pillage and extracted resources.
If China had taken over the world, it would have been equally as bad. But they just didn't. And second is the ideology, that with the conquests was spread around the world.
People are moral persons. And to kill or enslave another human being, you must dehumanize her. So from the start of the colonial project, European scholars made a very big effort to justify this behavior.
Europeans, they knew murder was bad. They knew you had to have a just war. They knew slavery was bad.
It was forbidden in Europe. But when it's a whole different kind of person. Not human at all.
Not so civilized. Well, then maybe you can enslave them. So people have now complained that we're giving too much attention to the European side of things.
Well, I think after centuries of washing our hands clean of this past, maybe it's time to own up to this and actually really dove into this history. So for this, I applaud Johnny Harris. Still.
Why does he make this fictionalized, simplified account of history and why is it such a bad thing? I think Johnny generally wants people to get interested in these stories. And you, yes you, the audience, you like to watch things that are dramatized and flashy.
So he finds a way to make it as attractive as possible. But I think he goes too far with the whole storytelling bit. It's a bit ironic that the criticism Johnny has for the news could also be leveled at his work.
The news is too flashy, not nuanced enough, and it makes you feel informed for this piece. Cutting the context gives you a worse reading of history. The education niche of YouTube.
It's not like a peer review paper. It's also not as fictional as Hollywood true stories. I think on YouTube, viewers have an expectation that information is accurate, and many don't have the background tools or time to check if it's really the case.
And so posing a simplified narrative is maybe the only information people are going to get from a certain subject. So why should he care? Is this all nitpicking and jealousy from a micro creator?
Well, let me tell you a story about something that I know Johnny cares about. It's the origin story of the myth that people thought the world was flat in medieval times. That's actually a total legend, and I have no idea why I was taught that in elementary school.
How did that happen? I actually genuinely care. Like, how did that happen?
This myth is mostly the blame of the novelist Washington Irving. He wrote a fictional account of Columbus's travels. Irving really went to school on the storytelling.
He puts down Columbus as a great visionary man that has to fight against Catholic clergy at the Spanish courts. The book is ridiculously popular. 175 editions were printed in the 1800s.
But Irving presented this story as a struggle of scientific method against medieval religious backwardness. And this epic struggle has such an impact on his contemporaries, it soon morphs into a belief these clerics thought the world was flat. Eventually, his historical fiction becomes an historic fact that persists to this day.
If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail, they must have been founding members of the Flat Earth Society. They would not have believed that the world was round. Let's be clear.
Johnny is not as bad as Irving. But a story like that makes sure that myths about history are born. This idea that Irving put forward soon became the idea that medieval people were all stupid.
And when history is used to present myths that explain the modern world, we should be very wary. Okay, one last thing before we go. Johnny, if you ever see this, please, please, please start citing sources.
It gives more accountability. It's going to be a starting point for people to read more about certain subjects. It can help academics that write books to do more research that can eventually be an inspiration for your videos.
Okay, Randolph. I made this video by using different sources. They are in description.
YouTubers Imperial and Faultline gave feedback on the script. All mistakes are, of course, still mine. Don't forget to check out their channel.
I definitely didn't touch on everything that was wrong with the video, so let me know in the comments what I missed and be sure to check out my content which I tried to make as truthful as possible. See ya.
