Most of Africa does not have the requirements to easily sustain large populations as do Canada, U.S., South America, etc. The Europeans still wanted their natural resources, however, so they just had the blacks do the work.

Europeans never intended to move large portions of their population down to Africa, as far as I know, due to the inhospitable environment. To my knowledge it was always intended as a draw of resources and nothing else.

I see, thanks for clarifying. The only question left to ask is which is more humane?

Purging the indigenous population to the point where they are an insignificant minority group, or robbing them of all their resources and enslaving them for centuries, then leaving them to fend for themselves?

They wouldn't have been able to.

It only happened in the US because the natives were already dying off in massive numbers from plague and other reasons when the Europeans landed.

If the indigenous North Americans were what they were a couple hundreds years prior it would have been considerably different.

This post was edited by Skinned on Jun 8 2013 01:27am

no poll?

population density in the americas, australia and new zealand was (far) lower than in africa or asia
but stealing the resources took place everywhere

I don't know what history books you guys are reading, but Europe conquered the shit out of Africa. They could have done next to anything they pleased with it, including inhabit it.

the op is not about conquering but populating
north america = plenty 'free' space
south america = first gold-rush which eliminated a lot of population. otherwie the same
australia - urgent need for britain to find a place to send the convicts after they couldn't anymore to america
nz - a little more difficult but read up on the treaty of waitangi and what happened before that

africa had quite a few established powerful kingdoms and it took the colonial power some effort to take control
and to put one example in crass language, the english & boers were not able to breed enough to outnumber the natives in south africa

This post was edited by brmv on Jun 8 2013 02:01am

...not a single mention of King Leopold II of Belgium ?

Isn't Africa very infertile for farming?

Hostile arab states and deserts between them, bad farming land, a shithole where nobody would want to live, heavily populated by natives and colonization efforts seriously repulsed by warlords, a lack of known resources at the time, and yes, above all else, malaria. There aint enough jesuit bark for an entire continent.

The land down under was a similarly infertile resource barren shithole, but at least it had less aborigines with no zuluesque armies and no malaria, and the only good use for it was exile

Because there would be nowhere else to send people darker than us.