Why didn’t countries in Asia just build factories and guns to compete with the west? I’ll admit I slept through a lot of the class since I had it first period but I’m in AP euro and we learned that Otto got fucked since he had open market policies and when Europe was pumping out goods with colonial resources and manufactorie his local traders were outcompeted and unemployment skyrocketed. Like in AP US history they tell us we just stole the factory model from GB even though he tried to hide it, why didn’t other countries do that? And why didn’t Asian countries try to colonize if they knew about the new world? And why were they lacking in military tech, why couldn’t they just capture a dude and get the tactics from him or kill a dude and reverse engineer his stuff. Like the arabs learned paper making from the Chinese after the battle of talas river and richtugese monks smuggled silk works out of China in their monk canes right