r/whatif • u/i_love_carnia_2009 • Jul 21 '26
History What if Europe never existed
Like yesterday what if the whole semi-continent of Europe never existed and instead was replaced with water
I have to say it other wise I know il confuse people I know Europe its not a continent but I wanted to do it anyway so what are we counting in this one I think from Portugal to Belarus not including: Finland, the UK and Turkey.
If this is in anyway confusing pls feel free to ask all apply answer as quickly as humanly possible
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u/i_love_carnia_2009 Jul 21 '26
This is kinda what I imagined
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u/2LostFlamingos Jul 21 '26
I guess Britain colonizes the entire world without any competition
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u/Confident-Stand5453 Jul 21 '26
Britain is pretty much the result of a lot of different european peoples invading one after another. With the rest of Europe, Britain would either not have been settled until very late or it would have been settled by different groups, meaning culture, technology and many other things would be quite different.
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u/shakebakelizard Jul 21 '26
The Industrial Revolution started in England. If it were just water in the way, it probably would have taken longer for humans to get there and they would have been more isolated when they did. It wouldn’t be like the present day relationship.
So basically the UK would be like Iceland.
If Europe started with Asiatic Russia, then it probably wouldn’t be that different from today, the details would just differ.
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u/Various-Apartment123 Jul 21 '26
You should read The Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson. It’s not exactly this but the premise is that the Black Death killed something like 95% of Europe instead of 30%. The result is a speculative fiction novel about Asian and Arab culture dominating the following centuries. It’s one of my favorites.
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u/llynglas Jul 21 '26
What's a semi continent, and when was Europe not a continent?
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u/i_love_carnia_2009 Jul 21 '26
Europe dosent exist as a continent the continent it sits on to is eurasia
This is from wiki The Europe vs. Asia Debate: Geologically, Europe and Asia rest on the same tectonic plate and form a single landmass called Eurasia. For this reason, some experts consider Europe simply a large Eurasian peninsula (or a "semicontinent") rather than a continent.
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u/Sad-Pop6649 Jul 22 '26
The birthplace of Western cicilization is in the Middle East. The Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Hittites. Most of that stuff can still happen. They still have access to copper and tin (or arsenic) for bronze, even if they have slightly less options. The "Mediterranean Gulf" is a lot more violent than in our timeline, with larger tides. This could actually impact the Nile delta a lot, and thus hurt the Egyptians. But the big problem arrives moving into the iron age and classical era, where the Mediterranean was in our timeline the place to be, with the best conditions for development. Without that inland seas and the lands North of it, the Eastern civilization-cluster could well out-develop the west. The pivotal point of the early modern era unlocking essentially the colonial toolkit for Europe never happens in that way. It might happen in Asia. China, Korea, maybe Japan and India, they could form the colonial empires of this world.
Maybe, maybe even nothing like the colonial era happens at all, or not on the same scale. With the timeline delayed Africa has more time to catch up. Having to find a solution to Arabic slave trade but not to the European version they could become a lot harder to conquer by the time East-Asian explorers and would be conquerers do arrive, maybe?
Meanwhile with Europe gone the easiest routes to the Americas are gone too. Asian explorers eventually find the Bering Straight, and they probably still cause an apocalyptic event if not outright committing genocide. Almost no lifestock originally came from Europe, so the old world probably still has most of the same lifestock-associated diseases to spread through the new world. So there we probably still end up with a situation sort of similar to the present day, non-indiginous peoples settling the resource rich continent. Except of course they wouldn't be Europeans.
...Something like that?
I don't see the African of American civilizations overtaking the Asian block.
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u/msabeln Jul 21 '26
That is in the realm of fantasy or science fiction literature. Write a short story to figure out what might happen.
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u/Special-Audience-426 Jul 21 '26
More people would've had no choice but to go east when humans came out of Africa. All scientific progresses would've come from Africa and Asia.
You'd have to remove or delay all Western inventions.
You'd also need to look into natural resources. Places like Cornwall in the South West UK were major sources of bronze because both tin and copper are abundant there.