Historians compare ancient non-Western societies to Western societies.

There is no comparison.

What historians call ancient Great Civilizations were what I call slave traps. Those Great Civilizations built the giant structures historians worship because they had millions of subjects who could go nowhere else.

Egypt’s population could not move out of the narrow strip beside the Nile River.

The Mesopotamian Civilizations were less stable. Mesopotamian means “between the rivers,” the Tigris and the Euphrates, but it was easier to get out of than the Egyptian Strip, the ideal slave trap.

China’s slave traps were the rice paddy cultures. Paddies can only be cultivated beside huge water sources. They were concentrated beside the Hwang Ho and the Yan Tsu Rivers.

For at least a thousand years, Westerners have worried about the Chinese conquering the world. It is a remarkable feat that China has contained almost exactly one fifth of the human race for at least two thousand years.

In the meantime the Chinese never even conquered the parts of CHINA that were outside the rice paddy area. Conquerors came in from outside. China conquered nobody north of them. They conquered more rice paddies in southeast Asia, though.

And lost them.

South America had a lot of brief slave traps, too. But that is a somewhat longer story.

The paddies came from a completely new, invented crop called aquatic rice. China got it from India when India was still ruled by whites around 2000 BC.

The Chinese took aquatic rice back to China and made slave traps out of Hwang Ho and Yang Tsu areas, just as Great Civiliations had developed in the slave traps of the Nile and Mesopotamia.

Thus another Great Civilization emerged.