The rise of Europe explained

In Europe, the infighting between groups due to small geographical boundaries and distribution of rich resources throughout the fairly small region resulted in advances in warfare and technologies to support that ... as Chinese invented gunpowder but it took the crazy bloodthirsty Europeans to figure out how to kill people using chemistry of an explosive. And it took good blacksmiths to build a tiny version of the cannon called a gun and half the forests in Europe to smelt the metal to build all the guns used to kill each other off, in other cultures that spoke the same tongue -- a lot less bloodshed occurred and a lot less technology to kill each other was invented.

Having that many people fighting (In 1900 roughly 500 million of 1.7 billion on earth were European and perhaps 200 million of 1 billion in 1800s) just accelerated the development of civilization and knowledge, a means to survive and advance your personal chances of winning a battle. Simply put, between smelting advances and cheap access to forests for fuel, Europeans are more bloodthirsty and have more history of warfare then any other area, humanity has all the great battles and wars to thank for most of our technology and civilization too. Like I said before humans are the mammalian equivalent of social ants, only instead of social nest building, we have a social intelligence and build social knowledgebases through the ability to learn from and teach others. Like ants we aren't very impressive on our own, but working together, what our collective intelligence can do is astounding. What has made our visible achievements increase exponentially over the years is population growth. In order to build more complicated and involved knowledge and technology, it is necessary for different people in our collective brain to specialise - it is unlikely that Newton or Einstein would have been able to make their contributions to scientific knowledge if they were required to be hunter gathers fending for themselves, rather than being able to specialize as scientists. If they lived in a village with a population of 150, then it is unlikely that it would be able to support scientists, whereas a country with a population of 60 million could support that degree of specialization

The birth of civilization clearly grew from the same tension. Tribal groups that set up farms and domesticated animals, in certain ecological situations, ended up with greater survival value -- and thus flourished in the group selection competition. But individuals, seeking the best for themselves, then exploited this new situation in a variety of complex ways, leading to developments like markets, arts, schools and the whole gamut. Not all of these new developments were actually best for the tribe -- some of the ways individuals grew to exploit the new, civilized group dynamics actually were bad for the group. But then the group adapted, and got more complex to compensate. Eventually this led to twisted sociodynamics like we have now ... with (post)modern societies that reject and psychologically torment their individualistic nonconformist rebels, yet openly rely on these same rebels for the ongoing innovation needed to compensate the widespread dissatisfaction modernity fosters.

Granted all humans are a part of the deadliest species on the planet, a small group of even monkeys can take down any animal, prey or predator... humans invented guns to takedown other animals at few hundred meters. Civilizations invented means of destroying entire countries within days and even one whole large city in a moment.

Nowadays, corporations are larger and more powerful and semi-large states. Our bloodthirsty hunting instincts are used to dominate markets and find corporations to buyout and ways to expand control and extract money from other people and companies. Yet most of this influence and power is hidden from the world's view... how states and industries are intertwined and how entire areas of the world are being destroyed so some corporate profits go up, its hard to make money if your company makes bombs without wars going on... bullets don't sell themselves, that takes a politician and an opponent who knows how to insult you or who claims superiority in some way or another, or who has more wealth or assets -- and who can be vilified.

But the problem being solved was always the same until this last half the this century... how to survive your not so friendly neighbors invading and taking your land or valuables. Then the lawyers showed up and setup the legal system