All of the Middle East, North Africa and parts of Spain were "colonized" by the Arab world during the conquests after Mohammed's death, much before the first wave of European colonization. It was not in a seafaring fashion but it was no less monumental and likely resulted in vital knowledge in math and the sciences being passed on during a time when Europe was one of the most backwards places on earth.

I think the key to this question is ocean going vessels. The big colonisers the English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese were all seafaring nations.

This was the platform from which the global colonisations of 1400 onwards sprung.

What were the peculiar conditions that caused these guys to take to sea in the first place and why didn't their Asian counterparts do likewise?

I think the Arab world can lay claim to some conquests - Spain for a while anyway ...

I think this is an important question, why did the European nations have more success in colonization? Was it something inherent in the nature of Arab/Asian cultures that made them less willing to travel oceans and capture new territories? They have coastlines and trade routes too. Can it be explained by history/climate/geography/religion?

This sort of question is itself poor history. We cannot cleanly use today's popular cultural boundaries like "europe" and "arab world" to describe people 600 years ago. The assumption that we can bake all european nations into one civilization that has coherent and universal cause-effect relationships is not really solid.

So what is your explanation as to why the West charged ahead, but the Middle East stagnated?

Its the wrong question, which is why you don't tend to find a lot of respected historians writing books that seek to answer this question. A lot of assumptions are baked into this question that historians do not think are valid.

The sort of "why the west won" pop history makes experts cringe in the same way that articles on AI hysteria might make experts here cringe.

I guess the answer is complicated, but clearly one factor is the Arab golden age of science ended when it was suppressed by islamic conservatives, but modern science was then adopted by the West.

The Islamic Golden Age is usually considered to end after the Mongol sack of Baghdad, back in 1258. The main rise of Islamic conservatism doesn't really start until after the Ottoman Empire starts to decline, about the loss of the Battle of Vienna in 1683. Even then, it should be noted that the Islamic fundamentalism doesn't really arise until the 20th century.

Right. I think one important factor is that western europe was spared from the mongol conquest and genocide- china and the Middle East were not.

>> why did the Arab World and Asian civilizations fail to do the colonization that the Europeans did

Perhaps because of the sheer size of Asia. Western Europe isn't exactly large.

Western Europe? Do you mean the landmass that extends all the way from the Atlantic ocean to the Pacific? You can walk all the way from the Bering strait to the Atlantic Ocean, and down to the tip of Africa.. thats a pretty large landmass and there was no gulf between Asia and Europe. (its pretty inhospitable in parts I agree, but the Mongol Empire reached the Mediterranean)

Also, perhaps, because the Arabs who were conquering were generally a land-based civilization, whereas the English, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, were all sea faring civilizations.

Certainly the Arabs had boats and knew how to use them, but I'm not sure sea voyages held the same cultural cachet in the ancient Arab world as it did in the ancient European coastal civilizations.

The Arabs conquered North Africa (which speaks Arab to this day), Persia, Spain (from the 700 to the 1400, a fairly big ammount of time) and they where able, by means of maritime commerce and the spead of Islam, to influence lands as far as Malaysia and the Philipines.

The Turks conquered Constantinople, the capital of one of the most advanced civilizations in Europe, and they employed the new cannon technology to successfully besiege the city in 1453. The Mughal empire pretty much colonized India in the 1500s, and did it basically with gunpwder. [1]

Xinjiang, Tibet, and Vietnam were occupied by different Chinese dynasties several times. While it began in the XVII century, China pretty much colonized Taiwan, despite previous Spanish/Dutch. China had a significant commercial presence in the Indic Ocean and Southeast Asia by the 1400's, and substantion immigration to SE Asia - specially to Malaysia. Ming China had substantial naval technology, and they have repeatedly won naval battles against the Portuguese, one of the great naval powers of the time [2]. They invented fire-arrows, basically incendiary rockets, frequently used agrains ships. [3]

The Arabs, Turks and Chinese of the 1400-1600 were colonising/conquering other lands, making maritime commerce and exploration, and had gunpowder technology good enough to beat European powers at the time. The Arabs specially had a strong presence in Africa and did as much slaving as the Portuguese.

So in terms of technology, the civilizations in Asia where more or less equivalent to Europe. They did not fail at colonisation, they just had much less to colonise, and less interest to explore. The reasons are:

1- Of the advanced civilizations of the time, Europe was the closer to Americas, a large, a rich continent whose inhabitants did not use metals nor gunpowder as in the rest of Eurasia. Native Americans had no immunity to Old World diseases too. The Turkish or Chinese could very easily defeat the Incas and colonise portions of the Americas, had it been closer and they knew about it in time to do so. But Europe was closer, they discovered it first, and the countries of Europe stated competing to colonise it. By the time Asians realized the existence of America, it was probably totally colonized.

2- Europe was very interested in commerce with India, specially access to spices, and America was pretty much discovered by accident in an attempt to find a new route to it [4]. The Chinese and Arabs already had easy access to the Indic Ocean Commecial zone, so they had little incentive to expeditions. The Chinese, in particular, could simply grow their own spices, produced their own silk and porcelain and had little interest in foreign products, and even less interest in expading their religions (the Muslims did spread Islam as far as the Philipines and even to China) The Europeans sufferd from Turkish commercial blockades, and had to contour Africa to have access to Indian Continent, which was a long and dangerous route. So they eventually tried a new route.

tl;dr: Europe discovered and colonized the Americas because it was nearer and because of the lucrative spice trade. Asia did not because it is more distant and because they could grow their own spices.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mughal_Empire [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tunmen [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_arrow [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyages_of_Christopher_Columbu...