I’ve recently read"The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World" and want to hear what all of you think the answer is, because I feel like the book was missing something in its thesis and I am not very sure what that is.
A theme that keeps seeming to come up is luxury goods. Do you think it would be fair to say Europe is rich in useful goods (iron, wood) and poor in everything else? If Europe was truly that poor it wouldn’t be able to actually conquer anyone. Unless I’m mistaken on how poor is meant.
Well in the context of international trade it was poor. Iron is all over the place, trees are pretty common. Europe had nothing other places couldn’t get for themselves, and a strong incentive to develop a method for getting things it wanted by a means other than exchanging precious metals for them.
I think Debt is the first of his books I read, I think it’s a good one, approachable and also concrete. Would recommend.
So the shipbuilding was purely an incentive structure thing?
As for iron, it varies so much in what a particular deposit is good for… I should have specified that it’s actually good iron that doesn’t need the katana treatment to make a solid sword. Unless that’s a myth and I’m dumb. The point of this post was to learn lol.
What’s required to produce those things at a scale that matters is a transformation of social relations that frees up a bunch of people and forces them to do new, alienating work. It’s not enough to have good techniques, you need to fill a nasty city with people who have to be there using them to make a hundred new ships a year.
As with your katana example, technology was not unique to Europe. Many of the things they ended up using to dominate the world came from China, the Arab world, etc. But they had incentives to escalate the use of expensive technology and a social base that was suddenly uprooted by a new form of market relations that killed the previous ways people met their needs.
Economies are, at their core, a social phenomenon, not a technological or resource system. So I wouldn’t discount technology and such as contributors but I don’t think they are the main cause of the transformation Europe experienced.
THANK YOU.
you made so much stuff click with that explanation. Genuinely good at teaching, you are,
