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.
two continents of free wealth
that’s basically it
if the western hemisphere didn’t exist Europe wouldn’t be able to colonize anything except maybe Siberia
more detailed explanation:
- europe was the same as every other place, king nobles serfs caste system etc
- 1350 AD the Black Death did the mayocide and 40% of all europeans died overnight
- suddenly king had to pay peasants more bc labor pool was halved
- peasants also had 2x land per capita, everyone better fed and had leisure time for art/tech
- western hemisphere discovered bc the Atlantic is easymode (this is the most important factor)
basically they were in the middle of a renaissance (which is nothing special tbh) but then they hit the mega giga trillions jackpot in the middle of that
Also constant war necessitating more and more complicated systems of debt that both necessitate more war to pay of that debt but also allow financing large naval expeditions to loot not just the new world but the entire Indian ocean. Even after all this they are still in constant conflict with each other so the exploitation of the rest of the world accelerates to keep up.
I doubt it, India was also in constant war as was the Middle East
Europeans just had a giga shitload more money and more resources to finance the wars, so they won
bazingabrains always bleat about how only Spain colonized Americas initially, but they ignore that Spain losing their gold means England/France gaining it, and not China or Thailand
there’s also maps of European innovation which show that basically all of it took place in England Germany Northern Italy France and the places inbetween. Unsurprisingly these are all places that had Atlantic access or were close enough to those places to benefit from wealth diffusion
As others have said, being essentially a backwater place where there wasn’t much that other people wanted, left lots of time for the dirty hill people to figure their shit out while the older civilizations who had already figured their shit out where busy fighting each other until their civilizations started to go into decline. This gives some space for the dirty hill people who’ve, in a more recent sense, got their shit together to actually take advantage of the destabilization and start successful empire building.
I’m sure the deep history nerds can cite instances where England’s imperial project could have be hindered but due to some fluke of weather, or a miss written message, or a military officer has a case of diarrhea at an importune moment that turned the tide of a battle or business deal or a political gambit to England’s favor.
A growing number of elites, go out and carve out something for themselves as fast as possible in any way possible. So long as there was a frontier to be exploited, those trying to lay claim to it would be less likely to fight their own and take their claims, so all efforts could be focused outward on Africa and Asia and South America and North America instead of Sir Reganald Cockswaller, III getting into a pistol duel with Sir Richmond Baldknobb, Jr over who gets to be the sole supplier of sheered sheep scrotums to the Southwest part of TERF island.
So you think a key aspect of it was the reduction in infighting? Would I be wrong if I summarized your post as: early on they weren’t contesting other great powers and didn’t get snuffed out as a result, they became one late to the game which was an advantage actually, and over time became more and more aware there was greater profit in extracting from places far away that couldn’t strike back at the homeland? Think that quote about conspiracy not being needed where interest naturally align,
That makes a lot of sense assuming I understood you at least half rightly.
I suggest Robert Marks The Origins of the Modern World. He’s not a Marxist, but he takes a materialist stance on this exact question.
Basically since Europe didn’t have an abundance of mineral resources like gold and silver, they couldn’t compete with the other major cultures in Eurasia. China and India had much better manufactured goods, Indonesia had spices, and the Ottoman empire had Afghani silver and were the middleman if Europe wanted to trade with the east.
What European nations could do was fight, all they did was fight each other for the last 1000 years. So they turn their warfare on other nations via gunboat diplomacy. I could go on, but by the time of the industrial revolution England’s coal deposits put them in a powerful position. English coal combined with slaves and looting of the continents propelled them until WW2. After that America took over as world hegemon.
Basically it’s not a simple answer, there were many points where the dice could have rolled the other way. The materialist answer is not supposed to be predetermined, that’s where Jared Diamond gets it wrong. A lot of things went right for European empires and they capitalized on it with their barbarity.
I wanted to chime in with trade and lack of ressources, but they also got really really good at plundering due to the political system of feudalism (whose need for currency to fuel more wars also gave rise to credit systems)
Damn, I’m beginning to tbh k I was wrong. Because almost everyone is pointing at debt systems as the cause. I really need to read “debt” by the big G it seems.
World Systems Theorists have some interesting takes on this. In particular, Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Centrury lays out an interesting theory about how the nexus of hegemonic power shifts geographically and temporally through the rise of capitalism to an epochal “signal crisis” and through its financial sublimation leading to a “terminal crisis”. It takes an absurdly long durée view, tracing the development of capitalism from the Italian city states of Florance, Venice, and Genoa, through the Dutch, England, and finally to the US, examining this cycle of accumulation and crisis in each case as the mechanism which drives these tectonic shifts in hegemony.
World Systems Theorists aren’t strictly Marxist, but they aren’t allergic either and do cite a lot of Marxist sources.
Terrance Ray and Sean K.B. gave a pretty good summary of the book in a dusty old podcast episode: https://soundcloud.com/user-972848621-463073718/year-zero-the-thousand-year-stare-w-special-guest-sean-kb
Thank you, that book sounds really interesting.
I like how the “shifting of capitals…capital” sort of uses material anaylysis to deflate the story the west tells itself about “Greeks, Roman’s, anglos/french, Americans” (depending on who does the telling)
I also highly recommend Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris, as it goes into great detail about the history of the settlement of California in the 1800s and the roll it played in accelerating indigenous genocide and capitalist accumulation, and continues to do so to this day in the form of Silicon Valley.
