how did the west become so wealthy and why is most of the world dirt poor?
>>341024
First disease let them conquer a couple nations, then they used the money from that and skills they learned murdering each other to exploit everyone else.
>inb4 white supremacy theories
define wealth
>>341024
your picture, they stole a bunch of gold from mexican and south american countries
they went up from there
>>341040
Let's define wealth as concentrated control over the value form by western bourgeoisie.
>>341024
We spent most of our prehistory trying to kill the Romans. When we finally succeeded, we took their land and achievements, then began killing ourselves with it. When we got good enough at killing other Europeans, we realized enslaving the rest of the world was convenient if we wanted wealth. Also science and stuff
define west
>>341068
This >>341029
>>341047
They weren't better than anyone else for a long while, until through essentially happenstance they were able to destroy an entire continent by accident and they realized they were the only people in the world who had spent their entire fucking history murdering each other.
They just rolled into everyones countries and bought/killed their way to power and then funneled all the wealth back to Europe. That wealth is what allowed the west to become the power it is. Culturally, scientifically, and of course economically.
>>341029
>>341047
>Standardized Guns, Germs, and Steel response
When will this meme die
>>341024
FIREARMS, BACTERIA AND IRON-CARBON ALLOYS!
GEOGRAPHY!
RANDOM CHANCE!
PAPUAN IS MORE CLEVER THAN ANY EUROPEAN I KNOW!
>>341047
nope...most of that gold and silver was used to buy stuff from China.
>>341024
Capitalism, banking, advances in philosophy, the black death, powerful monarchs, lots of internal competition, a large unitary state existing for a long time then a sudden collapse, strong sense of individuality and justice, christianity, literally a fuck ton of things which can;t even be quantified down.
read the book Rise of the West
>>341047
desu it started well before that, arguably with Charlemagne
>>341115
Maybe industrialization and high literacy I dunno its a mystery lol
>>341115
Well the reasons are probably actually the opposite of literally everything you just said. You claim that Europe is the only place in the world who were doing nothing but constantly killing each other for centuries, when on the contrary, due to the religious and political unity of Europe at the time, it was in fact much more peaceful than other places in the world such as in Mesoamerica, the Andes, China, Africa, and India. It was because of this state of relative peace and cooperation that nations were able to take on their own endeavors of exploration, trade, and colonization across the globe, and also the reason why ideas spread so quickly and efficiently through the continent.
>>341129
yea that's why your country is full of soldiers and invade other country, for your literacy and industry
>>341118
pretty much....aristotle + the golden mean in terms of instability vs stability. the Mughal, Ottomans, and Ming/Qing were too centralized, corrupt and complacent/opposed to advancement.
>>341151
don't forget the Church creating a meritocratic elite equal if not often more powerful than the noble bloodlines
a poor family could send their intelligent son to the Church and have him command kings
>>341168
Yes, the Church was probably the most important factor in Europe's rise to power.
Nowhere else in the world could you find such a massive range of different nations and cultures submitting themselves to a single central political body based on their religion.
>>341196
[muffled allahu akbar in the distance]
>>341205
They were doing incredibly well in the fucking Mongols set everything on fire.
>>341205
Islam never had a single body and law to unite them all and keep the peace though, except under the Caliphates, and those were only single nations.
>>341024
A legal tradition that facilitated the rise of the corporation and civics that defended their interests above all others.
>>341211
Mongols were not to blame
if anything the Mongolian invasion was a boon to the Muslim world
the real issue is the combined lack of a central authority (in Islam there is no figure like the Pope, and even the Caliph isn't infallible and cant really decide the fate of Muslims.) and the heavy focus on Islam and the state being intertwined. it lead to division almost immediately and local lords were relatively free to do what they wanted.
>>341235
>if anything the Mongolian invasion was a boon to the Muslim world
Yeah, maybe if you fucking hated them.
>>341129
This is begging the question.
You haven't explained why "industrialism and literacy" happened. Beside, Europe was advanced since before industrialism. At least since the beginning of the 1600s. But I'd say the 1400s is when Europe really started to pull ahead of the pack (Asia) - for some reason.
>>341244
not really
prior to it you had Christian encroachment in the Levant, and large Turkish superpowers basically fighting one another tom exhaustion, the Mongols helped unite Islam against a common foe and soon after provided fresh converts vastly expanding Islamic territory and power. the Islamic world was at its most powerful following the invasions.
>>341024
Cultural superiority.
China could have done it, they certainly had the wealth, but their priories were set elsewhere
The Middle East was the same
Because the white race is superior dingus.
>>341273
how come white people elsewhere didn't do fuck all then? Germans, Slavs, Scythians, Nordics, Iranians
>>341284
>Iranians
>Slavs
>Scythians
>white
>>341292
They certainly look pretty white.
>>341284
Iranians aren't white you retard. Scythians? Is this 200ad? Nordics had a few great thinkers. Slavs created some of the greatest art the world has ever seen. Germans are great warriors and industrialists.
There's a reason the whole world envies Europe even today.
>>341284
Germans do pretty well for themselves. They could have had a big colonial empire but they were late to the game. Nordics as well.
Basically the reason was the Church, guys. Europe conquered the world because of the Church.
>>341024
Colonialism or something..
>>341301
>They could have had
Semitic Jews have done more for humanity than Germs have
>>341118
Rise of the west is a great book to read on the subject
>>341322
Well they have contributed a lot to science/engineering and so on.
They have done 10 times more than what Turkey contributed for example.
>>341315
I thought we agreed to not post this meme image under any circumstances
>>341315
how did they figure out the GDP of ancient countries and compare them accurately?
pic related is a bit more accurate since production is something we can actually measure accurately.
>>341338
Wages divided by the local price of bread multiplied by the population, or something like that.
>>341353
that's not terribly helpful desu
>>341256
The Mongols were a boon to the spread of Islam at the cost of everything else stable and prosperous about the society.
>>341315
Reminder that GDP was invented in 1934
St.Thomas Aquinas defends slavery as instituted by God in punishment for sin, and justified as being part of the ‘right of nations’ and natural law. Children of a slave mother are rightly slaves even though they have not committed personal sin! (Quoted by many later Popes).
they hit upon a series of cultural, geographic, infrastructural, and political coincidences that facilitated the first wave of industrialization a good 200 years before the rest of the world began industrialization.
more specifically, it was England that hit upon all the coincidences, given that they had an abundant supply of ready-to-burn fuel for mechanization (coal), close to the surface and a short distance from city centers, which were also coastal to facilitate trade.
Competition between European countries drove the rest to emulate the UK, over the course of a century. France was the second, which initially struggled to begin industrialization due to its much more authoritarian style of government which imposed strict controls on commerce, research, innovation, and academia.
It was also difficult for the rest of Europe to catch up simply because easy fuel sources like coal weren't necessarily widely available or abundant or close to urban centers.
The key ideas that facilitated industrialization were market economies, intellectual property, and some degree of intellectual liberalism.
Even without industrialization, Asia did manage to hold its own economically for a good amount of time, partly owing to large populations. Egypt remained dominant in producing textiles for a while.China produced a variety of ceramics, and both China and India had some metalworking industry and produced their own blackpowder weapons.
>>341292
you mean european.
lots of people outside of europe are white (caucasian with light colored features).
Time to solve this shit for real.
What percentage of conquistadors had armor and weapons like in pic related?
If it was over 2,000 soldiers then they can easilly break an enemy formation if the enemy is primarily using blunt weapons.
>>341413
And by pic related I mean the ops pic. There is an insane armor and weapon advantage for the conquistadors there.
>>341024
When human populations are spread out, travel is slow or expensive and communication is limited to natural sight and sound, people interact infrequently. When human populations are dense and/or communication is extended and/or travel is fast and cheap, people interact more frequently.
In the first case, with low interaction, events that require long chains of interactions, like the introduction of a new product or the formation of a new institution, are rare and slow. In the second case, these events can become very frequent.
>>341413
Not so many.
But also Cortez had an army of tens of thousands of native auxiliaries.
>>341338
>Wikipedia
>more accurate
>>341024
because the west's civilization happened to reward ambition and conviction due to the Roman Empire's culture rubbing off on all the kingdoms and nations that followed after the fall of Rome
ambition means everyone is constantly competing with each other to attain supremacy, and thus would always be on the hunt to develop new technologies that would give them the edge in any field.
conviction means that they couldn't be stopped by complacency and even in peace-time people were still building and innovating.
compare that to large empires like the chinese and you'll see that they've stagnated because they had no real rivals and no real motivation to continuing to innovate except with themselves.
>>341024
racism
>>341246
>1400s
Why so early?
>>341645
The Black Death was the start of the economic changes that started the trend.
>>341645
That's just the way my internal history knowledge base calls it. Definitely could be wrong since I'm far from an informed expert.
At this point firearms start entering Europe fully and are being absorbed into contemporary military tactics. This is the age we start seeing cannons and early experiments in hand guns with the development of the matchlock. After this point Europe leads the world in military technology through development of the gun and further development from other cultures only happens after western help (i.e. Japan, China buying persian cannons). The Islamic world keeps parity for a while, but eventually falls behind.
Paper and the compass have entered Europe previously, but at this point I would say they have become ubiquitous commonplace technology. We start seeing paper mills, steel foundries, and competently mapped water routes.
On a related not, the movable type/the printing press is invented in this era. Subsequently there is an explosion of literacy and the modern concept of the "book" as we know it is invented. In my mind this is a major plateau that no other civilization managed to accomplish. After this point China and Japan start loosing the realistic ability to claim to be the most literate and educated cultures on the planet.
Another major symbolic milestone is the fact that the century is capped off with the rediscovery of the American continents by the Eurasian people with Columbus in 1492. Again this is a sign of an act that no other world culture be it India, China, or Islamic world really seemed close to accomplishing. I don't care what the sinophiles say. This guarantees that it will be the emperor meeting western explorers and traders, not the other way around.
Though it's not totally fair to compare, this is also seemingly the point where people rediscovered the concept of perspective and art starts to git gud. After this other cultures are playing catch up. The difference is quality gets really dramatic.
Genetics.
Well genetics and being in the right environment , you need both.
Nature + Nurture = success you can't discount either one.
>>341024
>that monk trying to do a cheeky conversion in the background
>>343747
Sorry, do you have a minute to talk about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ?
>>341151
The age of exploration coincided with the General Crises- an age of civil and religious strife. Europe was being torn apart by the wars of religion, famine and pestilence. English, Spanish, Dutch, French and Portugeuse explorers all hated each other, pirated each other's ships and burned their colonies. Europe was not more peaceful than the rest of the world by any means.
>Eurasia had the largest and most interconnected population of humans on the planet and thus developed the quickest
>China sprung ahead and invented gunpowder first because they had a population boom after they started flooding their rice patties
>China got rekt by Mongols and gunpowder spread to Europe
>Europe's political landscape* kept it divided into nations of relatively equal strength, making Europe the most militarily competitive place on the planet at the time so gunpowder weapons developed quickly
>Europe therefore had the best canons and at the moment that sailing had advanced far enough to make global sea trade possible
That's the gist of it.
>* The interconnected nature of warring noble families and the papacy's role in mediating international disputes kept Europe stable despite being divided into many combatitive nations, else one nation might have formed a larger European empire. If that had happened then war in Europe would have been relatively asymmetric and thus top of the line canons would have been less valuable.
>>341068
The trade/communication with Arabs helped the West understand that there was a rich world outside their little zone. Arabs gave them the tools of trade (astronomy for navigation, arabic-numberals (indian) for fast calculation and information/knowledge about outside world like India/China (which had been closed for a while).
>>341024
Aryan superiority.
>>341106
If I dumped you right now in the stinking papuan jungle, even with some training, how long would you survive? It takes a lot of brainpower to survive the rainforest, fucko. It's not called the green hell for nothing...
>>341271
If by culture you mean near-total lack of morals and honour and a worship of greed, then yes, western european culture had a big role to play.
>>343880
This is the most sensible answer in the thread probably.
>>343899
> Even Cortes himself only had a chainmail shirt. Most of the soldiers had cotton armor only. I think the pictures showing conquistadors wearing solid iron corselets and morions are anachronistic by a few decades.
Chainmail was outdated by the late 1400s. Most spaniards wore at least steel breastplates and helms.
> Auxiliaries who weren't very good or useful fighters.
Their auxiliaries were hardened warriors of the Mexica client city states that rebelled against them (Tlaxcalans, etc). They were nearly on par with Aztec soldiery.
A subspecies that evolves in an area of the world that has harsh winters has to plan ahead and be crafty to survive. They form the ability to think beyond the day and be inventive.
A subspecies that evolves without the need to plan ahead doesn't evolve. They wake up, eat, reproduce, then repeat.
While humans were evolving Europe was in an ice age and Africa was very temperate. There were plenty of wild plants and megafauna that were not difficult to hunt, while Europe was desolate and had few animals that were difficult to hunt. In order to survive these conditions a tribe had to be very determined and insightful. Imagination also develops as a result of planning a hunt and imagining where the animal will run, and what ways you can improve your weapons.
Guns, germs, and steel tier theories have already been debunked. This is basic evolution, Diamond ain't got shit on Darwin.
Darwinian evolution hasn't been relevant in human evolution for MILLIONS of years, it completely ignore cultural tradition.
It works for animals, that's it.
>>343963
That's a long and winding way to say "I don't have knowledge of biology, geography or history"
>>341024
Didn't you answer it in your question?
They stole the wealth of others making them poor and themselves rich.
>>343963
European megafauna died after the end of the last ice age. Africa had long dry seasons instead of winters. Who exactly "debunked" those explenations? Was it perchance /pol/?
>>343957
>Chainmail was outdated by the late 1400s.
Chainmail was still extremely common. Bernal Diaz's chronicle specifcally says that Cortes wore chainmail, and that the rest of the conquistadors had equipped themselves with cotton armor for the expedition. Cortes's men were mostly poor and slaveless so they could not afford iron corselets at inflated new world prices. Even a crossbow was a huge expense.
>Their auxiliaries were hardened warriors of the Mexica client city states that rebelled against them (Tlaxcalans, etc). They were nearly on par with Aztec soldiery.
The conquistadors beat an army of twenty thousand tlaxcala with only 500 men and about a dozen horses. And the tlaxcala were so dominated by the aztecs that they couldn't even afford cotton clothing. In battles against the aztecs the tlaxcala would hold back until the Spanish had virtually won the battle so that they could just chase down and capture survivors.
>>343963
Why didn't you just say "because theyre niggers" like all the other racists
You know that the majority of european genetics are not native to Europe in the past few thousand years?
>>343957
this nigga knows whats up
tho most of the spaniards abandond the breastplates after a while for the native cotton armor
>>343963
Also, top tier stupidity:
> A subspecies
Do you mean neanderthals? Idaltu? Or what exactly?
>>344007
It isn't the wealth of others if its inert resource just chilling around not being extracted
>>344014
Plenty of people, google guns germs and steel debunked. His theories aren't considered to be historic or scientific fact yet they're spouted here as such.
>>344020
>muh racism
Fuck off with your buzzwords.
>>344048
Caucasoids and mongoloids contain a percentage of neanderthal DNA, while denisovan DNA is exclusive to mongoloids and homo-sapien-sapien is exclusive to africoids.
We are different blends of separate subspecies.
>>344088
>africoids.
Hahaha this just gets more and more ridiculous
You know that theres Africans with less in common with each other than Europeans and Chinese
>>341024
Europe and Asia are both the natural home of animals like horses, cows, and pigs leading them to to more productive levels of farming and agriculture. This lead to the creation of large cities where people lived closer to each other, faster travel between those cities, and using animals for labor giving the average person more time to do as they please. Rome, China and Greece where all extremly advanced for there times and created unified empires giving these places a unified culture. After the fall of Rome the black death came having three effects on Europe. 1, bringing all or Europe closer to the Catholic church giving Europeabs even more of a unified identity 2: getting ride of most of Europe's population freeing up more resources to be used for things like colonialism. This is why china never had colonys there where so many people and so much land that had to be controlled that almost all of China's resources went right back to, well, China allowing very little room for a large army to go to Africa or the Americas. 3: showing the average European that more scientific advantages should be made to stop things such as the black plague from happening. These things combined with many other factors to lead to Europe being able to become a colonial power.
>>344016
Well Bernal Diaz's chronichle I would hardly call accurate. He wrote it in his later years, and he was, after all, a simple mercenary.
>>341029
>reality is videogame
>>344090
>doesn't even know the different subspecies
>has the audacity to speak on race
Ok just live in your fantasy land where everyone is exactly the same despite obvious differences in physical and mental characteristics. I'm not claiming anyone is superior to another, we all have different trade offs. We aren't the same subspecies, though we all share a percentage of homo-sapien DNA which makes up the majority of our overall traits, that's why we're not different species entirely and are still able to breed.
>>341024
Here is your answer.
It's a great read and a short one but you can also read all the research he cites in this piece.
If you can't be bothered to read this small text then don't bother asking such questions.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/pdf/Broadberry/AccountingGreatDivergence5.pdf
>>344102
1. The plague turned a lot of people away from the church too because the church was obviously failing at pleasing God, else there wouldn't have been a plague.
2. China had plagues like the rest of the world and China was never in a position to colonize regardless of domestic issues.
3. Science did jack shit to stop the plagues back then.
Overall a pretty bad analysis desu, senpai.
>>344120
Go away you dime-a-dozen troll.
> Africoid
A word literally used only on white supremacist websites. Oh wait, it's on some black supremacist ones as well...
At least *try* to sound scientific when you post this shit.
>>344046
They never had breastplates to begin with.
There were two expeditions to the Mexican coast before Cortes. On the first, the Spanish didn't wear armor and lost half their men while they were gathering water when the natives attacked unprovoked. On the second expedition under Grijalva, they brought cotton corselets with them.
"Nothing daunted by this they each selected their man, whom they particularly aimed at with their arrows, but we had taken the precaution to put on cotton cuirasses."
In preparation for Cortes's expedition more cotton armor was made. "Cotton being very plentiful here we constructed ourselves cuirasses with it, which form the most efficient protection against Indian arrows, pikes and slings."
Higher ranking soldiers wore mail.
"Leon was seated on his fine mare, and clad in his coat of mail, which he scarcely ever put off, and had his helmet on..."
Even later in the war when Cortes's men were receiving regular reinforcements and resupply they did not have breastplates : "Cortes particularly recommended us to furnish ourselves with good weapons, helmets, gorgets, and steel coverings for the legs, to protect our bodies from the destructive weapons of the Mexicans."
Most conquistador art is based on what a Spanish soldier would have looked like in the 1580s-1640s, not 1520.
>>344108
If you assert that he is wrong then provide evidence. You don't get to throw out the most complete history of the conquest just because you prefer your own history of events.
>>344130
Oh I should probably add that civilizations outside of Eurasia and north Africa couldn't 'win the race' because they were still in the stone age or early iron age by the year 1000 AD.
>>344140
>1. The plague turned a lot of people away from the church too because the church was obviously failing at pleasing God, else there wouldn't have been a plague.
Not quite, if anything they became richer, lot of rich folks were patrons of the church and donated dosh to save their soul.
>2. China had plagues like the rest of the world and China was never in a position to colonize regardless of domestic issues.
Unlike Europe the plague didn't cause wages to rise and the population rebounded without economic growth, labour remained so cheap Chinese printer preferred to use woodblock printing presses despite having moveable type printing presses, key difference is that the latter requires a lot of labour while the former requires a high capital investment.
>3. Science did jack shit to stop the plagues back then.
They figured out quarantine and due to a stroke of luck the whole plague mask tended to work a bit.
>>344130
While interesting in itself, that explanation focuses only on economic factors, and only in a modern capitalist framework. I wouldn't bet my last dime on its accuracy and lack of bias.
>>343880
>Eurasia had the largest and most interconnected population of humans on the planet and thus developed the quickest
how is that an argument? they had to learn all skills that make life easier by themselves, there weren't any aliens that gave them some cheats to get ahead in life, why couldn't the american civilizations do the same? they too had large agricultural centres and huge populations, Mexico was very interconnected.
>Europe's political landscape* kept it divided into nations of relatively equal strength, making Europe the most militarily competitive place on the planet at the time so gunpowder weapons developed quickly
same could be said for Japan, constant civil wars and political strife between rivalling clans, just like in Europe
>The interconnected nature of warring noble families and the papacy's role in mediating international disputes kept Europe stable despite being divided into many combatitive nations, else one nation might have formed a larger European empire. If that had happened then war in Europe would have been relatively asymmetric and thus top of the line canons would have been less valuable.
There was never a single Asian empire that united all Asian kingdoms, there were many kingdoms of different races and religions throughout south-east Asia
>>344172
Well it is chiefly concerned with charting the great divergence rather than explaining it fully. The trends shown in the work do roughly correspond to other sources which state that the Netherlands was indeed the richest European country for a while and here is a nice, but rather fanciful, quote of Adam Smith regarding China. He never went there though.
China has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in world. It seems, however, to have been long stationary. Marco Polo, who visited it more than five hundred years ago, describes its cultivation, industry, and populousness, almost in the same terms in which they are described by travellers in the present times. It had perhaps, even long before his time, acquired that full complement of riches which the nature of its laws and institutions permits it to acquire. The accounts of all travellers, inconsistent in many other respects, agree in the low wages of labour, and in the difficulty which a labourer finds in bringing up a family in China. If by digging the ground a whole day he can get what will purchase a small quantity of rice in the evening, he is contented. The condition of artificers is, if possible, still worse. Instead of waiting indolently in their workhouses, for the calls of their customers, as in Europe, they are continually running about the streets with the tools of their respective trades, offering their service, and as it were begging employment. The poverty of the lower ranks of people in China far surpasses that of the most beggarly nations in Europe. In the neighbourhood of Canton many hundred, it is commonly said, many thousand families have no habitation on the land, but live constantly in little fishing boats upon the rivers and canals. The subsistence which they find there is so scanty that they are eager to fish up the nastiest garbage thrown overboard from any European ship.
Because we domesticated fucking aurochs
>>344175
>same could be said for Japan, constant civil wars and political strife between rivalling clans, just like in Europe
See >>344130 Japan was one of the few Asian economies that was improving steadily prior to industrialization.
>>344156
>>344163
Guys I don't want to spoil your party but have you tried looking at contemporary aztec depictions of the Spaniards?
>>344211
They aren't "contemporary". Aztec depictions were made decades later, and reflected what Spanish soldiers were wearing decades later, not those who were with Cortes.
>>344175
1. Eurasia had the most total humans and the most extensive trade. That's an undisputed fact.
2. a. Japan is tiny. It's not even comparable to Europe. The population of Japan in 1500 was like 17 million and the Europe's was like 90 million.
b. Japan has very few natural resources.
c. The competitiveness of the Sengoku period was what propelled Japan into even contemplating invading Korea and China.
I'ts a good comparison though.
3. Warfare in most other equally populous regions was relatively asymmetric. You only NEED bigger and better canons if your enemy has canons too.
>>344145
What is this shit that you can just call someone a racist/white supreme and it invalidates their facts? Where are your sources that humans haven't been separated into these groups for scientific purposes? You CLAIM the groups don't exist because of some sociopolitical agenda, that doesn't make it so. The fact is they have been separated into these groups to help us better understand the diverse human traits.
>>344222
Here's a good source of info on conquistador arms and armor.
>>344282
forgot link
http://myarmoury.com/talk/viewtopic.php?t=29426
>>344130
>Europe sprung ahead because the Black Death raised wages
How does that follow? Sure, life was better for the individual (those who survived), but that doesn't mean European nations were strengthened. It sounds like the prosperity of individuals and the prosperity of European nations is being conflated.
High wages helped spur the industrial revolution, but it doesn't explain "divergence" before Europe opened up global sea trade routes.
>>343880
So Europeans had great military capacity at a time when sea trade became more viable that before. Ok so where to from there? Just straight off into "early colonialism" (americas) while riding on the advantage of military supremacy? is the rediscovery of the americas the greatest point of origin of later european wealth? How? plunder? discovery of new natural resources? european hegemony on sea trade? all above?
>>344120
Race isn't 3 broad categories like you think and theres no such word as Africoid.
>>344319
He means negroid.
>>341118
This. Internal competition is a major factor for the rise of the west. With so many small kingdoms in Europe, the need to be powerful compared to the neighbour was strong. Smaller kingdoms also meant not enough resources to go around equally to all of the kingdoms. This led to Age of Exploration and colonies so that valuable resources can be secured. This brought wealth, which meant investment in universities, which in turn led to advances in sciences and philosophy. Mughals dominated most of India and most of China was unified, which meant less competition in these regions.
The doc - Civilization: Is the West History? - talks about this.
>>344282
I wouldn't call those forum posts either "good" or even a "source". Several of them are spectacularly wrong.
>>344299
Did you read?
The ones that survived had a load of dosh to spent on consumer goods, the women started marrying later and worked as wage laborers, fewer kids received better education, people started investing in labor saving devices etc etc.
>>344336
I meant did you read the paper*
Anyways in China population growth outpaced their economy with a resulting drop in per capita gdp while in Europe the Black Death caused a sort of 'hard reset' on the population growth while the economy didn't decline equally and actually started outpacing population growth for a long time.
Part of the reason for this is that the land left after the Black Death was increasingly used for pastoral farming of livestock such as sheep for wool or cattle for dairy products, both of which were exported far and wide from England and Holland. The households themselves also started sort of 'industrializing'. In some surveys by the state of Holland half of all rural households in a certain part of the province had a loom.
>>344283
>For an inattentive scholar -- or one who doesn't have a clue about the rapid stylistic changes in arms and armour throughout the 16th century -- it'd be extremely easy to mistake these later editions' illustrations for accurate depictions of the arms and armour from the period being narrated.
So basically what I said. Depictions of Cortes's conquistadors with iron corselets, morions and tassets are anachronistic.
There were certainly conquistadors equipped like that in Mexico, but not in 1520. Morion helmets in particular date from the 1540's onwards.
>>344336
>lose 1/3rd of populatin to disease
>broken windows turn you into a world power
Yeah nah I don't care what justification the paper comes up with. That's bullshit.
>>341256
The fuck are you on about? The Mongols ANNIHILATED Baghdad, the cultural, intellectual and economic center of the Islamic world at the time. In fact, too this day, Baghdad has never fully recovered.
An equivalent idea would be if some outside barbarian force came and utterly destroyed Athens at the time of Aristotle, snuffing out the prospects of Western civilization right then.
>>344361
Here is another graph indicating the new spending pattern in post Black Death Europe. It's a logarithmic scale so the increases are far larger than they appear on the graph itself.
The Black Death is 1350
The printing press is 1436
See what happens between those dates.
>>344383
You should read this book called; 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations' by Adam Smith.
He is one of the founders of Economy as a science really.
tl;dr of him is essentially wealth = division of labor
>>344400
Sorry wrong picture.
>>344400
Your black death broken windows theory has nothing to do with division of labor.
>See what happens between those dates.
The thing about history is that lots of things happen at the same time... and over a 100 year period.
>>344305
>the riches of the Americas helped Europe make up trade deficits and made global trade that much more profitable
>increased networking thanks to newly establish global sea trade routes led to a marked increase in the rate of technological and philosophic* knowledge
>domination of global sea trade routes meant new discoveries spread to Europe first before spreading elsewhere (e.g. the Chinese plow, amazing American crops, military tech spread from European nations to other European nations first)
>Europe therefore stayed ahead until industrialization, at which Europe went from merely being ahead of the world to controlling the world
>* By "philosophical" I mean advancements in every field but technology: economics, governance, and basically anything fat heads talked about.
P.S. - The printing press worked especially well with European phonetic languages, aiding in the dissemination of ideas. China had printing presses before Europe but there are so many Chinese characters that it's easier just to hire someone to write all your fliers than it is to assemble the movable type.
>>344245
> Eurasia had the most total humans and the most extensive trade. That's an undisputed fact.
And how does having a huge population correlate to having an advanced civilization? if you follow this logic china would have been, and still be, the most advanced civilization on earth. Having a bigger population does not mean a more advanced civilization.
>2. a. Japan is tiny. It's not even comparable to Europe. The population of Japan in 1500 was like 17 million and the Europe's was like 90 million.
the argument was about division in nations of the same strength, not population numbers, which have nothing to do with the advancedness of a civilization. they are VERY comparable.
>3. Warfare in most other equally populous regions was relatively asymmetric. You only NEED bigger and better canons if your enemy has canons too.
Europe is not in a state of war and has not been in one for a very long time, yet scientific progress has skyrocketed. scientific progress, or "bigger cannons" if you will, do not require a strong enemy, or a war.
>>344016
>The conquistadors beat an army of twenty thousand tlaxcala with only 500 men and about a dozen horses.
Your reference is Bernal and you say they beat the Tlaxcallan army?
He says the battle was over after they killed a General who Xicotencatl forced to join.
>Auxiliaries who weren't very good or useful fighters.
>And the tlaxcala were so dominated by the aztecs that they couldn't even afford cotton clothing.
Even economically dominated they were one of the two independant nations within the Aztec Empire, in 100 years the Aztecs conquered almost all Mesoamerica but never managed to subject them.
>>344336
see >>344383
I'm not buying the argument. Fewer humans may mean life is better for individuals but it also means a net loss in the ability to get shit done.
If anything the loss of population held Europe back. For example, it was the high demand for farm land as England's population grew that led to innovations in agricultural productivity and the English Agricultural Revolution which led into the Industrial Revolution.
>>344419
Never heard of the broken window thing but that's not what I meant. I think.
Anyways it's not my theory it's those of the guys who wrote the paper.
I think it's a sound theory, disposable income of most people increases a lot so they can spend more on luxury goods. Since you can only eat so much grain the money is instead spent on goods that you can consume more of such as clothes, manuscripts and spices.
Guess what happened, the cloth industry grew after the black death, so did the manuscript industry (leading to the movable type printing press) and for spices it became economically viable to fund exploration voyages along the coast of Africa to get to India.
Why don't you believe the economy shrank less than the population during and after the Black Death? The machinery, lands and livestock remained intact. JL van Zanden and a Chinese colleague compared the richest part of China and Holland with each other over the course over a few centuries, what they found was that Holland was much more industrialized whereas that river delta of China still used human powered water mills to drain the land and the labor intensive woodblock printing instead of the capital intensive movable type printing.
>>344489
>If anything the loss of population held Europe back.
Look at China and Russia.
Shitload of farmers, low labor cost and mostly sort of 'meh' when compared to other nations. These lads weren't busy buying costly cloth or spices brought away from faraway lands simple because they couldn't afford it.
As for the Industrial revolution in England, apparently it was cheaper to dig up coal from the earth, construct expensive steam machine and factory halls rather than hiring a lot of people to do it manually. Necessity is the mother of invention really. In the medieval period a lot of advances in agriculture were made that they Romans didn't come up with, they could just throw more slaves at it until it was done.
Then there are things like mills, high initial cost, skilled labor to make one and operate it but better in the long run. Meanwhile the Chinese just threw more peasants at it until the lands they wanted to cultivate were drained.
>>344490
Broken windows is a common economic fallacy where people believe that destroying things somehow makes them richer. The joke is that we should supposedly go around breaking windows because the glass maker will have more money to buy things and stimulate the economy.
I don't think anybody would think that releasing a plague today would somehow stimulate the economy.
>>344468
For most of human history Eurasia (including the northern and eastern coasts of Africa) were connected by trade but relatively cut off from the Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia, and all those Polynesian fuckers floating in the pacific. Eurasia was ahead because it had the most networked humans. Sub-Saharan Africa had a trickle of knowledge from Eurasia and the Americas had the second most extensive network of humans. The state of development of each world zone reflects this.
The distinction between world zones has been thrown out the window because we are presently part of the same network.
>>344481
It's been a while since I read it. My recollection is that he says the Tlaxcalla gave up after Spanish crossbows and harquebuses picked off enough of their leaders. Maybe I'm wrong. Either way the Spanish won.
Diaz and Cortes both say that the Tlaxcalla were probably allowed to remain free just so that the Aztecs would have somebody nearby to be a source of war captives or training for young warriors.
>>344527
Well those guys who wrote the papers did.
Somehow GDP per capita doubled in the century after the Black Death.
Somehow manuscript production quadrupled in the century following the Black Death
Somehow England and Holland suddenly started surpassing Italy and Spain in the century and a half years after the Black Death
Would it work today? Well we are an industrial society now so I can't say AND it didn't have the same effect in Asia or Southern Europe.
>>344558
I should also add that two other things happened more or less at the same time.
Gunpowder was increasingly used in Europe from 1340 onward too and plate armor really started to become popular.
Perhaps it's mere coincidence that a mail hauberk could take up to three months to be linked together by unskilled labor while plate armor breastplates could be hammered in three days by skilled labor. Perhaps it would be interesting to compare the price of mail armor between say 1300 and 1400-1500. I think you'll find that mail was quite expensive.
>>341024
>>341068
Spending hundreds of years fighting each other made us good at winning wars.
Also trade from the middle east.
>>343977
>Darwinian evolution hasn't been relevant in human evolution
>>344539
trade is a small component of advancement. if your statement was true the middle east would have been the most developped region in the world since it is on the crossroads between three continents.
>>344542
>Diaz and Cortes both say that the Tlaxcalla were probably allowed to remain free just so that the Aztecs would have somebody nearby to be a source of war captives or training for young warriors.
Also because they were the best warriors in the region.
>or training for young warriors.
Only veterans participated in Flower Wars.
>>344520
>These lads weren't busy buying costly cloth or spices brought away from faraway lands simple because they couldn't afford it.
The gentry exploiting their labor were. Humans are a resource like any other. Fewer humans means less fewer miners digging up iron, fewer craftsman improving the worth of raw materials, fewer people building boats, fewer trained sailors, and a net loss to the economy.
And yes, though high wages may have led to the industrial revolution, it doesn't sufficiently explain Europe's success before the industrial revolution and before Vasco da Gama. That's all that I am arguing.
And a distinction should be made between larger populations and agricultural productivity. Higher populations increases demand for farm land. Once good farm land runs out productivity of goes up to meet demand. Better agricultural productivity means a smaller proportion of the society has to be farmers and more people can be innovators.
>>344558
Of course GDP per capita went up. The capita went down! But that doesn't mean the plague increased the GDP overall.
>>344601
This is >wikipedia but it matches my recollection of Diaz.
>Historians note evidence of the sacrifice motive: one of Cortez's captains, Andres de Tapia, once asked Moctezuma II why the stronger Aztec Empire had not yet conquered the nearby state of Tlaxcala outright.[13] Moctezuma II responded by saying that although they could have if they had wanted to, the Aztecs had not done so because war with Tlaxcala was a convenient way of gathering sacrifices and training their own soldiers.
If you yourself are Tlaxcalla and want to believe that your ancestors were the best warriors in Mexico then go right ahead. I just find it hard to believe that the best warriors in Mexico would be forced into being dirt-poor human cattle.
>>344599
More innovators means more technology. A larger population generally means more innovators (agricultural productivity also matters). More networking between innovators means civilization isn't constantly reinventing the light bulb.
Eurasia had the most networked innovators. Trade routes were simply the means of networking. They didn't have the internet back then.
>>344558
I'm pretty skeptical of data regarding the GDP of countries from the middle ages. It's naturally going to be very speculative.
>>344607
>The gentry exploiting their labor were.
Do you have some numbers on that?
Did you forget that Flanders and Holland had an urbanization rate somewhere in the high 30% or low 40% And like I posted a lot of villages did stuff besides agriculture.
Also remember that the population rebounded within a century or two. Fewer humans also means fewer mouths to feed, more land available for commercial crops. Then there is the grain import from the Baltic and advances in agriculture. The plague knocked over 1/3 of people but the percentage involved in things other than growing food increased and the ratio didn't go back the way it was when the population grew again.
>>344558
Alternative theory, other factors were increasing the GDP and the Black Plague was merely keeping the population low. Raising the GDP while the population remains relatively the same increases GDP/capita.
The idea that killing people makes the nation stronger is absurd. The only point in time it was true was England leading up to the industrial revolution.
>>344645
If you have nothing but ad hominen then go right ahead.
Still, you seem reasonable enough to understand that skills in battle may not always lead to victory in war. There was a reason no one was allowed to sell cotton to Tlaxcalla.
>>344680
Well I'm not sure about the exact figure down to the dollar but the trends are important. Europe was well ahead of China way before the industrial revolution and like Adam Smith said, China hasn't really changed since Marco Polo visited it. The little divergence is also mentioned in many sources from those days.
Anyways read the paper for their methods, they used the same method on the countries examined.
>>344746
Well yes the European marriage pattern kept the population low too but I think it was this sudden burst increase in income that allowed the persistent growth we see in Holland and England to occur.
>The idea that killing people makes the nation stronger is absurd. The only point in time it was true was England leading up to the industrial revolution.
What?
>>344781
Sadly the site is down now but here is the cached text.
n a recent CEPR working paper with Bozhong Li (Li and van Zanden 2010), we go one step further and make detailed estimates of the structure and level of GDP per capita of two regions, which are among the most advanced parts of Western Europe (the Netherlands, with a level of GDP per capita comparable to that of England) and China (a more or less comparable region within the Yangzi delta, the Hua-Lou district).
The two regions have a lot in common.
They are both situated in a river delta controlling trade with a vast hinterland, causing them to both specialise in services and related manufacturing activities.
They are both highly urbanised; about 39% of the population of Hua-Lou lives in cities, in the Netherlands this share is 35%.
Agricultural conditions were similar as well; both have difficult to work clay soils and water management is key to the high levels of agriculture productivity found there.
Finally, perhaps because of the advanced state of their economies and societies, in both regions relatively good economic statistics were collected, making it possible to estimate the level and structure of GDP in the 1820s.
But the picture changes radically when levels of productivity and income are compared. GDP per capita in the Netherlands is 86% higher than that of Hua-Lou district. Much of this is caused by a particularly large productivity gap in industry and services, where labour is at least twice as productive in the Netherlands. Only in agriculture is the gap between ‘East and West’ very small.
cont.
>>344815
So why is labour in services and industry so much more productive in the West? Factor prices form probably a large part of the explanation – real wages in the Netherlands were at least 70% higher than those in the Yangzi Delta, but interest rates were much lower in the West (but data on interest rates in China are still very scarce and not very reliable). Since the late Medieval Period (in fact, since the Black Death of 1348), the North Sea area was a region with high real wages and low interest rates, and producers had developed and selected production technologies which are consistent with these relative prices. Meanwhile, in China – in the Yangzi delta and elsewhere – wages were much lower, and capital markets probably not that well developed as in Western Europe. A comparison of production techniques used in different industries is illuminating.
In China, water management was carried out largely by hand using sophisticated machines (see Figure 1 below). In the Netherlands the windmill had been adapted to service water management, resulting in the huge mills that dominated the rural landscape (Figure 2 is a design of one of the first 17th century mills). The same difference applies to oil pressing, a large industry in both regions. The Dutch developed a highly capital-intensive windmill technology to press their oilseeds, the Chinese version of this was driven, again, by humans or oxen. Inland transport along canals and rivers was pulled by horses in the Netherlands, by humans in China.
cont.
>>344741
>Fewer humans also means fewer mouths to feed, more land available for commercial crops.
Fewer humans means fewer mouths to feed, but it also means less food to feed them with. And what crops are you talking about in pre-Colombian Europe? Furthermore, there was no dire shortage of land in pre-Colombian Europe. Europeans were expanding into the unoccupied Commons as the population of Europe grew. That's why the British Agricultural Revolution happened when it did. All the land was either being farmed or set aside for posh fox hunting by that point so that's the point British agricultural productivity began to rise to keep up with demand.
>>344816
Most famous is perhaps the different choice of technique in printing. Although the Chinese had invented the printing press, commercial printers preferred to use a more labour-intensive technology, woodblock printing. Since the middle of the 15th century, Western Europe concentrated on moveable type printing as the most important technology, which was a very capital-intensive process, with high levels of labour productivity. Figures 3 and 4 illustrate the difference in capital-labour ratio between the two technologies; typically, the pressing in China is done by humans, in Europe by a machine.
Perhaps Chinese and European producers had, as in the case of the printing press, in principle access to the same relatively advanced technologies, but radically different relative prices induced them to select different modes of production, resulting in the big gap in labour productivity that can be observed in the 1820s. The story for agriculture is different, however. There, land productivity was much higher in the Yangzi delta – where advanced systems of multiple cropping had been developed – and total factor productivity was much higher than in the West. This may have been a particular feature of “rice agriculture” in combination of very intensive forms of irrigation. It resulted in a level of labour productivity which was almost as high as in the Netherlands (or England). This also implied that, in the Yangzi delta, labour productivity in agriculture was much higher than in industry – the reverse of the “normal” structure of relative productivities known from the work by Simon Kuznets and Colin Clark. This may also have had consequences for structural transformation – it limited the incentives to move from agriculture to industry (although Hua-Lou district, with its high level of urbanisation, is probably not the best case in point).
Why do we have this same thread in different syntax every damn day?
>>344781
>Well yes the European marriage pattern kept the population low too but I think it was this sudden burst increase in income that allowed the persistent growth we see in Holland and England to occur.
Marriage? What? We are taking about the Black Plague keeping Europe's population from growing.
Regardless, you are conflating the prosperity of individuals with the net productivity of the country. The wealth of individuals went up due to the Black Death but the wealth overall was brought down or it's growth slowed. Fewer humans means less production of everything.
>>344817
>Fewer humans means fewer mouths to feed, but it also means less food to feed them with.
Imported food started to become more important and agricultural advances were made during the period.
>And what crops are you talking about in pre-Colombian Europe?
Cows for dairy and meat
Sheep for wool
Linen for the linen industry
Hemp for rope and sails both used extensively in ship building
Peat was dug up by former farmers to use in large brick and kelp ovens
>Furthermore, there was no dire shortage of land in pre-Colombian Europe
They did have quite a few famines in the decades before the plague and as the chart shows many were not that fare above the bare bone subsidence as before. Quite a few people must not have had a lot of land.
>>344826
It's history. We discuss it quicker than it happens.
>>344841
>Black Plague keeping Europe's population from growing.
Lol of course it didn't, it didn't turn women sterile did it? It was a large wipeout that occurred over a few years, after that it went back to growing and was at pre plague levels by the early 1500s IIRC.
What did change was that many Women in both England and Holland went into the labor market which needed ever more people and didn't really marry until they were 25 when they had already accumulated capital and were less likely to have a shit ton of children, unlike Italians who arranged marriage at age 16 and had them churn out little humans by the dozens.
And no I am not confusing GDP with GDP per capita at all.
I am saying that the increase in GDP per capita resulted in a more modern economy because people could act more as consumers. Which increased the GDP per capita even further between 1340 and 1500 while the population was growing.
There is another thing I just recalled.
Farm productivity went down in the decades or even the whole century preceding the Black Death and went up after it. The highest yielding lands weren't even the ones that had a natural good soil but rather the lands on the Artois/Flanders border where they intensively manured, irrigated and drained lands
>>344844
I don't like the greentext, comment, greentext, comment, greentext, comment post format. Comments aren't tied together as a singular cohesive argument and no point is stressed. It's hard to respond to so let me just blurt out what comes to mind after reading your post.
GDPs did not increase due to the Black Plague. They increased steadily due to other factors. The Black Plague merely kept capita low, thus improving GDP per capita. The sudden uptick in GDP per capita is not by itself a sufficient explanation for the relative success of Europe. It did not free up land for cash crops because there was plenty of land already.
>>341024
The modern "rest of the world" is dirt poor because the modern West is the center of a global economy and make sure these countries can never rise to our level without great difficulty.
In ancient times though, how could wealth be defined? Inventions and technologies are made because they are needed within their respectives societies, not because a collectivity becomes smart enough to suddenly invent it. Writing wasn't invented for fun, and if it would have been, it would have remained this hobbyist and obscure thing, kinda like the games child invent aren't widespread in our societies. We don't need these games. In Mesopotamia, writing was a need, it could facilitate commerce management greatly. In other areas of the world, it came to be for other reasons.
The places you define as dirt poor are, in their traditional context, often well adapted to their environment. Technological evolution isn't linear, it's all about adaptation. Not every society needs/will go through the same stages, at least.
In a way, the most "evolved" areas of the world are the ones who had the most challenges. And yes, from recent centuries we could say inventions flowed without filling a crippling need we had, but that is another issue. Perhaps the action of inventing something became in itself a need. People of the West have built this idea of carreer and "what do you do in life" that they need to fill as any other need, so inventions come to fill that need, whatever type of invention they are.
>>344928
Well but then how do you explain the growing pastoral/livestock sector in England and Holland. IIRC sheep eventually led to the enclosure of common lands in England. Didn't people think of doing that before the Black Death? Was there suddenly an abundance of prime pasture in the late 14th early 15th century due to human factors?
I admit High Medieval history is not my prime interest but I have skimmed some texts on the situation in Europe in the decades preceding the Black Death. If anything it does seem like land was becoming an issue as ever more 'marginal land' was put into use for growing grain. I really need to read some books on this again.
Now I believe that sudden uptick in GDP caused an increasing part of the western European population to start picking up different trades. Serfdom was already gone in France by 1315 while England and the low countries more or less abolished it by 1400-1500, and some areas in both England and Holland it never existed in the first place. This contrasts sharply with Eastern Europe and Russia where serfdom increased during and after the middle ages. The grain trade from Prussia and the Baltic was what fed this highly urbanized belt in North Western Europe and the Dutch owned this trade. Around the year 1500 more than half of all ships entering the Baltic were Dutch, Amsterdam turned in the largest grain market in Western Europe. In turn this imported grain allowed people to do other stuff besides farming.
This sudden uptick in GDP also resulted in an increase in literacy, again North Western Europe dominates this with extremely high literacy rates and book production following the Black Death.
Then there is the (perhaps) even more important age of discovery. The credit for starting this is, in my opinion, solely for the Portuguese. The Italians and Middle East had dominated the spice trade for a long long time, the Portuguese were in a unique position to find a new way to enter this trade.
>>344874
>the increase in GDP per capita resulted in people acting more as consumers.
There were plenty of consumers before, and more producers, and more everything. Killing off humans is like whittling away at every aspect of the economy.
I don't want to be disrespectful to you, but this whole hypothesis sounds like a poorly founded attempt at making misanthropic Malthus relevant again by claiming that humans are the problem with humanity.
>>344980
With no ports in the Mediterranean they had no need to keep a fleet of galleys there to protect their interest. All their naval potential could be focused on Atlantic shipping and exploration voyages. These voyages were royally sponsored from the beginning with the aim of finding a way to India, apparently the volume of spice consumption in post Black Death Europe was enough to warrant financing these voyages.
>>344984
In absolute numbers but not as percentage, and as this
>>344815
>>344816
>>344824
shows their labor productivity was possible lower than post Black Death labor.
>>344984
PS, the paper goes further with proposing that centralized governments, merchants classes and parliamentary bodies caused these nations to have more effective economies.
The guys who wrote this can explain it a lot better than I do so I suggest you read a few of the Broadberry papers, they're quite short and you could read them on your daily commute if you take public transport.
>>345020
Oh yeah and a little of Max Weber is thrown in the mix.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/seminars/ModernAndComparative/papers2012-13/accountingforlittledivergence(LSE).pdf
>>341090
> only people in the world who had spent their entire fucking history murdering each other.
Just how underage are you? Do you seriously not know of the Mongol invasions. Or the fact that the Aztecs literally had ritual wars (called flower wars) with their neighbors?
>>341024
Poverty and disorganization is the natural state of man.
/leftypol/ please leave
>>341024
>Native, domesticatable animals in America:
Llama
>Native, domesticatable animals in Eurasia
Cattle
Sheep
Fowl
Horses
Pigs
Crop farming is a slow and labourious process, with many factors, such as weather, climate, environment, greatly affecting it. Crops could fail for a season and everyone would starve without sufficient stockpiles, which themselves are very liable to looting or burning. Animal domestication, however, can safely produces great amounts of food which is easy to store, and generally not in great danger of catching fire.
This agricultural safety and productivity led to the rapid growth of settlements and cultures in Eurasia, thus expanding technology and civilisation as a whole.
>>345023
And here is another interesting paper on literacy, book and manuscript production from the sixth to 18th century.
http://vkc.library.uu.nl/vkc/seh/research/Lists/Research%20Desk/Attachments/14/Charting%20the%20'Rise%20of%20the%20West'.pdf
>>345031
Funny thing is that medieval warfare was quite ritualized and low risk compared to the rest of the world.
>>345046
I just hate the meme that "everyone lived in peace until the white devil showed up". I thought this was a history board for fuck's sake. I guess you can't expect much from tumblr-level retards.
>>343963
You think Asia and North America don't get cold?
You think intelligence isn't helpful in a hot environment? Megafauna was everywhere, and Africa was hardly temperate. It was undergoing a horrible drought and long term planning would have been useful just like anywhere else.
>>343977
>le humans stopped evolving maymay
>>345060
Europeans weren't that bloodthirsty when fighting each other.
Mongols were probably the worst and Timurlane/timurlame was no pushover either.
>>344980
As I have been arguing, enclosure was due to population growth using up all the land as either farms or hunting grounds for the rich.
The concept that the Black Death dissolved social institutions such as serfdom is about the only compelling thing about this theory because it is hard to wrap one's mind around the ranging effects that would have, but the effects mentioned so far have been convincingly tied to the relative success of Europe.
I'm not sure what you arguing with the shipping of grain from rural regions to more urban northwestern Europe. How does that connect with the success of Europe and the Black Death?
Literacy going up probably had more to do with the growing use of the printing press. The Black Death killed teachers too.
>>341024
Because Europeans domesticated the fucking Aurochs.
>>341024
Current world structures heavily favourite certain nations over others due to certain factors.
Why is everyone talking as if only Europe was effected by plague during this time? Europe wasn't special in this regard so it seems odd to claim that is what propelled Europe to predominance.
>>343963
>A subspecies that evolves in an area of the world that has harsh winters has to plan ahead and be crafty to survive. They form the ability to think beyond the day and be inventive.
That requires intelligence to a point, but do you really think africans are incapable of reasoning to the point of planning ahead?
Most adult humans, regardless of their ancestry, are capable of understanding the point of investing effort in the interest of the future. Masai have for many generations been pastoralists that will not kill their cattle whenever they are hungry; they don't do this out of instinct it's quite reasoned planning for the future that they expend energy to maintain a herd of cattle to provide for their family's needs.
Why claim intelligence must have been the reason for the difference, instead of any other intellectual / personality attribute, like simply ability to delay gratification? Predicting and preparing for a cold season is an IQ test but it doesn't have a great deal of predictive value for most adult humans; they will all be able to reason why it's beneficial to be able to do so even if they are African.
More importantly, your line of reasoning is a "just so" story that may necessarily play to the idea that because there are average differences in tested intelligence, the differences must be caused by differences in genes because it just so happens that europeans tended to occupy colder climates and life in colder climates selects for higher intelligence.
This doesn't provide explanatory power because if it happened that Africans scored higher it is just as easy to concoct an explanation specific to the unique selection pressures faced by Africans in their environment, like disease, wildlife, drought, &c.
Your claim that Europeans tend to occupy colder climates doesn't lead to the conclusion that greater genetically caused intelligence was necessary, it is drawn from it.
>>343905
Experience=/=Intelligence. They lived in that environment for several thousands of years, of course living there is an easier task for natives then if you were dumped there.
>>345094
I am afraid I do not know a lot about enclosure but the wikipedia article on it says it was mainly due to rich landowners and their sheep.
As for the shift in Grain growing, the west focused more on commercial crops, rural industry, trade and production in cities while the primary food crop was increasingly grown elsewhere. The Black Death is not the cause of this because it already happened before but I believe it did accelerate it when the west increasingly used more land for livestock.
As for the literacy and I have been trying to get this across before and I linked a study >>345046
It increased before the printing press. The invention caused an even bigger growth in literacy but it was invented in response to an already growing demand, it didn't create demand but was itself invented/created to meet a demand created by the increase in GDP per capita. Look at the graphs from the study I posted again and you can see this.
>However, after this temporary decline, production
rebounded significantly, and an even sharper increase in output began, resulting in an
almost tenfold increase in the next hundred years (average rate of growth was 2.2
percent over the 1360/69-1460/69 period, whereas it had been 1.8 percent during the
first half of the fourteenth century).
>>345118
dunno, regions that are more consistently warm and wet and densely populated and hosted a larger diversity of host species for pathogens exist than Europe.
>>345118
Well I've been looking at this >>344130 table.
It hit large parts of Eurasia (except for maybe Japan) but the effect differed in the nations we are now discussing. If we are to take the trends it appears the plague set in motion events that allowed North Western Europe to overtake Italy before the spice trade, something which is rather odd.
>>345060
>>345081
>I just hate the meme that "everyone lived in peace until the white devil showed up". I thought this was a history board for fuck's sake. I guess you can't expect much from tumblr-level retards.
You're right that whites aren't the only ones to subjugate other cultures.
But they might still be disproportionately targeted because Mongols and Afghans don't insist everyone owes their development to having been subjugated by them in the past (that, and they're just not relevant anymore but you can't really blame Europeans for maintaining success and consequently relevance). It makes it harder to 'get over' colonialism.
That and there are still cultures do actually despise Mongols and non-whites for their interactions in the past, for ex. Indian Hindus and Muslims.
>>345166
Didn't the paper proposing the Black Death as an explanation for Europe's predominance plainly state how? Did no one actually read the shit being defended?
>>345213
Actually it's a paper aimed at proving the Divergence between Asia and Europe didn't start in 1800 with the industrial revolution but long before that.
The date of Italy overtaking China is around 1300 while North Western Europe finally overtakes Italy around 1500 and then continues growing until the Industrial revolution hits, proving that the industrial revolution was a continuation of several centuries of previous growth rather than a chance event.
The exact reasons for this big divergence between Europe and Asia and the little divergence within Europe are still debated. Black Death, literacy, farming pattern, parliaments, fiscal structure, Protestantism, merchants fleets etc etc. have all been proposed.
>>345152
I've got a few papers to peruse thanks to this thread. I'll do it later. Thanks for whichever you contributed.
As of now, I'm not convinced. As I've said before, I feel like this hypothesis is a sort of neo-Malthusian broken window fallacy held together with little more than correlation.
>>345277
I am afraid I am not familiar with the Malthusian theory in full. All I can say is that from 1350 onward a few European nations showed persistent growth until the Industrial revolution hit. That said, can we all agree on the fact that Europe surpassed China in per capita income before the industrial revolution?
PS, so far most papers posted here were mine.
>>345244
>Actually it's a paper aimed at proving the Divergence between Asia and Europe didn't start in 1800 with the industrial revolution but long before that
Oh, well yeah, I agree with that. Europe had better guns and canons by the time they started exploring the oceans. I doubt it was caused by the Black Death though.
>The date of Italy overtaking China is around 1300
Overtook how? GDP/capita? I think GDP would matter more. The relevance of GDP/capita to Europe's "divergence" has been a point of contention throughout this thread.
>>345312
>That said, can we all agree on the fact that Europe surpassed China in per capita income before the industrial revolution?
Well sure. I'm not questioning the numbers given by the papers and posted in this thread. I'll take those on good faith. I'm questioning GDP/capita leading to Europe surpassing China.
>>345318
True but I propose the reason they started exploring in the first place might have something to do with the rise in income experienced in Europe.
Gunpower weapons are a whole new topic I'd love to talk about and why China didn't develop along similar lines.
As for Italy, I don't have the population numbers at hand right now but I think that combined the two would have a higher GDP even before 1500.
Here is another short article.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/economic-history-1
>>345340
Well the bit I quoted on the labor productivity of the Yangtze Delta and Holland shows labor was more efficient in Holland, at least twice as efficient whereas agriculture showed no difference.
>>344815
>>344816
>>344824
That's why Europe experienced an Industrial revolution in the first place which was the final deathblow.
HOWEVER
It should be noted that the British army of the first opium war was essentially still Napoleonic. So perhaps they could have taken on China earlier militarily, I just wonder if they would have won the other wars in China and if they could have managed to colonize it without the industrial revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War
>>343963
>He thinks the races are subspecies
Pic related is the only currently known subspecies of Homo sapiens besides us, Homo sapiens idaltu
>>341024
>why is most of the world dirt poor?
most of the world is actually average-poor
you can kill yourself now
>>344048
>neanderthals
>subspecies
They're a separate species that is closely related to us.
>inb4 to be a species you must interbreed successfully with each other
Go tell Wolves, Dogs, Coyotes, and other members of Canis that, not to mention Llamas and Camels.
>>344203
>We
Middle Easterners and Indians did.
>>341024
People make this sound like a much bigger mystery than it is. In a nutshell, European history is a bunch of warlords trying to reinvent the Roman Empire.
1. European warlords emulated the extremely ambitious and successful Greek/Roman model.
2. You can be a warlord without having control of a single river valley, floodplain, etc. Natural resources aren't necessarily abundant or scarce compared to everywhere else, they're just better distributed.
3. The rest of it is just a series of catastrophes and a thousand year long arms race pushing technology and competition until the age of sail began and the conflict took to the seas and therefore the rest of the world.
>>345383
i can tell that a guy with his back torwards me is asian due to hte skull shape, of course we are different subspecies. science should stop being hostage of ideology, its 2015.
>>345359
>True but I propose the reason they started exploring in the first place might have something to do with the rise in income experienced in Europe.
The reason they started exploring is because naval technology had finally advanced to the point of making oceanic journeys practical at a time when Christian rulers wanted a means of getting spices without giving money to the Muslim Ottomans.
On the topic of gunpowder weapons, see >>343880.
>>345359
>Well the bit I quoted on the labor productivity of the Yangtze Delta and Holland shows labor was more efficient in Holland, at least twice as efficient whereas agriculture showed no difference.
What year does this estimate you quoted pertain to?
>>345594
Gunpowder is a bit more complicated than that. The fortifications in Europe in China differ greatly too and the cannons that could reduce medieval walls in 1480 in Europe would have little luck against typical Chinese walls. Of course this in itself is a product of Europe's culture.
As for naval tech, you have to remember that the early caravels were hardly efficient and coastal exploration was still the way to go.
And no Christian rulers did not want a means of getting spice without giving money to the Muslim Ottomans they just wanted money and spices. Bypassing the Italians was equally important and funnily enough the Italians cooperated with the Ottomans against the Portuguese when they arrived in India.
>>345603
I believe that one was 1820 or 1500 I'd have to check.
It's important though to realize the Netherlands didn't industrialize until way into the 19th century and was actually quite a bit poorer than it had had been.
>>344490
You're basically describing the Solow growth curve.
>>345655
Is that good or bad?
>>345645
How exactly were Chinese walls superior to European walls? I'm curious. But regardless, the asymmetry of warfare in China is what stagnated their canon/fortification arms race relative to Europe.
And yes, I should have said that Christian leaders wanted to bypass the Ottomans AND any Europeans trading with the Ottomans. The Venecians were building a city of marble off of the mad dosh they were making trading with the Ottomans. That's why the Portuguese were willing to sail half way around the world along the African coast and why Columbus was willing to sail out into the middle of the ocean.
>1820 or 1500
That's a hell of a difference.
>>345713
European walls really max out at around 5 meters thickness with smooth stone on the outside and a mortar stone mix on the inside.
The Chinese didn't really built castles as much as city walls which were fuck huge, the core was stamped earth, rubble and some other shit with smooth stone facing. They relied on what can be called armies of craftsman and peasants to get these done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Wall_of_Nanjing
>Then, he started to build the city wall. It took 21 years to complete, and used 200,000 laborers to move 7 million cubic metres of earth.
Seems like Vauban would be proud.
Anyways the step from going to basic cannon to something that can reliable throw these walls down is simple huge and the internal peace inside China didn't really spur development either.
>Europeans are exceptional in that they are more evil than other races.
>Europeans are exceptional in that they are genetically superior
both bullshit, this right wing versus left wing stuff is getting annoying
Pretty much every civilization in the old world in the 15th century was undergoing a renaissance, Europe was only a little ahead of the curve, not enough to stop them getting pasted by the Ottomans, Barbary pirates and anyone else who had access to similar technology but enough for them to monopolize the oceans when naval technology was developed enough.
An analogy might be the betamax and VHS. Your technology only has to be slightly better for you to dominate the market.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Every#The_Grand_Mughal.27s_fleet
Colonies helped fund further development in Europe to a degree, however India and China are geographically located next to the oceans, China had the potential to cross the Bering strait or colonize the west Indies. The main cause of Europe's success was this slight initial advantage in technology and this gap continued to widen until the Meiji Restoration in Japan.
>Europe's technology was foreign in origin
If India, the Islamic world, Europe and China each generated 1 new piece of technology and it spread to the other civilizations, each civilization would have 1 domestic technology and 3 foreign technologies. This observation is useless.
>Europe had geographic advantages
India, the Islamic world, Europe and China all had major cities and trade centers. In terms of population and urbanization Europe was not exceptional.
However you have western Europe, the Mediterranean with its fabulously wealthy trade and the Islamic world all strongly interconnected while China and India are almost on their own with only a few lengthy trade routes. Of these western Europe emerged as the largest population center.
>>345512
Good, I suppose. If you're reading papers published by economists you'll probably pick up on the basic idea. Basically the poster described capital deepening.
>>345744
>Anyways the step from going to basic cannon to something that can reliable throw these walls down is simple huge and the internal peace inside China didn't really spur development either.
I disagree. China was notorious for going overboard with it's defenses. The Great Wall used to be a point of shame for Chinese until westerners made a big hoopla about it. Had China been divided into warring nation states they would have been forced to use their manpower more judiciously, putting more effort into offense then everything into defense, as it were. Any nation-state putting absurd effort into defense instead of going on the offensive would get outcompeted by it's neighbors.
That's why Europe just had so many castles. They were relatively easy to build fortifications to retreat to while carrying out mobile actions.
>>341235
>Mongolian invasion was a boon to the Muslim world
As others have said, the adoption of Islam by some of the hordes lead to a spread of Islam at the cost of Christians/Jews/Others in the Middle East that had been able to continue practicing their religions. This almost certainly caused a net negative affect for the development of the ME as it contributed to the xenophobia/close mindedness that prevented any post-Mongol Islamic civilization from adapting the same way Europeans did.
>>344390
>Christian encroachment in the Levant
The Crusader states were on the decline by the time the Monols showed up, the Mamluks weren't far from wiping them off the map.
>large Turkish superpowers fighting one another to exhaustion
And they continued to do so afterwards? Mamluks vs. Ottomans, specifically, although the Timurids stepped in as well.
>Mongols helped unite Islam
Not really. Mamluk victories over the Mongols allowed them to consolidate the Levant and the Hijaz afterwards but there was still plenty of Muslim v. Muslim fighting going on.
Seriously, what the fuck are you smoking?
Nobody knows, but maybe it has to do with the stablishment of stable institutions that limited power and allowed government to make credible commitments.
>>345577
>skull shape determines subspecies
Explain why dogs have different skulls from each other, and yet are all Canis lupus familiaris.
>>345965
>As others have said, the adoption of Islam by some of the hordes lead to a spread of Islam at the cost of Christians/Jews/Others in the Middle East that had been able to continue practicing their religions. This almost certainly caused a net negative affect for the development of the ME as it contributed to the xenophobia/close mindedness that prevented any post-Mongol Islamic civilization from adapting the same way Europeans did.
How did Islam spread to the Indonesia?
>>345996
Muslim traders during the 13th-16th centuries set up shop, married locals, some locals converted, some royals converted and some wars happened. What's your point?
>>346017
Just a question, muh brutha.
>>345931
How does that not correspond with what I said?
Are we disagreeing about something?
>>346054
Oh no I wasn't.
I said they had a strong central authority that got replaced once in a while, but comparatively little infighting between local potentates.
Thank god for Christianity and Feudalism.
>>346072
I wonder, do you think that Europe was primed to be divided into nation states instead of one big empire from the very beginning because it has so many relatively short river valleys instead of a few really long ones? Humans seem to have the compulsion to control entire river valleys.
>>346097
Not really, plenty of people succeeded in running empires for a short duration.
What's different is that Europe had no conquerors between Charlemagne and Napoleon. Not a single Christian ruler than I can name ever started a war in the name of conquest. It was always an inheritance issue or the said inheritance having an issue with the inheritor.
Rulers started wars over pieces of land 50 by 50 miles in size because they had some claim on it through their seventh cousin on their mothers uncles side or some shit. Then they would fight for a bit, end the war with a formal treaty and go their own way. Wars seldom ended with a king being killed and his kingdom taken.
Quite a contrast with the rest of Eurasia where one dynasty was replaced by the next big ruler in a violent all out war. England and France fought each other with armies 5000-10000 men strong at certain times and drew up a treaty every decade. Genghis Khan or Timurlane waltzed into what ever piece of land they wanted without a reason with an army several thousand strong and started genociding the shit out of them.
Really I'd say Europeans had a common culture that promoted lots of small scale, relatively low risk warfare as opposed to total war with a bit of genocide thrown in.
>>346136
>Not really, plenty of people succeeded in running empires for a short duration
Duration? I was talking about river valley length, not time. If you start a civilization in a large river valley you feel compelled to conquer the entire thing. If your continent is nothing but many small rivers then you have less of a compulsion.
It's just a thought. I'm not denying that hypothesis that Europe was remained a motley assortment of nation-states both because most royal families were related by blood or always had the option of marrying in to another family and that the papacy played a big role in arbitrating disputes. The Pope probably knew if any one king dominated Europe he may take power from the church. Many small kingdoms made the Pope more influential.
>>341024
The Mongols happened to develop a way of crossing at high speed what was, to others, impassable terrain, and this terrain happened to connect the most developed parts of the world together. They got knocked back a few centuries after the Mongols.
Western Europeans happened to develop a way of crossing at high speed what was, to others, impassable terrain, this terrain happened to connect most of the worlds population together. This just so happened to be just after Western Europe wasn't knocked back by the Mongols, and it just so happened to give Europe two and a half (the Americas, and a half including Australia) free continents to develop without competition.
>>346282
>Eurasian steppes
>impassible
Try again, nigga.
>>341029
fuck off Jared Diamond.
![Taklamakan061[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/huXs4Up.jpg "Taklamakan061[1].jpg")
>>346289
The Mongols crossed the Taklmakan and Gobi dessers, and that unlike the europeans with many thousands of warriors at the same time.
Now it's your time to try again, nigga.
>>348012
The silk road operated just fine without the Mongols ferrying people across a desert that no one had to pass through anyway. There was nothing impassible about Eurasian trade routes.
>>348044
Why don't you try crossing the silk roads today and see how well it goes without the mongols governing them, and i do mean by foot or horse.
![PictureMapRoutes[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/BhkUbl5.jpg "PictureMapRoutes[1].jpg")
>>348044
>>348161
You will NOT stray from these routes, try it out
>>348161
>Why don't you try crossing the silk roads today and see how well it goes without the mongols governing them, and i do mean by foot or horse.
Mongols were part of the reason the Silk Route shitted up. Before and After their Empire.
>>348168
4Before the Mongols' rise, the Old World system consisted of isolated imperial systems.[9] The new Mongol empire amalgamated the once isolated civilizations into a new continental system, and re-established the Silk Road as a dominant method of transportation. The unification of Eurasia under the Mongols greatly diminished the amount of competing tribute gatherers throughout the trade network and assured greater safety and security in travel.[10] During the Pax Mongolica, European merchants like Marco Polo made their way from Europe to China on the well-maintained and well-traveled roads that linked Anatolia to China.
On the Silk Road caravans with Chinese silk; pepper, ginger, cinnamon, and nutmeg came to the West from the Spice Islands via the transcontinental trade routes. Eastern diets were introduced to Europeans as well.[11] Indian muslins, cottons, pearls, and precious stones were sold in Europe, as well as weapons, carpets, and leather goods from Iran.[11] Gunpowder was also introduced to Europe from China. In the opposite direction, Europeans sent silver, fine cloth, horses, linen, and other goods to the near and far East.[11] Increasing trade and commerce meant that the respective nations and societies increased their exposure to new goods and markets, thus increasing the GDP of each nation or society that was involved in the trade system. Μany of the cities participating in the 13th century world trade system grew rapidly in size
>>348172
>Pax Mongolica
gee how long was that one wonders.
>Toluid Civil War
>Mongol balkanization
>Back to shitty silk road travel again.
>>348178
>gee how long was that one wonders.
The pax mongolica lasted longer then a united europe under Napoleon, not to mention that is was bigger and more diverse as well.
>tfw someone already posted the huge article on gdp between Europe and China
>>348164
The Silk Roads were never actually roads, they were common paths but overall there was no official fucking road. Notice how on your map it only lists things you can get and cities, not actual fucking roads.
>>348172
>quoting wikipedia directly
>>345713
>>345744
European castles were never about thickness, it was about quantity and terrain. It's hardly comparable.
>>343880
>gunpowder first
We don't even know the recipe they had, the first recorded one is by Roger Bacon. The only excavated cannon we have dates from the 14th century and many of the accounts of "gunpowder" in ancient china testify more towards a roughly ground serpentine powder, something which bears next to no resemblance to gunpowder save in chemical makeup
Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf1mCiAodl0
The subtle nuances really do make a difference
>>348315
>>tfw someone already posted the huge article on gdp between Europe and China
Where?
>>344130
That's interesting, seen very different tables but not sure of the source.
Might be something for me to read up on.
>>344390
The sacking of Baghdad is easily the single most overrated mongolian deed. It's single long-term effect was the utter elimination of the last line of Caliphs whose connection to Mohammed was broadly recognized as legit across the Sunni muslim world. Even then, despite the brief recovery the caliphate had been having at the time of the mongol conquest, for centuries then the caliph had been made little more than a puppet recluse that would only made himself seen by the local population once a year, leaving provincial warlords (and afterwards, Turkmen) in charge of larger and larger portions of their former dominions.
>the economic center of the Islamic world at the time
Baghdad had long declined from its splendor days, starting with the Fatimids strengthening the sea route to India going through the red sea and continuing with the interminable wars as the Seljuks gradually disappeared outside of Anatolia. It even recovered partial and briefly in the 50 year interregnum as the land route throughout Asia flourished under mongolian patronage, much like other cities such as Herat and Samarkand that had been met with the same fate, though it would end up burning again under Timur.
>the cultural, intellectual center of the Islamic world at the time
The House of Wisdom had long slowed down by then, when it was little more than a library among many around the islamic world. A single city being destroyed does not negate the cultural development of such an extensive cultural region. For comparison, the sacking of Constantinople some 50 years prior, if not as thorough, still resulted in the closing down of the city's so-called university and the burning of it's most important library, and the byzantine world was much, MUCH more centered around its capital. The arts still flourished in the Nicene and Trebizond empires and later even had a golden age all while things only went south for Byzantium starting in the 14th century.
>>348448
(cont.)
If the islamic world suffered cultural and intelectually following the mongol conquest it must be looked further than the destroying of Baghdad. Perhaps the accumulated effect of several learning centers and libraries being destroyed from central Asia to northern Syria, or the policies adopted from the conquerors themselves and if they reshaped things such the state of things left by then by the time of their demise and replacement by local powers killed the dynamism the region had displayed beforehand.
>>348353
I believe Broadberry started in 2000 something with England and later had Indian, Japanese, Dutch, Chinese, Italian and Spanish academics help him to create a world picture.
The Chinese one had to be adjusted because they assumed Early Ming was the height of the Chinese but with some more research they found that the Norther Song was the most prosperous part of Chinese history and incidentally most of the famous Chinese discoveries such as paper money, gunpowder and a load of other shit were made then.
Another thing they discovered is that Japan was on its way to slowly overtake China from the 16th century onward.
As it stands that table is the most current with all the up to date it research.
>>341413
I thought it was widely known the conquistadores for the most part weren't very wealthy, that was kind of the point in the whole "God gold glory" deal
>>343880
also bells, one of the reasons our cannons were so good was because of the practice of bell making
>>349676
If only China had access to Europe's space age bell technology...
>>349743
What?
>>349751
China could have developed bronze canons and expanded the mandate of heaven to encompass the world!
>>349787
alright you're just shitposting
>>349797
Yes. Yes I am.
>>341401
How did you develop this line of thought?
>>341785
Isn't the source of all of these geopolitical advances the result of technology? And the technology can only possibly be created and purchased as the result of a strong economic advantage in Europe?
>>343880
The focus on military power and international trade is clearly justified, however, is it based on the socioeconomics of Europe, and if so, are these conditions unique to the West?
>>349910
A knowledge of history, I would imagine.
>>343905
Does the expertise to survive in a hostile natural environment transfer well to a global theater?
>>343963
>subspecies
i'm already laughing!
>>349962
Europe had no strong economic advantage before the age of sail. The Chinese had everything they could ever want in their own lands and the Ottomans were getting rich off of selling Indian spices to Europe.
Except you're forgetting the part where the people who are dominant now(Western Europeans) were literally tribal savages who were known for living in the forests and fighting each other with unsophisticated weapons for most of history and getting their shit kicked in by Arabs and Turks.
Gunpowder/guns and firearms were invented by the Chinese and artillery rockets were invented by the Indians, they stole these technologies and ran with them.
Industrial Revolution was pretty much all Europe tho. There is some theory about how high IQ genes became more widespread in Britain in the pre-industrial revolution century.
