Agreed, but that guy's comment was so offensive I'm actually laughing for some reason.
Is Europe destined to rule the world?
- Thread starter LNSS
- Start date
Agreed, but that guy's comment was so offensive I'm actually laughing for some reason.
One factor which doesn't seem to have been considered here is the role of Christianity as opposed to other religions. To put it somewhat crudely, Christianity tended to emphasise God's reason, whereas Islam tended to emphasise his will, especially after Al-Ghazali's ideas came to be widely accepted. The net result of this was that Islamic theology tended to breed a certain fatalism: things are as they are because of the inscrutable will of God, and there's no point trying to understand it with your puny human reason. Such a view is obviously not very conducive to innovation or scientific endeavour. Christianity, on the other hand, tended to be much more optimistic about our ability to discover why things happen, and so provided more fertile ground for the development of modern science.
Now, I don't know enough about other cultures' religions and philosophies to know whether the same would hold true of them; but I would say that, whilst the rise of modern science wasn't inevitable anywhere, it was far more likely to begin in Europe than it was in the Islamic world, at least after the 11th century.
Now, I don't know enough about other cultures' religions and philosophies to know whether the same would hold true of them; but I would say that, whilst the rise of modern science wasn't inevitable anywhere, it was far more likely to begin in Europe than it was in the Islamic world, at least after the 11th century.
Is it weird that reading those two words made me think of some body abnormality like hemaroids?
He said that he was pasting an expose he liked, so I presume it wasn't his own words.
Which is why I said 50 years. The Portuguese could have shown up one year earlier or later. But 30-50 years ? it was a window of opportunity where West Europeans had an advantage. An advantage that did not exist a generation earlier and might now have existed a generation later.
To put it another way. The Chinese had an advantage at one point and did not use it to create a global empire. Which resulted in them losing that advantage. It has taken them centuries to get back to that point.
Gotcha. Still, he could have added sentences; and not checking forclines like "negroid" is rather amateurish
Westad
Banned
You're right, they do come from someone else. In fact they seem to come from two /pol/ threads on 4chan.
https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/29189426/
https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/25295656/
Except, interestingly enough, the part about "genetic negroids". That appears to be an addition.
Burton K Wheeler
Moderator
I'm going to be charitable and just assume this was juvenile trolling. You know better.
Kicked for a week.
Burton K Wheeler
Moderator
He got some 'splaining to do...
Critiquing a bad post is perfectly acceptable. When it's this blatantly racist and obnoxious, I think the kind of dogpiling we see in this thread is acceptable. This kind of stupid posting, however, is just destructive to discussion and contributes to making the thread an orgy of vituperation.
There are a lot of good suggestions in this post. About the Indian one, may I bracket that unifying the Indian subcontinent is unnecessary, and might be counter productive?
What the European were doing before the 18th century in India wasn't colonization, it was simple commerce. They built port to facilitate it. The real colonization of India started in the 18th century when the French and Brits started their colonial rivalry on the subcontinent. When the brit kicked the French out after the 7 years war, they controlled the richest part of India, with a lot of allies and they basically couldn't be thrown out at that point (also, it was right at the point where the Mughal Empire was starting it's decline and couldn't resist the Europeans).
The situation is similar for China. 50 years before the Opium war, the situation was still salvageable, but various factors (amongst them a financial crisis in China due to a lack of Gold and an overabundance of silver due to the fact that silver was more valuable in China than in Europe and the commercial deficit of Europe with China) led to China slowly losing it's various advantages.
.......
Europe, on the other hand, was the most miserable place on Earth to live right into the 15th century. Thats why so many people invested in leaving: because, to be frank, being European fucking sucked. Disease, poverty, religious corruption, nobles, constant low-level war, famine, lack of hygiene: Europe needed a New World. Europe needed to leave ...............................................
Your comments speak of the over-crowding .... Over-population ... that inevitably follows the boom-and-bust cycle of climate. After several years of good harvests, you end up with far more surviving children, far more than you can feed in lean years. Those starging children either die at home or emigrate to a less crowded country.
For example, Ireland was crowded before the Potato Famine hit circa 1848. A few Irishmen had already emigrated to Canada and wrote letters home telling their neighbours how much better Canada was. One of my ancestors sailed from Ireland to Quebec City in 1840. He walked straight south and settled land in the Eastern Townships.
After he left Ireland, European farmers suffered several wet summers and poor crop yields. Poor Irish farmers struggled to grow enough potatoes to feed their families. They shifted to mono-culture potato cultivation because potatoes allowed them to grow more calories per acre than any other crop.
When the Potato Blight destroyed the main food stock, there were no alternate food reserves in Ireland or Western Europe.
Millions of Irishmen starved to death. Millions more boarded the hunger ships that carried them to North America.
Similar saw-toothed shifts in agricultural productivity drove Viking, Mongol, etc. migrations.
Europe, on the other hand, was the most miserable place on Earth to live right into the 15th century. Thats why so many people invested in leaving: because, to be frank, being European fucking sucked. Disease, poverty, religious corruption, nobles, constant low-level war, famine, lack of hygiene: Europe needed a New World. Europe needed to leave ...............................................
Your comments speak of the over-crowding .... Over-population ... that inevitably follows the boom-and-bust cycle of climate. After several years of good harvests, you end up with far more surviving children, far more than you can feed in lean years. Those starging children either die at home or emigrate to a less crowded country.
For example, Ireland was crowded before the Potato Famine hit circa 1848. A few Irishmen had already emigrated to Canada and wrote letters home telling their neighbours how much better Canada was. One of my ancestors sailed from Ireland to Quebec City in 1840. He walked straight south and settled land in the Eastern Townships.
After he left Ireland, European farmers suffered several wet summers and poor crop yields. Poor Irish farmers struggled to grow enough potatoes to feed their families. They shifted to mono-culture potato cultivation because potatoes allowed them to grow more calories per acre than any other crop.
When the Potato Blight destroyed the main food stock, there were no alternate food reserves in Ireland or Western Europe.
Millions of Irishmen starved to death. Millions more boarded the hunger ships that carried them to North America.
Similar saw-toothed shifts in agricultural productivity drove Viking, Mongol, etc. migrations.
read up Kenneth pommeranzes the great divergence. The main reason for Europe becoming so rich was the fat that it had easy access to coal deposits and good waterways to use said coal cheaply and effectively.
Geographically it was also a lot closer to the new world, not to mention the europeans had related financial and banking enters at places like Amsterdam, Antwerp or London and these banks provided merchants with the apital they needed through loans to invest in large projects and migration abroad+ black death contributed to the wage increases of European workers and so you had high wages.
You also had high agricultural productivity per land hectacre and easy tech diffusion, as in the ase of the duth use of pumps to utilize less arable land. Not to mention nessesaty also played a role inthe UK's case. The Dutch with ppumps and canals also played a role since their innovations lead to a 40 fold increase in agricultural productivity by the 16th century. Not to mention deforestation lead to reliance on coal in UK and Belgian cases.
Once the UK advanced, the other European nations followed suit and through the diffusion and rivalry and coupled with the new world resources meant European hegemony was liekly. Though hina almost developed the steam engine independently though it was plagued with many more issues. Essentially qing during the Opium wars was roughly the equivalent in power and gdp per capita to Austria Hungary form the same period.
Geographically it was also a lot closer to the new world, not to mention the europeans had related financial and banking enters at places like Amsterdam, Antwerp or London and these banks provided merchants with the apital they needed through loans to invest in large projects and migration abroad+ black death contributed to the wage increases of European workers and so you had high wages.
You also had high agricultural productivity per land hectacre and easy tech diffusion, as in the ase of the duth use of pumps to utilize less arable land. Not to mention nessesaty also played a role inthe UK's case. The Dutch with ppumps and canals also played a role since their innovations lead to a 40 fold increase in agricultural productivity by the 16th century. Not to mention deforestation lead to reliance on coal in UK and Belgian cases.
Once the UK advanced, the other European nations followed suit and through the diffusion and rivalry and coupled with the new world resources meant European hegemony was liekly. Though hina almost developed the steam engine independently though it was plagued with many more issues. Essentially qing during the Opium wars was roughly the equivalent in power and gdp per capita to Austria Hungary form the same period.
...You do realize that technologically, philosophically, and scientifically Europe was behind the Islamic world for the vast majority of the middle ages to the early modern period right?
For that matter, the "deterministic/inscrutable will of god" argument could just as easily be argued against Calvinist Protestants and belief in predetermination, yet they were very active in every aspect of advancement as Catholic powers.
Ultimately, trying to find a reason culture-wise is an exercise in futility. There isn't one. Ideologies do not shape thinking as much as people like to pretend, rather, people tend to shape and use those ideologies as they will for their own reasons.
Europe is not destined to rule the world. It is not even likely, if you start from scratch. Europe's dominance was made as much by geopolitical positives that Europe had during that particular time and era as much as temporary negatives for others, which gradually built and created a period of a few decades where Europe was dominant over most of the world.
Well, the non bolded part is not much better, though instead of blatant racism is subtile racism. It ignores the existence of patronage, clientelism, personal and familial influences etc in Europe and come from the assumption that other cultures have not institutions were intelectual skills are appreciated and are driven only by brute force (unlike Europe, where as we all know things have been always solved by polite and nuanced debates)
As for the OP, I've no fucking idea why europe dominated the world, and never found a convincing explianation. Obviously it was not predestined. However, I think we should try to tackle the question from the premise that Europe has nothing inherently special on herself compared to other places, because it seems to me that that way we are projecting what happened after to a question that adress what happened before. Europe had a set of mundane circumstances. Nor in the positive sense, neither in the negative (the depressing vision of medieval Europe some people in this thread is defending is also an exaggeration, probably as a reaction to othe opposite position)...
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Faeelin
Banned
I seem to notice an awfully long gap between the adoption of Christianity and the rise of this rational, logical world view.