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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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chapotraphouse
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The problem with libs is that they beleve ideas make history. Once you put yourself in that mindset the chauvinism becomes more reasonable.
The west is the richest so they have the best ideas. Since the liberal idea set is self evidently the best the other countries are backward and their idea sets should be replaced.
In reality the reason the west has been richer for the last 3-4 hundred out of 10-14k years of agriculture has les to do with ideas or western culture and more to do with geografic and demografic realities, that are too comlicated for this post. So the libs are wrong.
It also has to do with those conditions you mention allowing for the development of modern capitalism, the military and technology advantages (in some important instances like military and navigation) and the fact that the capitalist mode of production once it starting developing had an advantage over others and incentivized aggressive imperialist expansion.
A fantastic book related to this is Robert Brenner's Merchants and Revolution
I havent read that book. But i know brenner is a good economic historian and have recommended some of his other books in here before so thanks for the recommendation. I will get to it once i have some free time.
Eestern military technology only got ahead of the rest of the world in the mid ninteenth century. So it does not seen like a reason. Naderan armies for example are comparable in logistics and volume of artillery fire to napoleonic ones. The military argument is valid only in america and australia. And even then the role of germs in creating a demographic gradient seems to have been more important. We also know of cases like yermak were his oponents had the same military technology but there is a clear demographic gradient.
I disagree that imperialist expansion is a feuture of capitalim. Instead i thik imperial expansion becomes viable once the elites in a given society face crowding. This should appliy to feudalistic, pastoralist or mercantile societies. We could argue that highly urban mercantile societies have proportionally more elites than say more rural ones. But this may not be neccesarily the case when comparing with societies with pastoralist economies.
0The role of imperialism is to prolong or/and delay the cannibalistic phase. The discovery of america allowed europeans time to avoid demographic collapse. Even then by the early 19th century england was per capita the poorest it had been at any other point in history. Thats a sure sing that it was under enormous material contradictions.
I as for pre industrial capitalism. It applies to many societies with an agrarian base at diferent points in time many of these regions likley had larger urban fractions than all but the most urbanised regions of early modern europe. In this part i have to stress the postan thesis, that labor and class relationships (in this case wage labor and proletarization) are a result of productive finctions wich in any pre industrial setting are demoraphically driven(and to some extent affected by artificial selection on plant and animal domesticates). And not the other way around as brenner states.