I’ve recently read"The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World" and want to hear what all of you think the answer is, because I feel like the book was missing something in its thesis and I am not very sure what that is.
I’ve recently read"The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World" and want to hear what all of you think the answer is, because I feel like the book was missing something in its thesis and I am not very sure what that is.
Europe had a host of material conditions that led it to this position. It is relatively resource poor, and was constantly strapped for hard currency because the trade routes with the rest of the known world were mostly one way: Chinese people didn’t want a wool shirt from England, but English lords wanted silk and spices and porcelain.
This led to robust and relatively stable networks of credit that allowed nobles to engage in increasingly sophisticated and expensive versions of war and exploitation because they had to in order to keep up with their neighbor, who was trying to do the same thing. Because they were always in debt they had to keep doing more expensive things to secure more resources to pay back creditors, and build institutions to manage their money and regulate finance to keep everything from collapsing.
Eventually some landlords on an island found themselves in a new social relation to their tenants, where it was in their best interest to let them make their own living somewhere else instead of farming, and charging rent instead of feudal dues. This put everyone else on the same track or they risked being priced out of their lands and titles by a new class using a new form of socialized labor.
Essentially Europeans had to compensate for their economic disadvantages in ways that drove them to invent systems that created more productive capacity extremely quickly. I got most of this from The Origin of Capitalism, Graeber’s book on Debt, The Verge and Hell on Earth. But that’s my elevator pitch when I talk to people about this.
Edit: Since you read the Verge I’ll just add, I think it’s missing class analysis, it is looking at a set of economic structures and observing that they tend in a direction without tying it to social relations of production. I heartily recommend Wood’s The Origin of Capitalism on that point specifically.
don’t they have good agricultural land?
I mean compared to some places, sure. But agricultural products aren’t gonna buy you a fancy ivory cane from a merchant who sailed here from Istanbul with exotic wares. They want something they can get valuable goods with, not grain. The Arab traders in Istanbul can get grain from the next village. You need something they want, or precious metals if you don’t have anything else.
Which isn’t to say you can’t build a good population off of good land, it’s just that “a nice place to live” isn’t necessarily “a rich place in international trade”.
true, but wouldn’t good agricultural land mean more people can live in urban centers?
It can help, but I would argue that cities don’t cause this sort of change on their own. After all, many of the largest most dense cities in the world were in India, China and Central Asia/North Africa for a lot of the time that Europe took off.
That did happen eventually but for the pre mercantile period we’re talking about it’s either due to being a frontier colony for the romans or afterward quite decentralized in power from a regional perspective. Less central control meant smaller scale public works and lesser development of urban centres and the pre existing ones were beginning to fall to shambles due to lack of maintenance from a building and infrastructure perspective and disease from a human perspective leading to urban centres being generally abandoned fornthe countryside. Urban life in Rome and similar cities was pretty ass and without a strong central government making sure slaves kept the food coming in and maintaining the structure necessary to keep an urban area going, it was basically leave or die. This led to central and western Europe having a more disperse population with less centralized control and greater regional power than before. Urban centres weren’t really built by the romans in Northern central and wesrern Europe and in the middle ages there wasn’t really much material reason to try to build new ones of equal scale and power dynamics were often a bit too chaotic to do so.
Thanks for the bibliography, I’ll check out the rest of the stuff in there.
A theme that keeps seeming to come up is luxury goods. Do you think it would be fair to say Europe is rich in useful goods (iron, wood) and poor in everything else? If Europe was truly that poor it wouldn’t be able to actually conquer anyone. Unless I’m mistaken on how poor is meant.
Is debt a good first Graeber? I really should read him soon. He keeps coming up.
Well in the context of international trade it was poor. Iron is all over the place, trees are pretty common. Europe had nothing other places couldn’t get for themselves, and a strong incentive to develop a method for getting things it wanted by a means other than exchanging precious metals for them.
I think Debt is the first of his books I read, I think it’s a good one, approachable and also concrete. Would recommend.
So the shipbuilding was purely an incentive structure thing?
As for iron, it varies so much in what a particular deposit is good for… I should have specified that it’s actually good iron that doesn’t need the katana treatment to make a solid sword. Unless that’s a myth and I’m dumb. The point of this post was to learn lol.
What’s required to produce those things at a scale that matters is a transformation of social relations that frees up a bunch of people and forces them to do new, alienating work. It’s not enough to have good techniques, you need to fill a nasty city with people who have to be there using them to make a hundred new ships a year.
As with your katana example, technology was not unique to Europe. Many of the things they ended up using to dominate the world came from China, the Arab world, etc. But they had incentives to escalate the use of expensive technology and a social base that was suddenly uprooted by a new form of market relations that killed the previous ways people met their needs.
Economies are, at their core, a social phenomenon, not a technological or resource system. So I wouldn’t discount technology and such as contributors but I don’t think they are the main cause of the transformation Europe experienced.
THANK YOU.
you made so much stuff click with that explanation. Genuinely good at teaching, you are,
That means a lot. Thanks. I’m glad it made sense.