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.
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.