• sharedburdens [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    No. Water power did, Europe has an absurd number of suitable streams for grain mills allowing less the creation of extensive trade, merchant, and scholar classes. Which led to technological superiority which led to the capacity to roll over other nations (and the presumption that it was the right thing to do). Without that pre-existing wealth all that colonising would not have been possible.

    It was definitely the slavery

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      If it was slavery then why didn’t Africa develop that quickly? They’re the ones who sold the slaves!

      • sharedburdens [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        Because they weren’t the ones working the slaves to death in Caribbean plantations. Have you read any history?

        Also there were plenty of indigenous slaves taken, whole generations worked to death in mines to send silver back to europe

            • barsoap@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              …for centuries if not millennia at quite low ROI and then Europeans came along with fancy ships and the capacity to conquer more fertile places earning quite a bit more dough per slave.

              As said: The primary cause of Europe’s wealth is early technological development, at scale, and in breadth, enabled because lots of food could be produced with comparatively small workforce.

              • Yes, the europeans showed up to profit-maximize the slavery process. That was the technological innovation, the boats helped, but the main part of the equation was translating huge amounts of human suffering into money, and then re-investing it. You’re hyping up Europeans technology up a little too much, chauvinists tend to. Europe was a plague-ridden backwater for centuries before they opted to sacrifice endless humans to Moloch. They “invented” all sorts of science to tell themselves it was the ‘natural order’.

                Based on how you’re responding you do think this is a good thing though and are giving it positive spin.

                • barsoap@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  I’m merely saying how things are, why Europe was in the position it was, why it has the edge it has. You know, material realism.

                  • Yes, and that’s why I point out that it’s silly to say ‘these are both colonial empires’ when one has had two major changes in government since then, and affected far fewer people. Unless you’re trying to be essentialist about Russians as colonizers or something it makes no sense.