Europe and the world… sins of the past… what could have we done to avoid our current situation?

[Rippounet]

14 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Had other civilisations found themselves in the same position would they be incentivised to act the same?

Other civilizations were in the same position as Europe before.

Just a quick look at Chinese history should be enough to realize that global imperialism is not a universal.

[Zorral]

Take it from somebody who was there in his lifetime -- the founding of the United States imperium -- and figured it out: “Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire, by Jonathan Katz.  Also, please do not forget that the industrial revolution was financed by SLAVE LABOR, particularly sugar, in which life expectancy for the labor was less than 10 years.

[SeanF]

17 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Indeed, the Mongol invasion is the one undeniable counter-example.

The An Lushan revolt I'm not deeply familiar with, but I finished a recent - and rather big- book on Chinese history like, two days ago, and I just didn't see anything even close to such a death toll. A quick glance at wikipedia tells me the figures here are rather unreliable and controversial (they could reflect a breakdown in the census system rather than a massive death toll).
In fact, the higher death toll seems to come from Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature, a book that is notoriously riddled with inaccuracies, exaggerations, and methodological errors, all in the service of a rather dubious thesis. I definitely wouldn't trust Pinker when it comes to Chinese history; his credentials in the field are basically inexistent.

See, this is where historical perspective should change our views a bit.
I understand that the Abbasid and Ottoman empires would have enslaved between 12 and 15 million people over twelve centuries.
Europeans enslaved over 20 million people in about three centuries.
The figures alone should give one pause.

But that's the thing, they don't. There are plenty of atrocities in humanity's past, but the scale just isn't the same. "Pyramides of heads" may sound like much, until you realize we may be talking about thousands - not millions.

The key difference being that the Europeans seem to be the only ones who developed new motives to commit atrocities in faraway lands, and everywhere at the same time (or close enough).
It's quite ironic that we tend to celebrate the fact as some kind of genius achievement too. It adds a level of cruelty to the entire process.

That everything you just said is wrong.
As I said, life on the eve of the IR was not as hard as you make it to be. Life expectancy wasn't actually 30, the average was about 35. Huge difference, because it was child mortality that brought the average down ; the actual life expectancy on the eve of the IR was considerably higher, around 55 in most places.
In fact, there's a pretty big question as to how you define the "Industrial Revolution." Many of the developments you would ascribe to the IR were not direct consequences of it. Some may have been helped by it (the spread of electricity), others may not (I do believe life expectancy for the working classes went down at the beginning of the IR).
If the IR was about new manufacturing processes, then its main contribution was producing more stuff.  If you think in terms of social progress, that took a bit longer. For instance, life expectancy in Britain only rose dramatically around the end of the 19th century (as I said, the working class only started becoming the middle-class in the early 20th century). And I don't see why the public health measures that brought child mortality down, and thus life expectancy up, should be credited to the IR, would you care to explain how that is supposed to work?

I'd say it's -very- easy to make the case that the IR only became a contributor of social progress once its main effects (exploitation and pollution) had been mitigated by laws, regulations, and social programs.

I think you're just seeing the non-European, and pre-industrial, past through rose-tinted spectacles.  I don't see how it can be open to dispute that the standard of living in industrialised societies is vastly in excess of the standard of living in pre-industrial societies. 

Yes, of course, high rates of infant mortality dragged down average life expectancy figures.  These rates of infant mortality fell because societies could afford better standards of public health, due to the fact that these societies were getting richer.  Better public health costs money.  Education costs money.  Better standards for employees cost money.  Social progress would not have taken place, had these societies remained at the level of income per head they enjoyed in 1800.

JJ Saunders estimates the number of dead, in Timur's wars, at 17 million.  That would have been quite a high proportion of the world's population in the late fourteenth century. The Encyclopedia Britannica estimates the number of dead in the Taiping rebellion at 30 million.  These were mainly people killed with edged and pointed weapons, or by means of starvation.  We can't know for certain how many people became chattel slaves under the Abbasids, Ottomans, Mongols etc. We can know that the numbers would have run into the millions, and this represents a deep well of human misery.  

[SeanF]

16 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Other civilizations were in the same position as Europe before.

Just a quick look at Chinese history should be enough to realize that global imperialism is not a universal.

There was nothing more benign about Chinese imperialism than its European counterparts.  Chinese rulers were quite prepared to resort to genocide and enslavement when it suited them.

[Heartofice]

9 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

Other civilizations were in the same position as Europe before.

Just a quick look at Chinese history should be enough to realize that global imperialism is not a universal.

China banned ships, kind of spoiling its own opportunity to take over the world.

which other civilisations had the same technological advantages as the Europeans and didn’t take them?

[baxus]

Fuck this "Europe" category right off!

There is a huge chunk of Europe that had zero colonies, no slavery, didn't annihilate whole continents worth of indigenous people and all that. Back in 1800s my country had a Constitution that stated that a slave who set foot on our soil becomes a free man (or woman, obviously), while hundred years later black people were still being exhibited in a zoo in one of Europe's capitals.

Not saying people in that part of Europe are some perfect examples of human benevolence, but the shit we did stayed local and paled to insignificance with what the other part of Europe did.

[SeanF]

6 minutes ago, baxus said:

Fuck this "Europe" category right off!

There is a huge chunk of Europe that had zero colonies, no slavery, didn't annihilate whole continents worth of indigenous people and all that. Back in 1800s my country had a Constitution that stated that a slave who set foot on our soil becomes a free man (or woman, obviously), while hundred years later black people were still being exhibited in a zoo in one of Europe's capitals.

Not saying people in that part of Europe are some perfect examples of human benevolence, but the shit we did stayed local and paled to insignificance with what the other part of Europe did.

Which country, out of interest?

[Heartofice]

7 minutes ago, baxus said:

Fuck this "Europe" category right off!

There is a huge chunk of Europe that had zero colonies, no slavery, didn't annihilate whole continents worth of indigenous people and all that. Back in 1800s my country had a Constitution that stated that a slave who set foot on our soil becomes a free man (or woman, obviously), while hundred years later black people were still being exhibited in a zoo in one of Europe's capitals.

Not saying people in that part of Europe are some perfect examples of human benevolence, but the shit we did stayed local and paled to insignificance with what the other part of Europe did.

Which Europeans counties didn’t expand their holdings globally due to moral objections?

[SeanF]

1 hour ago, Zorral said:

Take it from somebody who was there in his lifetime -- the founding of the United States imperium -- and figured it out: “Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire, by Jonathan Katz.  Also, please do not forget that the industrial revolution was financed by SLAVE LABOR, particularly sugar, in which life expectancy for the labor was less than 10 years.

I think that the 18th century sugar colonies in general, and Haiti in particular, must have been like Belsen for most of their inhabitants.  In Haiti, on the eve of its revolution, average life expectancy for a slave on arrival was about three years.

[baxus]

38 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Which Europeans counties didn’t expand their holdings globally due to moral objections?

Who said anything about moral objections? They still didn't do it. Mostly because they were fighting powerful neighbours, or trying to get out from under foreign rule or stuff like that.

[Heartofice]

Just now, baxus said:

Who said anything about moral objections?

Well I am interested in which countries had the ability to exploit areas across the globe due to huge technological imbalances.. but didn’t. 
 

There seems no point talking about countries that didn’t have foreign colonies if they never had the ability to do so. 

[baxus]

41 minutes ago, SeanF said:

Which country, out of interest?

I'm from Serbia, but the same can go for pretty much whole central Europe, Balkans and a pretty big part of Eastern Europe as well.

[Heartofice]

1 minute ago, baxus said:

I'm from Serbia, but the same can go for pretty much whole central Europe, Balkans and a pretty big part of Eastern Europe as well.

How would Serbia have managed to create a global empire, especially if it was part of the Ottoman Empire??

[baxus]

2 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Well I am interested in which countries had the ability to exploit areas across the globe due to huge technological imbalances.. but didn’t. 
 

There seems no point talking about countries that didn’t have foreign colonies if they never had the ability to do so. 

Who said anything about ability? It's just that when someone goes about "Europe doing this and that in a period between XV-XIX century", it need to be said that a pretty big part of Europe was not involved.

For example, people in the Balkans were fighting Ottoman empire or trying to get out of it. They didn't have colonies, didn't go pillaging other civilizations etc. Don't count us in there.

[baxus]

Just now, Heartofice said:

How would Serbia have managed to create a global empire, especially if it was part of the Ottoman Empire??

Are you even reading what I'm writing?

Whatever the reasons were, we took no part in acts of colonial powers that are deemed despicable by today standards. And the same goes for a few other countries.

[Heartofice]

1 minute ago, baxus said:

Who said anything about ability? It's just that when someone goes about "Europe doing this and that in a period between XV-XIX century", it need to be said that a pretty big part of Europe was not involved.

For example, people in the Balkans were fighting Ottoman empire or trying to get out of it. They didn't have colonies, didn't go pillaging other civilizations etc. Don't count us in there.

You were the one mentioning your anti slavery constitution as if that points to some moral superiority.
 

The reason Serbia didn’t get involved in empire and slavery isn’t due to any other reason than they simply didn’t have the ability to do so.

[Rippounet]

1 hour ago, SeanF said:

I think you're just seeing the non-European, and pre-industrial, past through rose-tinted spectacles.

I'm really not. I'm just saying the scale and the intensity of atrocities are something else - they don't differ in nature.
And quite honestly, that's not in dispute (i.e. the historical record is rather clear).
What's in dispute is whether Europeans just happened to be the first to have the means to do this, or whether there was something especially nasty in European ideology that led to this outcome.
Not that the two proposals are totally mutually exclusive (let's not fall into a false dichotomy).

At any rate, the sole example of China should be enough to reconsider the narrative that "Europeans just happened to be the first to have the means." If we're talking about colonies, China obviously had the potential to do that long before Europe, and many other empires had colonies without developing a systematic campaign of oppression and plunder.
But more importantly, this isn't exactly what I'm talking about in the first place...

 

3 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Well I am interested in which countries had the ability to exploit areas across the globe due to huge technological imbalances.. but didn’t.

But that's the thing: why would any country or civilization "exploit areas" in the first place? Most past empires were content with demanding tribute. Sometimes they took over the administration of neighboring cities. But colonial administrations thousands of kms away seems to have been a uniquely European innovation...

Genocide and enslavement did happen, of course. But I don't think anyone can claim they were always the primary tools of imperialism, everywhere. Which is why I'm interested in knowing what exactly were the large-scale atrocities committed before Europe became the dominant power.

1 hour ago, SeanF said:

JJ Saunders estimates the number of dead, in Timur's wars, at 17 million.  That would have been quite a high proportion of the world's population in the late fourteenth century. The Encyclopedia Britannica estimates the number of dead in the Taiping rebellion at 30 million.

Interesting examples, thank you. I'll read about them to know more.

1 hour ago, SeanF said:

I don't see how it can be open to dispute that the standard of living in industrialised societies is vastly in excess of the standard of living in pre-industrial societies.

It's really not.
The question is whether the Industrialisation itself was the cause. For instance:

1 hour ago, SeanF said:

Yes, of course, high rates of infant mortality dragged down average life expectancy figures.  These rates of infant mortality fell because societies could afford better standards of public health, due to the fact that these societies were getting richer.  Better public health costs money.  Education costs money.  Better standards for employees cost money.  Social progress would not have taken place, had these societies remained at the level of income per head they enjoyed in 1800.

The first problem with this narrative is that social progress really took off around the 1870s...
The second problem is that education and health don't always require that much wealth ; relatively poor countries can achieve good outcomes with little means. In fact, for the topic of this exchange (infant mortality in the second half of the 19th century), it seems Nordic countries (Norway and Sweden) already had much better results than the much wealthier Britain. That's because a decent quality of maternal care and decent hygiene are rather cheap.
The third problem is that it's not so easy to know for certain what the rates of infant mortality looked like prior to the industrial revolution ; as I said before, the case has been made that the IR initially brought life expectancy down, and I think it's easy to see how life could be worse for factory workers in the city slums than for peasants in the countryside.
Point here being, it's more of a matter of public policy than of industrialisation. Or, to put it differently, sharing the pie seems to be more important than wanting a bigger one.

OTOH, it's hard to deny that the IR was a source of wealth. But what was the exact source of that wealth? Wasn't it a combination of worker exploitation and unfair trade practices? Would the IR have taken off at all without colonialism?

Of course, the wealth of the IR was such that a minimal amount of wealth redistribution led to significant social progress.
But was that huge wealth a requirement for social progress? I don't think that follows.

[SeanF]

29 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

I'm really not. I'm just saying the scale and the intensity of atrocities are something else - they don't differ in nature.
And quite honestly, that's not in dispute (i.e. the historical record is rather clear).
What's in dispute is whether Europeans just happened to be the first to have the means to do this, or whether there was something especially nasty in European ideology that led to this outcome.
Not that the two proposals are totally mutually exclusive (let's not fall into a false dichotomy).

At any rate, the sole example of China should be enough to reconsider the narrative that "Europeans just happened to be the first to have the means." If we're talking about colonies, China obviously had the potential to do that long before Europe, and many other empires had colonies without developing a systematic campaign of oppression and plunder.
But more importantly, this isn't exactly what I'm talking about in the first place...

 

But that's the thing: why would any country or civilization "exploit areas" in the first place? Most past empires were content with demanding tribute. Sometimes they took over the administration of neighboring cities. But colonial administrations thousands of kms away seems to have been a uniquely European innovation...

Genocide and enslavement did happen, of course. But I don't think anyone can claim they were always the primary tools of imperialism, everywhere. Which is why I'm interested in knowing what exactly were the large-scale atrocities committed before Europe became the dominant power.

Interesting examples, thank you. I'll read about them to know more.

It's really not.
The question is whether the Industrialisation itself was the cause. For instance:

The first problem with this narrative is that social progress really took off around the 1870s...
The second problem is that education and health don't always require that much wealth ; relatively poor countries can achieve good outcomes with little means. In fact, for the topic of this exchange (infant mortality in the second half of the 19th century), it seems Nordic countries (Norway and Sweden) already had much better results than the much wealthier Britain. That's because a decent quality of maternal care and decent hygiene are rather cheap.
The third problem is that it's not so easy to know for certain what the rates of infant mortality looked like prior to the industrial revolution ; as I said before, the case has been made that the IR initially brought life expectancy down, and I think it's easy to see how life could be worse for factory workers in the city slums than for peasants in the countryside.
Point here being, it's more of a matter of public policy than of industrialisation. Or, to put it differently, sharing the pie seems to be more important than wanting a bigger one.

OTOH, it's hard to deny that the IR was a source of wealth. But what was the exact source of that wealth? Wasn't it a combination of worker exploitation and unfair trade practices? Would the IR have taken off at all without colonialism?

Of course, the wealth of the IR was such that a minimal amount of wealth redistribution led to significant social progress.
But was that huge wealth a requirement for social progress? I don't think that follows.

I don't think that the ideology of the conqueror or slaver is terribly important to their victims.   Sure, some some people conquered and enslaved because it was the will of Eternal Heaven;  others because their victims were heretics or infidels;  others because they wanted land for their people;  others because they thought themselves a superior race.  Others, because they were engaged in dynastic disputes, and the lives of the enemy smallfolk were entirely expendable in pursuance of such disputes. 

And, I don't think that (as a proportion of the world's population at that time) anyone has quite matched the great steppe conquerors, or the Qing Dynasty, in terms of killing.

[baxus]

2 hours ago, Heartofice said:

You were the one mentioning your anti slavery constitution as if that points to some moral superiority.
 

The reason Serbia didn’t get involved in empire and slavery isn’t due to any other reason than they simply didn’t have the ability to do so.

As I already said, I'm not claiming that non-colonial European countries/peoples are some shining beacons of morality. No country or people is, despite what some try to paint themselves as. History is a long list of wars and everyone has had blood on their hands at some point in time and for most you don't really have to go that back to find it.

Judging people from centuries ago by todays morality standards is beyond stupid, but if we are doing that then let's judge them for what they actually did, instead of lumping them all together.

And once again, what Serbia had the ability to do or not is irrelevant here. The fact is they didn't do it. To put it as bluntly as I can - you may have at some point in your life been so pissed off that you wanted to kill someone but didn't do it because you didn't have the means. I'd say it would be quite a stretch to call you a murderer based on that. Wouldn't you agree?

[Heartofice]

1 hour ago, Rippounet said:

But that's the thing: why would any country or civilization "exploit areas" in the first place? Most past empires were content with demanding tribute. Sometimes they took over the administration of neighboring cities. But colonial administrations thousands of kms away seems to have been a uniquely European innovation...

Countries always exploit areas, either those they directly control or elsewhere. Even tribute is exploitation, and only exists under the threat of violence, probably based on past violence.
 

I’m not quite sure how else  you are distinguishing between what the Europeans did and other nations empire did, other than in terms of scale? Which empires didn’t violently take over their neighbours? Which ones didn’t engage in some sort of slavery? Which ones didn’t exploit resources?