You’re backwards. Because of slavery land was able to be organized into large plantations.
I never established causation; it is right looking at it from both perspectives.
Just because the empicism arose out of the Scholastic environment of contemporary Europe does not mean that it would have only arose out of those conditions.
Just because there is correlation between scientific stagnation, and Caesaro-Papism does not mean that there was scientific stagnations because of Caesaro-Papism, we simply cannot establish that from historical analysis.There was a large amount of scientific progress under a powerful French state showing that if there is such causation, it is mild, and dependent on the individual state.
It wouldn’t have had to arise out of scholasticism per se, of course. But there are strong reasons to believe persistent progress toward truth requires intellectual independence from the central state and political fragmentation within cultural unity, which permits intellectuals to escape from persecution and re-establish themselves elsewhere. Both of these prerequisites were practically unique to Catholic west, and both were outcomes of the bizarre historical accident of the Catholic Church.
In the Afterword of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond tells about how 15th century China
“sent treasure fleets, each consisting of hundreds of ships up to 400 feet long and with total crews of up to 28,000, across the Indian Ocean as far as the east coast of Africa decades before Columbus’s three puny ships crossed the narrow Atlantic Ocean to the Americas’ east coast.”
This Chinese lead in exploration was ultimately squandered, however. Why? As Diamond explains,
“Seven of those fleets sailed from China between A.D. 1405 and 1433. They were then suspended as a result of a typical aberration of local politics that could happen anywhere in the world: a power struggle between two factions at the Chinese court (the eunuchs and their opponents). The former faction had been identified with sending and captaining the fleets. Hence when the latter faction gained the upper hand in a power struggle, it stopped sending fleets, eventually dismantled the shipyards and forbade oceangoing shipping.”
He talks about how similar local political disturbances also happen in Europe, but…
“…in China there was a difference, because the entire region was politically unified. One decision stopped fleets over the whole of China. That one temporary decision became irreversible, because no shipyards remained to turn out ships that would prove the folly of that temporary decision, and to serve as a focus for rebuilding other shipyards.”
Diamond goes on to characterize the ultimate failure of promising Chinese head starts in other exploratory, scientific, and technological endeavors as stemming from the same basic problem.
“These consequences of Europe’s disunity stand in sharp contrast to those of China’s unity. From time to time the Chinese court decided to halt other activities besides overseas navigation: it abandoned development of an elaborate water-driven spinning machine, stepped back from the verge of an industrial revolution in the 14th century, demolished or virtually abolished mechanical clocks after leading the world in clock construction, and retreated from mechanical devices and technology in general after the late 15th century.”
If you were a Chinese genius, and your ideas fell out of favor in the imperial court, where could you go for your ideas to bear fruit, when almost the entire Chinese cultural world was under the same unified state? Nowhere. But the intellectual history of Europe is replete with stories of geniuses hopping from one competing kingdom or principality to another when things got too hot for them. The political fragmentation within cultural unity that made this possible was the product of the Catholic Church’s checks on the local states and its culturally unifying aspects.
Of course with such theories, we are never dealing with apodictic certainty. But there is a high degree theoretical plausibility and empirical evidence supporting this view of history.
Individuals having marginally more freedom and respect for private property in the West, in the past especially in the USA individuals exercised a lot more freedom, produced the Industrial Revolution and all the goodness that sprung from that. As governments consume individual freedom and lose respect for private property rights you see a slowing of the rate of progress of the West relative to the rest of the world. As individual freedom and respect for private property expand in East Asia, South America and the Pacific Rim, you will see these societies develop faster relative to the Western world.
But why couldn’t the landowners simply continue with the practice of forced labor on their lands like they did in the Roman and early medieval times?
There were also more prosperous (at the time) Islamic countries that didn’t abandon slavery until what, 19th century?
It certainly didn’t happened overnight but I don’t think there were any slave workers left in Europe by the 12th century (except maybe the port cities that used to trade with other places).
The Black Death certainly had a dramatic effect on feudalism, which was essentially a continuation of the Roman latifundia.
I don’t see how this is relevant.
There was no economic need for slavery in the West after Rome, the agricultural reforms around the time of Caesar ensured that the latifundia had to employ Roman plebians rather than slaves, and this economic shift drastically reduced the economic utility of slavery.
That’s a good question. It is basically the way White people think and henceforce act. One important key characteristic is the readiness to accept responsibility for once own fate and to plan and act accordingly. I think that this had the strongest influence on the advancement of the Western nations. Other characteristics are the ability to solve problems creatively. The respect for higher law. The mental capability to plan ahead, to think objectively and many more.
Shall I elaborate a bit on this issue?!
Please do elaborate.
Also, do you feel that non-whites don’t plan or accept responsibility?
Low IQ people have shorter time horizons and are more impulsive. If your society has a bulge in the IQ curve that’s left of center, it’s going to be a mess. A ‘white’ example of this is Britain, where most of the white population will be illiterate and living in lean-to’s in about four generations.
Culture shapes breeding patterns, and after two generations of militantly egalitarian-welfare state culture, Britain’s chickens are coming home to roost.
I buy arguments about IQ more than blanket arguments about skin tone. Certainly the Japanese can keep pace with any caucasian group I have seen in IQ studies. You are definitely onto something with the culture argument IMO.
People here actually take IQ tests seriously? IQ is a fictitious standard thats criteria is based off that of the opinions of a small set of physiologists. The standard however usually never reflects the skills currently demanded by the free market. IQ also does not test true competency and cannot measure “Real Performance” of any one individual. It sets a negative connotation against individuals with a more kinetic thinking process as those individuals who are often far more competent in various practical things are given the appearance that they are less competent, which the opposite is true.
IQ also fosters a culture that believes all people should think, understand, and comprehend in exactly the same way as the authors of the IQ test. It creates the immoral foundation for fictitious mental disorders which are nothing more then behavioral traits. A comparison would be, calling all redheaded children retarded.
If these guys who actually made IQ tests were truly competent or knowledgeable they wouldn’t be making IQ tests at all, instead they would be employed in the open market making money rather than taking grant money working in a state run university somewhere. So again, we are back on the topic of praxeology. IQ tests pre-suppose what society deems valuable as a skill trait and dis-regards what the free market considers valuable as skill traits. It’s an additional reason why public education is a failure; governments make these fictitious standards which normal people tend to be unable to stand up to, regardless of the individual’s competency.
If you really want to read up about real human competency I encourage you reading the following book. Highly valuable to managers. I don’t know what Thomas Gilbert’s political views are but at least in education and training he’s hit the nail on the head.
Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance
By Thomas Gilbert
Again, slavery was gone before the Black Death.
Latifundia existed in Italy and Spain, it has little to do with the rest of Europe. And ‘feudalism’ is a misnomer anyway.
You named “prosperity” as the reason.
In any case, it should be obvious that slavery, like any severe restriction on free market exchanges, should slow economic growth.
Well, I suppose that proves it once and for all (in a scientific way) - I always suspected the Japanese were really White. I think there are scientific studies explaining that they look different because of certain optical illusions caused by the interplay of volcanoes and the sea in the Japanese islands.
Yes but it seems that Lam’s been reading a couple of marxists thinkers and now he’s sharing his newfound knowledge about the relationship between material production forces and history.
Wrong. G intelligence is very real and can be captured and measured in IQ tests. Social dysfunction correlates very strongly with low intelligence.
Actually, there used to be a lot bigger market for standardized testing before employers started getting hit with ‘disparate impact’ lawsuits. It’s a lot cheaper for companies just to sit a bunch of applicants down in a room and test for the IQ/skill set they need for a particular slot than to jump through all the Title VII-mandated hoops.
Is it the marxist idea? I remember reading about the purely economic justification of the end of slavery or the rise of manufacturing in England and Northern Europe.
slavery is good for the special interest slave owner and bad for the typical consumer (and the slave obviously) in any society.
abolishing slavery on economic grounds would never have been a bad idea.
Its not bad for the typical consumer, slavery can support a large agricultural sector, most of Manchester’s textile mills were supplied by slave-picked cotton, but it is bad for the average worker, and contributed to the social undoing of the Roman republic.
wrong. your mentioning manchester is a non-sequitur.
having a slave deprives the economy of a productive profit seeking member, one who is incentivised, one who can entrepreneurialise. the turning of a free man into a slave necessarily reduces the extent of the market. it is like outright banning trade with a foreign country and looting them pirate style every few years. you would do much better to be at peace and free trade with them. you make a mercantile mistake if you think otherwise.