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It's actually a lot simpler, stealing gold works. It's old fashioned but they extracted $45 trillion from India alone, think about how much was taken from Afri

by roboys 7y ago

It's actually a lot simpler, stealing gold works. It's old fashioned but they extracted $45 trillion from India alone, think about how much was taken from Africa and China....also at it's peak opium deals in China accounted for 35% of the UK's GDP (expect similar numbers in the US)... Explanations of western growth that exclude economic history seem suspicious to me, a lot of the true story & criminality is hidden in the numbers. Of the few ways to avoid the Malthusian trap, the West did it by robbing people at gun point.

throw0101a 7y ago
> It's actually a lot simpler, stealing gold works. Except how did the West get into a position of being more powerful than the rest of the world? Around 1600, Western countries, the Ottomans, Mughal-ruled India, and Imperial China weren't too different in development (the non-Euro folks could actually have been considered more developed). By the late-1700s / early-1800s the Europeans were steamrolling over everyone. What changed in those ~150 years? A good book on the topic is Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution by Toby Huff: * https://www.cambridge.org/9780521170529 https://www.cambridge.org/9780521170529 It explores an interesting accidental historical experiment: the telescope was invented in 1608 in the Netherlands, and in the next ~20 years had spread to most of the world's major civilizations. What various cultures did with it (or not) explains why Europe took off. See also The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West by the same author: * https://www.cambridge.org/9781107130210 https://www.cambridge.org/9781107130210