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Sorry, but this is bull. First: the West was a decidedly very un-free place for the vast majority of its history, certainly during the Middle Ages millenium. To

Sorry, but this is bull. First: the West was a decidedly very un-free place for the vast majority of its history, certainly during the Middle Ages millenium. To be fair, most places in the world were like this until the advent of Liberalism (in the West), though we also know today that there were places which were anarchic/democratic (e.g. Native American tribes) at a time when 98% of the population of Europe was at the mercy of the whims and arbitrary cruelty of his/her local nobleman. Second: Liberalism only began in the 1700s, over two centuries after European colonisation of the world began, so it's very strange to attribute that to "notions of rights and freedoms".

WalterBright 4y ago
After the plague, Europe developed a thriving middle class of merchants, etc., which formed the basis for free market rights. The Magna Carta (1215) was the first big step towards rights. Read the book. It's a nice counterpoint to currently popular theory. Native American tribes were in the stone age, and did not have any consistent notion of human rights that I've read. Keep in mind that also very little is known about the pre-Columbian tribes, as no records were kept (yes I know the Maya had writing, and hence we do know a lot more about them).