So you are "
unimpressed" with with one of my ten sources.
That really is devastating to my case then, huh? (LoL)
I pointed out that MANY OTHERS were unimpressed as well. Fogel's original contention was that slavery was enormously profitable; Gutman I think is the name of the author who first raised profound objections to his analysis, if you want to start reading the other side; the overall consensus now is that yes, of course, it was profitable (slavers didn't do it out of "motiveless malignancy") but it made only marginally more money than more humanely operated farming. The literature taking off from Fogel's thesis to assert that Western society depended for its development on the allegedly enormous profits from slavery is driven, in my view and the view of many others, principally by a politically-correct "white man's guilt" that feels a need to exaggerate the evils of the West.
You have tried this same tactic with your point about the elite in Mesopotamia. I provided you with Morton Fried and Elman Service's research, and you wantonly disregarded it.
No. I pointed out that nothing in Fried and Service supported your fantasies about a "life of luxury". It does point out that a cohesive elite class is likely to have been forming at an earlier period than previously thought; yeah, so? We are still talking about a "bully boy" class imposing a limited degree of "order", and commandeering control of a lot of the resources, through pervasive violence, in the context of a Stone-Age society improved, but also profoundly destabilized, by an expansion of the food supply. I am sure the warrior elite was well-fed, but they were as lacking as everyone else in other kinds of material goods, and had short life-spans often meeting painful ends.
I have to leave for China on Sunday and I could use this time to take care of other stuff.
Have a good time!
Fallacy: Begging the question.
??? No, this is what is called "experimental method". If you want to know whether some factor (a particular dietary supplement for sheep, say) has some effect (improving the health of the sheep), you compare the results with or without (you need one group of sheep that does, and another that doesn't, eat the stuff). How difficult is this to understand? I compared the US
with and
without the slavers: industrialization was more rapid
without. If your objection is that they were at different times (perhaps slavery is essential to early industrialization, but counterproductive in later stages?) then try a different comparison: Germany had no colonies until very late (and those too small to be of much importance) and never had any involvement in the slave trade-- so it could not possibly have become an industrialized nation on the scale of England, if your thesis were correct.
Without slavery modern industrialism would never
have gotten on its feet in the first place. Ample proof
for this has been already been provided.
No, all you have done is provide the names of expert authors who believe this. You have not presented or defended any of their evidence or reasonings. Look, I'm not working at a university right now, and don't have access to a major library; if you were expecting me to read ten books overnight, it was not going to happen. It was incumbent on you to summarize what evidence and reasonings supported these conclusions, not just say, these are "experts" so their conclusions are unquestionable. There are lots of other experts, you know, and this West-bashing school is not universally agreed with.
Doesn't change anything. The industrial age started in the 18th century. So my main argument remains unaffected.
Technological advance did not start with the steam engine. Improvements in agriculture (better use of legume crops and other innovations) and manufacture (water wheels supplementing animal power) had boosted the prosperity of 12th-13th century Europe far above the Dark Ages, indeed well past the Roman levels; the 14th century was a time of crisis (Barbara Tuchman's
A Distant Mirror is a justly famed, intriguing read) but subsequent centuries continued the trend until Europe could outcompete every society in the world except Islam, which still had the edge on them.
It is your chronological ordering (and standards of comparison) which need to be corrected:
The British Empire actually began with the plantations in Ireland in the 15th century. By this time the British weren't even strong enough to hold their first colonies in the West Indies! Also, the people Spain and Portugal had conquered were a joke, compared to the Ottomans who were peaking between 1483 to 1683.
India and China were not "jokes", although Mexico and Peru to be sure were not on the same level. It is true that Europe could not take on Turkey at that time, which is why they sought global outreach to get around Turkey. But Europe's
ability to span the globe depended on a level of technological achievement which cannot, obviously, be attributed to the African slave trade. The African slave trade at that time was (and had been, for centuries already) entirely dominated by the Muslims (yet somehow this did not spark any industrial revolution in Turkey).
At this point, I would like to make one thing clear: understand that I am not saying the Europeans were some diabolical psychotic villains.
Basically: yes you are. Your delusion that Africa was better off prior to the European incursion is an example.
You need to adjust your sights considerably.
The world in the last century contained TWO WORLD WARS
and a "cold" war that almost ended the history of man.
Yeah, so??? We got past that. There was no inevitability that we would; things can either go in the right or go in the wrong direction, always. That's up to us. Still, where we are now is vastly better than where we were thousands of years ago, and it requires a lot of blindness not to see that.
How was the upper economic elite of Rome .002% ???
A couple thousand, out of ~100 million, like I said. Not difficult math. This compares to 2% of the US.
And even if this figure was right, the current population of the world is over 6 billion. What percent of this population is the upper elite?
Think about it.
The US is 1/20 of that 6 billion, so 2% of the US is 0.1% of the world; but you have to add in the well-off from other developed countries.
The proper comparison here would be: what proportion was the Roman senatorial class as a fraction of
the whole world's population at that time? Just as most of the world, now, is not as well-off as the US, neither was most of the world, then, as well-off as Rome. Rome may have had as much as 1/5 of the world's population, so call the senatorial class 0.0004% of the world-- but again, you would need to add in comparably luxurious elites from China and a few other major states. In general, the change has been about three decimal orders of magnitude.
FYI: The poorest Roman citizens were no better off then the poorest humans in the world today.
That's not correct. The poorest Romans had more food security than the poorest Africans today; in terms of the availability of
other kinds of material goods, the question is more difficult to assess.
Are you seriously claiming that colonialism had no affect on the conquered?
Transportation, communication, and education are not what they should be, but Africans know have awareness of the wider world, not just their villages. Attempts to integrate their societies into large-scale states have been a resounding failure: if wars
between the states have been rare, compared to the chronic wars between tribal units in the pre-colonial period, violence between factions
within the states has in most places remained at a dismaying level. The most horrific of the old cultural practices have largely been abated: hunting members of neighboring peoples for purposes of cannibalism has almost completely ceased (the Pygmies in the Congo are still sometimes threatened with this, but Amin and Bokassa were the last major practicioners); castration of children for export, once a major trade, has ceased; the
kwashiorkor practice of singling out particular "surplus" children for deliberate starvation is now subject to strong social disapproval; witch-hunting and human sacrifice, though still major problems, are not as common as they were; only female genital mutilation is still resistant to efforts to shut it down.
Oh, that's not the kinds of effect you wanted to talk about? Colonialism was a mixed bag; I am not here seeking to downplay the negatives, which I am sure you can give me a long list of, just to correct any notion you may have that Africa was peaceful and prosperous before the eebul white man.
p.s. I didn't find "wars without ends" except for a book on the Iraq War.
Hmmm, I can't find it either. Maybe "Wars without End" was a subtitle and the title was something I don't recall. The closest I could find was
Epic Traditions of Africa, about oral histories from West Africa, rather than Central Africa (I didn't manage to get in to the book, but West African history I think is not as ugly as the Central African story was).
