Clearly, you are not familiar with what is happening in this field. This is why I told you to quickly familiarize yourself with CURRENT events.
I am not subject to your ORDERS. As I told you, I do not have regular access to a research library at this time, and such reading as I do will be on topics of my own choosing; a dear friend commends the works of Louise Hay, and that is what I will get around to before your assignments to me.
First you claimed the farming wasn't all that productive in the area.
This claim was refuted.
I made no such claim. On the contrary, I emphasized that the introduction of agriculture vastly improved the food supply, and questioned why you did not consider this in itself evidence that such a thing as permanent improvement in the human condition has occurred.
Then you claimed the elite was composed of the professional fighting class.
This claim was refuted.
The last point that you have, was that the area was politically unstable.
The following quote is specifically referring to the period you were talking about:
"A contextual analysis comparing different regions shows that the Ubaid expansion took place largely through the peaceful spread of an ideology, leading to the formation of numerous new indigenous identities that appropriated and transformed superficial elements of Ubaid material culture into locally distinct expressions.".
[7].
This time I do remember the author and title of the book I commend to you (but do not command you to look up this instant!): Keegan,
War Before Civilization. He points out that palisades and moats are universal features of "towns" as soon as there even ARE towns, and that defense is the evident motive for the existence of towns in the first place. He laments the idyllic romanticism which commonly causes archaeologists to gloss over or outright deny the evidence of pervasive violence which is staring them in the face.
Whatever picture you have of the poor in Summer and Akkad,
it could not have been worse than [19th-century Germany].
Yes it could: the average lifespan in Sumer was ~35 years. Please try to get some realistic concept of ancient times. You have this notion that in the Stone Age, everybody was living like chimpanzees, and then after the Agricultural Revolution, miraculously within a single day they started living like Romans (and you imagine that Romans lived pretty much like modern-day people).
Prove to me how the economic elite of Rome was only "a couple thousand" out of 100 million!
You were defining the "Upper" level as the senatorial class, which you analogized to the 2% of the US which controls 90% of the wealth; for an overall picture of the wealth distribution, it might be more sensible to look at the size of the "Middle" (equestrian) class rather than focusing on the freakishly super-rich, but data on the size of the equestrian class is not nearly so complete. In the Acts of Augustus we get a roster of the old and new senatorial families (decaying patrician families who had been in the Senate "forever", augmented by families being promoted because they had worked their way into the ranks of the super-rich), so yes, we do have good data.
Show me how the figure has shifted at all?
(as if a decimal order is that big of a difference anyway)
A "decimal order of magnitude" would mean "ten times as many now as before" (I would consider that a "big" difference); actually it is more like "three decimal orders of magnitude" which means a thousand times as many rich people (in proportion to the population) as there used to be (the same result holds whether you compare Roman senators, as a fraction of Rome, to US super-rich, as a fraction of US; or Roman senators, as a fraction of the world at the time of Rome, to US super-rich, as a fraction of the world now; or super-rich anywhere in the world, as a fraction of the world, then vs. now).
So the Romans were actually better off then, weren't they?
Comparing the Romans (the richest people in the world, back then) to present-day Africans (the poorest people in the world, now) is silly. Compare the Romans to present-day Americans; or the Africans back then to the Africans now.
But even comparing the Romans (of the lower class) to present-day Africans, it is only when you talk about food supply that the Romans look better. It may seem silly to you that I consider it significant that most Africans have access to radios or pickup trucks (not that most individuals own such things, but in their extended families or village acquaintances somebody will), but this kind of basic difference between modern and ancient times is not trivial. And consider even more basic goods:
I talked about clothing, how it wasn't until they met the Germans that Romans even learned how to make pants. And: in ancient times, the race to make new clothes faster than the old ones wore out was always nip-and-tuck; most people had one piece of outerwear to go over their loincloths, but sometimes not even that. In Proverbs, one of the praises for the "woman of substance" is that she weaves fast enough to be able to sell some surplus, and this was evidently rare (a woman who does that? her price is far above rubies). In Isaiah, the prophet goes naked for a year and a half as a "sign" of upcoming wars, in which (it is taken for granted) a consequence is that most of the losers won't have any clothes. In the Talmud, it is said that seeing a naked person is a shame, not to the naked, but to the one who sees him (a failure of the duty to be charitable). In the Gospels, Jesus says that if someone demands your outerwear (in payment for debt), give him your underwear also (to shame him, as the Talmud says; the reference is to a legal requirement that the creditor at least leave you with a loincloth). This situation, where a fair percentage of the population has not a single stitch of clothing, used to be common in Africa (recently; in a few places, still), but is not anymore (in most of the continent).
When did I ever say it was "universally accepted" ??
Since the beginning I said that this view has only recently
begun to come to the forefront.
I know that it's all the latest fashion to talk about how eebul the Western world is. I expect that this research will be attacked by people taking the extremely opposite point of view, and then there will be a lot of back and forth, and eventually a consensus will settle down that there is some truth to it but not nearly as much as the original proponents claimed. Isn't that the way these things go? So, I don't consider "the latest rage" to have some authoritative status. The thesis that James Watt could not have invented the steam engine except for the sugar plantations in Jamaica just strikes me as inherently silly, and inconsistent with the larger patterns.
For example, I bet you didn't even know there were 30 million slaves in the world today. And I am talking about actual slaves.
Not the functional bondage most of the world's population is tied to.
Don't you know that in 13th century Europe well over 90% of the population was formally owned (not just "in functional bondage") by their landlords? Yes, it is tragic that 0.5% of the world's population is in slavery, but are you trying to pretend that this is not an improvement over most of history?
[BobX: India and China were not "jokes"]
Did I say they were? I said the people Spain and Portugal conquered in the first wave of European colonization were a joke
India and China ARE the people Portugal bested in the first wave.
Did Spain and Portugal conquer India and China?
Portugal was not interested in taking the entirety of India and China; the manpower requirements for such an occupation are quite large (ask the Brits). Trading bases were profitable, occupation did not look so; they wanted to grab bits of territory from India and China, and showed that they could do so at will.
Spain had a treaty with Portugal that they would go west, not east. They took on Mexico and Peru, which I acknowledge were second-tier powers, but not entirely "jokes" either. Your claim was that Europe didn't get anywhere until after they had conquered the absolute weakest peoples (North America, Africa), when actually those were left to last.
Did they conquer the Ottomans?
Aren't you paying any attention to anything I say? "It is true that Europe could not take on Turkey at that time, which is why they sought global outreach to get around Turkey." They did, however, decisively check Turkey's expansion, even if reversing that would not be possible for a while.
Dude, when did I say their ability to get around the globe depended on the slave trade??? Why are you putting words in my mouth?
You started off claiming:
"When colonialism started, Europe was still a backwater compared to the actual centers of cultural and technological power in the world. Colonialism began (in the 14th century) as a series of bottom-feeding raids on the most backward parts of the world (to fuel the struggles within the continent)... And it isn't like it took much effort to "conquer" them. North America, for example, was basically depopulated by small pox. It was after this run-amok bottom feeding that Europe shot ahead"
On the contrary, colonialism only started because Europe had
already shot ahead of every civilization in the world except Islam.
It is their ability to conquer the world later that did rest on the Atlantic Slave Trade, colonies and other exploitative factors such as atrocities on their own domestic populations once the industrial age got kick started.
Europe conquered the Americas, the islands, and chunks of Asia
before all that. The conquest of Africa, I will grant you, depended crucially on the destabilization caused by major expansion of the slave trade.
Secondly, how can you claim that we "gotten past that"?
Its only 2010!
The Berlin Wall fell only 20 years ago! How many wars have
been waged since then?
A trivial number, really; in any 20-year period you choose to name in prior history, nearly
every nation would have experienced at least one war with its neighbors and/or high-death-toll internal upheaval. Go ahead and list the nations that have experienced such things: then list all the nations that haven't. Modern communications give us a distorted picture: in medieval times, if the shah of Persia was violently overthrown, Egypt wouldn't hear about it for a long time, and then only as a distant rumor, and England never would; and the chief of Bornu slaughtering the inhabitants of Baguirmi wouldn't get heard about anywhere.
And how can you claim there will be no major wars in this century?
Don't you pay any attention to anything I say? How many times have I repeated, "things can either go in the right or go in the wrong direction, always. That's up to us."? I make no claims about the future.
What world are you living in man?
It's called "Earth". You should check it out. It's got its good points and its bad points, like anyplace, but I'm content with it.
Don't play that card here, because I already made it clear that this isn't
about bashing the West, as anyone would have done the same if they
were in the West's position.
It is indeed "bashing" the West, both to pretend that the West is responsible for all kinds of ills which pre-dated the West's involvement, and to pretend that Europe was still in the Dark Ages when by some dumb luck they managed to conquer the world.
