Comment by xstartup | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xstartup | Hacker News Reader

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If Poland did perfect industrial processes where did it got the natural resources from if not from rest of Europe which were brought into Europe through imperialism? Becoming an Industrial power is not possible without importing resources.

>> Take Poland, which was one of the major powers of the pre-industrial Europe (around XV-XVII centuries), and which never ventured outside Europe.

It seems to support my claim perfectly. Poland was only able to become a major power because it did not have an excess of those resources, partly because it did not venture outside Europe. It had no option but to polish its industrial strength in order to compete with rest of Europe.

There was literally no incentive for other European countries of that time to become a major industrial power, they were awash with wealth and resources.

Poland was a major player in the pre-industrial era (the period that you referred to in your original comment, I am not saying anything about the industrialization period). It accomplished it without any ventures to Asia or Africa. Your original claim still looks invalid to me.

Polish per capita GDP that the county already lagged behind Western Europe in economic development at the end of the Middle Ages

Polish living standards in the sixteenth century were below those of Italy and The Netherlands but on par with those of England. The author demonstrated that the Polish series began to also lag behind the English values in the seventeenth century due to growth in the latter series. According to a study of GDP made by Wójtowicz and Wójtowicz (2009), people living in Poland enjoyed only around 70 % of the goods and services available to the inhabitants of Western Europe in the sixteenth century. This value declined to around 40 % in the late eighteenth century

source: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11698-016-0154-5

Interesting. Do you have data on the various Germanic states from that period? As far as I know, they've only joined the colonization/exploitation game in the late XIX century, and yet I think they did ok before that?

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