All of my modern education left me with the idea that we, like postit mentions, had squeezed every colonial nation for everything it was worth and left nothing but husks; producing little to nothing of value ourselves. In actual fact, with the exception of British India in the 1700/1800s, the revenue made from colonies was a fraction of a percentage of Britain's GDP. The same can be said of much of Europe.
Europeans became and stayed wealthy by producing goods internally and trading between themselves, and England particularly by the invention of steam power, mechanised factories, improved tooling, and better iron and chemical processes. It's difficult to fathom in the modern era such a technological leap.
> Indian cotton textiles, mainly those from Bengal, continued to maintain a competitive advantage up until the 19th century. In order to compete with Indian goods, British merchants invested in labour-saving technical advancements, while the government implemented protectionist policies such as bans and tariffs to restrict Indian imports.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_manufacture_during_the...
You could have been the most scientifically advanced culture in the world for centuries (see: 8th - 14th century Islamic world), yet missed out on being so for a few key inventions and lost most of the benefit.
That scene was during the Dutch Golden Age, in the era of the Dutch East India Company ("The prosperity gained from this was accompanied by horrors against the local population. For example, in 1621, Jan Pieterszoon Coen had almost all the inhabitants of the Banda Islands massacred." quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Golden_Age), and Dutch involvement in the slave trade ("It is estimated that more than 550,000 people were brought to America in slavery by Dutch ships" and "Asian slaves were also traded extensively. The slave was indispensable in the economy of the Dutch colonial empire in the Golden Age as a labor force; in the second half of the seventeenth century, half of the inhabitants of Batavia were unfree", ibid).
Certainly a good fraction of Dutch power came from "exploiting and pillaging colonies" and slavery.
I therefore find it odd that the text doesn't mention those components of European wealth. Don't you?
While your point might be valid, it's rather irrelevant to the author's thesis, which specifically concerns "The Great Enrichment" of the 18th century, with no mention of why Portugal, for example, was able to conquer Goa in 1510 and Malacca the next year.
This is a false premise. European powers didn't show up with massive armies and overpower regions until very late (19th century). Cortez didn't show up and just win with his guns; he joined a Native American civil war.
https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2r3svv/myths_of_...
See a more general critique of this kind of observation here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6meq1k/a_det...
Citation needed, some evidence to back up such a grand claim would be good. The article doesn't show any data to substantiate such an extraordinary claim. You also don't define who exactly you mean when you say "European powers".
Never before has any king or leader conquered somebody else and pillaged it.
What an amazing invention these Europeans made. Somebody should have told that idea to Ottoman and Persian Empires.
Really unfair to keep these amazing ideas to themselves.
Otherwise, you're just warring with your neighbors (does anyone say the Norse colonized the Saxon land of England? Did the Normans colonize France?)
So the question remains: How did Europe quickly go from inferior to their neighbors in the ~1200s to colonizing the world by the 1700s?
Colonization as we know it is more than just conquest and pillaging and setting up a loyalist government (did Napoleon colonize all of Europe? Was Hitler a colonizer?), its a reorganization of the state into an economic tool of the Colonizer country.
There was no colonization or exploitations by the Mongol state that lasted after the figurehead died, while the European colonization not only lasted for centuries, it was reinforced generation after generation with continuing military force and by economic systems designed to basically transform the entire colony and all its people into an economic machine for the host state.
Also, the idea that Europe was constantly at war and other places weren't is very Euro-centric, and I don't blame you because our schools teach ridiculous minutiae of centuries old European politics while not even touching a single iota of say Chinese history or Indian history or African history, so to us, we literally don't know about those regions' and civilizations' millennia's of wars.
People had to store food for winter. Wintertime could be spend on other things than farming, e.g. science.
> How did Europe quickly go from inferior to their neighbors in the ~1200s to colonizing the world by the 1700s
This is the question that needs to be answered. Guns, germs and steel attempts it
Colonization started more than 200 years earlier. I'm deeply suspicious of these theories seeking to unify an explanation of the development of centuries, even more so if the ideology used to explain an era is coincidentally the dominating one today. Just to point out two hugely important factors that have nothing to do with free market competition:
- Europe is geographically close to the Americas compared to the Middle East and East Asia.
- The introduction of New World crops like potato massively increased agricultural yields.
Basically, 14th and 15th century Europe was when it started pulling away from the rest of the world economically and technically. At the time, other parts of the world would have rivaled it in terms of technology, science, philosophy, etc. For example Chinese, Japanese, Arab cultures were relatively advanced and arguably a lot more sophisticated at the time. That started changing around that time slowly bur surely. It's not so much that they declined but that they did not keep up with the pace of invention and development and were slow to adapt. By the time the British Empire reached its peak, the difference was huge. After that the gap started narrowing as the rest of the world caught up and educated itself.
The question that is being asked is: what caused the change in those 150-200 years?