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Comment by vFunct | Hacker News Reader

Yah the Industrial Revolution wasn't a direct cause of any war. There are zero wars that are a result of economic efficiency. And, no, colonialism isn't economic efficiency. Economic efficiency is a very specific thing. It doesn't mean "whatever unfair thing I don't like".

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Really? None of the British invasions of the African interior would have been possible without industrialized. "We've got the Maxim gun and they've..." etc. People died, societies were conquered -- you might not consider those to qualify as wars, but the people conquered certainly did.

Warfare exists independently of economic efficiency. Colonialism would have happened regardless of technological advancement.

This is completely false. Colonialism depended on an incredible technological and economic gap between the colonizers and the colonized. Without that gap, colonialism would not have happened -- it's as simple as that.

I am not convinced that's true. Rome colonized vast swathes of the world long before the industrial revolution, without an incredible technological gap between them and the regions they conquered. It is not hard to imagine that a similar thing could have occurred with the European nations which colonized other parts of the world later on. Having a massive technology edge certainly helped a great deal, but I think that it was not necessarily required.

That is an impossible point to argue. What we can say is that historically they have been linked. The Danish slave trade was, as an example, fueled by weapon technology exports to African warlords in exchange for enslaving the population they defeated.

As the story goes, no Dane set foot in the african interior. We instead assisted the already warring factions with technology allowing them to subject more people to their war.

I think it's hard to envision how any of this could have happened without those wars.

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