I’ve recently read"The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World" and want to hear what all of you think the answer is, because I feel like the book was missing something in its thesis and I am not very sure what that is.
I’ve recently read"The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World" and want to hear what all of you think the answer is, because I feel like the book was missing something in its thesis and I am not very sure what that is.
Why did Europe come to dominate sea trade?
Mediterranean to start with. It’s huge and relatively calm to sail on, so lotsa trade, meaning lots of practice (and profit) in improving those trading ships. Rome took this to new (horrific) heights; mass (slave) produced, standardised pottery from North Africa can be found across the entire empire, from Jerusalem to London. Rome’s power (and wealth) was built on this slave labour (both in factories and in villas and in boats).
Rome’s collapse slowed the marketization and decreased the scale, but on the whole by this point, such methods of transport and trade had reached the northern coast of Europe, which has a similarly large, but less calm sea. Traders here needed more navigatory techniques, and of course traders going all the way around Iberia, the sea route connecting these two seas, requires naval expertise.
Europe’s polities are tiny and constantly fighting, in need of cash to pay armies (increasingly, mercenary armies). Merchants are hence supported, sponsered, etc. From here, see my points about the clock and navigatory technology above.
that all makes sense, but why did this “warring states funded by seafaring mercantilism and finance” dynamic not develop to the same degree in north africa or the levant, which were also in rome’s footprint?
was it a lack of good trees for building long-distance ships? was it that europe just has more coastline? was it the mountains of europe making it easier for there to be multiple states that never conquer each other?
the Ottomans conquered it while european capitalism was in vitro. they’d made a classic centralized empire, which was much better than the europeans & southern medd at the time (though the Mamluks were fairly sophisticated, they just lost the wars).
i’d argue that a centralized imperial system was more sensible, stable, and successful (until the 1700s-1800s) than the increasing role of burghers and capital in the european systems, unless you had the foresight to know the outrageous failures of the business cycle have a progressive motion of accumulation beneath them that would eventually grow to heights that surpassed an efficient pre-capitalist tax assessment system.
I’m still not sure. As @Dolores@hexbear.net says it likely had something to do with islamic conquest (not Ottoman though; the split occurred before then). It was against religious law for Sunni muslims to live outside of the House of Islam or to trade with the christians (this rule was of course violated), and their economic and administrative systems took very seperate courses from very early on. Sadly I havent done investigation into exactly what these differences were etc so cannot speak to them beyond generalities such as more centralisation. Deforestation is a strong possibility and definitely a factor, but without more research its hard to know how much
However, drawing on Jones’ work on the collapse of Rome, its clear that this divergence between East and West predated the rise of Islam. The trade economy of the West was never as robust as the East, and when it lost imperial trade connections, it collapsed hard, much harder than the East.
In the Eastern empire existing admin anf economic structures were taken over and only slightly altered, existing groups, peasant or aristocrat, taxed. In the West otoh, Rome’s settler-colonial policies saw mass settlement of retired soldiers with slaves (from conquests) for farm work. Slaves therefore featured more heavily in the western empire, and as the Western empire fell they rose slightly, to become protoserfs, whereas the remaining free farmers fell into protoserfdom.
These slave-owning small farmers were firmly tied to and dependent on Roman markets for many necessary commodities. As one example, some parts of the empire (e.g. Britain) native-made pottery disappears from the Archaeological record in favour of those imported. As a result, following the collapse, britons had to relearn the ability to make pots from the ground up.
i think you’re overstating the difference from the eastern med and the western, sometimes the muslim states had periods of centralization, but just as often were devolved to fractious feudatories. the decline in urbanization and production from roman levels also hit the east, just belatedly, and their ceiling being much higher–the decline less dramatic.
Very very broadly speaking, cause the eastern Roman empire lasted much much longer and controlled those regions.
Western and northern Europe had been flooded with German nomads so kingdoms were constantly being carved out and borders were in constant flux. Also in the western roman empire, the pope ruled over Caesar, unlike in the east where it was Ceasar over the pope. This meant these new German kings were constantly jostling for the title of holy roman emperor and back stabbing whoever got it.
Baltic sea ship building (viking) mixing with Mediterranean ship building led to caravel built ships. The Arabs were just as capable seafaring merchants as the Europeans. But they didn’t have systems to finance expeditions around Africa to fuck with Christians like the Portuguese would with them.
i’ve never heard that roman pottery production was a slave enterprise. i mean it’s roman so there’s bound to be some but i hadn’t read it like as a defining characteristic, like quarries, galleys, or latifundia. what’s the source?
Mostly going off of Jones’ 2 volume work on the later empire. Slavery basically permeates every pore of Roman society, especially in production.
This is not the reason but a key reason: Baltic rough sea ship building tech met Mediterranean large scale ship building tech via the vikings. Outcome is caravel hulls. Strap cannons on and now your ship is the naval equivalent of a nomadic horse archer army. You can hit anything with cannons and just retreat to blue waters before anyone could hit back.
Mediterranean ship building was built for scale but mostly joined large blocks of light wood together using mortoise and tenons. This meant ships could be large but were also brittle. Rough seas would snap the boat. But there were still large enough that people could put cannons on them as soon as small cannons were a thing.
In the Baltic, the seas are always rough. So shipbuilders used thin overlapping strips of heavy wood, which were nailed together, called “Clinker built”. These thin strips of wood could twist and flex in rough seas so your ship wouldn’t break. But you could only build ships so big in this style. Viking long ships could never fit a cannon.
Were viking traders first met Mediterranean shipping would’ve been around the Iberian peninsula. So its little wonder that the Spanish and Portuguese were the first intercontinental European empires. The Portuguese were considered the “first” though. And were far more Naval based than the Spanish. Once they got into the Indian ocean they became sea Mongols because they could strike anyone with impunity, claiming dominion over the entire indian ocean. Check out Afonso De Albuquerque for Portuguese exploits in the Indian ocean.
answer: forestry map of India China North America and South America
anything that happened in ancient greece/rome is basically irrelevant