From a materialist perspective, why did the the global north, the western global north in particular, become so powerful it could loot the rest of the world with borderline impunity?
From a materialist perspective, why did the the global north, the western global north in particular, become so powerful it could loot the rest of the world with borderline impunity?
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.
Trade. Specifically, trade overseas (sea transport is much faster than land transport to the point of qualitative difference) allowed by long-distance ships. This seems to have had dramatic effects from very early on centred around the Mediterranean (e.g. Bronze age, Hellenic world, Rome, etc for more detail see Broodbank's The Making of the Middle Sea). The secret to merchants' capital and hence merchants' power is found in ch5 of Kapital:
The form of circulation within which money is transformed into capital contradicts all the previously developed laws bearing on the nature of commodities, value, money and even circulation itself. What distinguishes this form from that of the simple circulation of commodities is the inverted order of succession of the two antithetical processes, sale and purchase. How can this purely formal distinction change the nature of these processes, as if by magic?
But that is not all. This inversion has no existence for two of the three persons who transact business together. As a capitalist, I buy commodities from A and sell them again to B... [A&B] step forth only as buyers or sellers of commodities. I myself confront them each time as a mere owner of either money or commodities, as a buyer or a seller, and what is more, in both sets of transactions I confront A only as a buyer and B only as a seller. I confront the one only as money, the other only as commodities, but neither of them as capital or a capitalist, or a representative of anything more than money or commodities, or of anything which might produce any effect beyond that produced by money or commodities.(258)
Even in the relatively even playing field of the Mediterranean, this creates the ability of one party, the capitalist, to hold an overwhelming advantage of knowledge of (closer to) the entire process of exchange, instead of one part. In addition, this creates impetus to find new sources of valuable materials (a source of relative surplus value) spurring expansion. These twin impulses help drive and enable early European expansion. The next key to super-imperialism lies in the medieval monasteries.
Moving quickly (for more detail; Landes The Invention of Time and parts of Crosby The Measure of Reality), medieval monks became very fixated on routine, schedule, fixed times unchanged by the movement of the sun, etc. This made them efficient workers, and it spread into the cities. This conception of time (time composed of homogenous, discrete units instead of heterogenous, continous movement) is a necessary precondition for the existence of the capitalist mode of production, but here we are interested in its relationship to the construction of the modern escapement clock (as opposed to e.g. water clocks, sun-dials, etc).
Modern clocks (basically the kind where time is measured by discrete intervals of sounds; the tick) arise from this conception of time, as a way to create clocks that are more consistent. At first, a main goal of such clocks was to regulate monastery life better; it spread to cities and burghers from there. At this point, we are at the pendulum clocks, and these serve well for use on land. However, the clock has applications for navigation.
In sea navigation you wanna know how far North/South you are (latitude) and how far East/West (longitude). Latitude is much easier to find to an accurate degree than longitude, so it was a major limiting factor in naval navigation. The pendulum clock allowed for much more accurate longitudinal readings, but pendulums do not work at sea. Even more complicated, smaller, mechanical clocks were needed, and they were created. This allowed Europe to reinforce its naval navigation advantage regarding trade.
From 1492 and even earlier, the ships developed through mass trade in the mediterranean saw Europe become a global middleman, buying (or stealing) goods in places where they were common and selling them in places where they were rarer. This was ultimately the source of European wealth and power, as they enjoyed a collective near monopoly on (direct) intercontinental trade, flow of information and military movement.
Europe's dependence on those ships gave it impetus to develop more intricate clocks and ships, and the wealth flowing into Europe gave it the means. As Europe shifted more towards exporting manufactured goods, this created impetus for methods to rapidly produce tons of shit. As manufacture turned into industry (meaning; as the machine was invented and the human turned into a mere motive power and machine-minder), a more controllable motive power was needed, and coincidentally existed in large quantities in the centre of manufacture (Britain).
The information gap also makes resistance, or even intention to resist more difficult:
The circulation of commodities differs from the direct exchange of products not only in form, but in its essence. We have only to consider the course of events. The weaver has undoubtedly exchanged his linen for a Bible, his own commodity for someone else's. But this phenomenon is only true for him. The Biblepusher, who prefers a warming drink to cold sheets, had no intention of exchanging linen for his Bible; the weaver did not know that wheat had been exchanged for his linen. B's commodity replaces that of A, but A and B do not mutually exchange their commodities...We see here, on the one hand, how the exchange of commodities breaks through all the individual and local limitations of the direct exchange of products, and develops the metabolic process of human labour. On the other hand, there develops a whole network of social connections of natural origin, entirely beyond the control of the human agents. (208)
...
Since money does not reveal what has been transformed into it, everything, commodity or not, is convertible into money. Everything becomes saleable and purchaseable. Circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as the money crystal.(229)
Conditions of production (e.g. extraordinarily brutal slavery, unprecendented ecocide, etc) are similarly in "the hidden abode of production on whose threshold there hangs the notice 'No admittance except on business'"(279-80), so for example while someone might reject trading furs for alcohol if they knew the alcohol was made with horrific slave labour, the conditions of international trade kept most knowledge in European hands. Without being aware of the conditions of oppression, without lines of communication, without immediate knowledge of the Europeans' goals, etc, co-ordinated defence against Europe is difficult.
so until the 1800s the Europeans were not actually militarily advantaged over asia/the middle east. 1500s-1700s it was always a pretty close run affair, and the imperial outposts relatively small. european naval vessels were relatively well-armed and nice, but other nations weren't unable to field reasonable equivalents. this early period of colonial conquests were fueled mostly by the looting of america, small-on-the-map european countries could outspend you, even if their soldiers weren't much better armed. i'm not counting america because it's really difficult to win wars against smallpox
but once the europeans have the steamship its joever. motherfuckers moving against the wind, faster than any boats before slipping troops places and bombarding shit nobody thought possible with blinding speed. from a european perspective, seeing the steady progression and failings it's a bit less dramatic, but for an asian nation one day the barbarians showed up with these things in a world that only knows wind and oar power. and the engineering to make your own relies on a bunch of ground-based shit you don't have yet either
as to why europeans got the steamship, that's from the development of capitalism and the looting of america
Europe had a host of material conditions that led it to this position. It is relatively resource poor, and was constantly strapped for hard currency because the trade routes with the rest of the known world were mostly one way: Chinese people didn't want a wool shirt from England, but English lords wanted silk and spices and porcelain.
This led to robust and relatively stable networks of credit that allowed nobles to engage in increasingly sophisticated and expensive versions of war and exploitation because they had to in order to keep up with their neighbor, who was trying to do the same thing. Because they were always in debt they had to keep doing more expensive things to secure more resources to pay back creditors, and build institutions to manage their money and regulate finance to keep everything from collapsing.
Eventually some landlords on an island found themselves in a new social relation to their tenants, where it was in their best interest to let them make their own living somewhere else instead of farming, and charging rent instead of feudal dues. This put everyone else on the same track or they risked being priced out of their lands and titles by a new class using a new form of socialized labor.
Essentially Europeans had to compensate for their economic disadvantages in ways that drove them to invent systems that created more productive capacity extremely quickly. I got most of this from The Origin of Capitalism, Graeber's book on Debt, The Verge and Hell on Earth. But that's my elevator pitch when I talk to people about this.
Edit: Since you read the Verge I'll just add, I think it's missing class analysis, it is looking at a set of economic structures and observing that they tend in a direction without tying it to social relations of production. I heartily recommend Wood's The Origin of Capitalism on that point specifically.
World Systems Theorists have some interesting takes on this. In particular, Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Centrury lays out an interesting theory about how the nexus of hegemonic power shifts geographically and temporally through the rise of capitalism to an epochal "signal crisis" and through its financial sublimation leading to a "terminal crisis". It takes an absurdly long durée view, tracing the development of capitalism from the Italian city states of Florance, Venice, and Genoa, through the Dutch, England, and finally to the US, examining this cycle of accumulation and crisis in each case as the mechanism which drives these tectonic shifts in hegemony.
World Systems Theorists aren't strictly Marxist, but they aren't allergic either and do cite a lot of Marxist sources.
Terrance Ray and Sean K.B. gave a pretty good summary of the book in a dusty old podcast episode: https://soundcloud.com/user-972848621-463073718/year-zero-the-thousand-year-stare-w-special-guest-sean-kb
I think people shouldn't underestimate the Mongol invasions had which China had to recover from and which the Islamic Golden Age was brought to an end. If it weren't for the Mongols, capitalism would most likely have started in Southern Song instead of Western Europe. Southern Song already invented paper currency, and in general, was already transitioning away from feudalism through the Industrious Revolution. And keep in mind, this was China having to face the full onslaught of the Mongol invasion, which Western Europe was completely shielded from. Now imagine if China never had to suffer through massive depopulation and infrastructural damage. Likewise, the Black Death was also the catalysis that brought the downfall of feudalism in Western Europe. Massive amount of death gave labor more bargaining power since the supply of labor was greatly diminished. It also forced people to question feudalism as a political ideology.
In an alt-history where the Mongol invasions didn't snowball like the way it did (maybe alt-history Genghis Khan was assassinated before he could unify the Mongols) and the Black Death never happened, Europe could very well just be a backwaters part of Asia still stuck with feudalism while China or India have a capitalist (or completely novel) mode of production which allows them to build colonial empires in Africa and the Americas (I think Chinese and Indian ships already were able to sail to those continents and this would certainly be true for alt-history Chinese and Indian ships).
Capitalism began in England during the enclosures. That’s how.
As others have said, being essentially a backwater place where there wasn't much that other people wanted, left lots of time for the dirty hill people to figure their shit out while the older civilizations who had already figured their shit out where busy fighting each other until their civilizations started to go into decline. This gives some space for the dirty hill people who've, in a more recent sense, got their shit together to actually take advantage of the destabilization and start successful empire building.
I'm sure the deep history nerds can cite instances where England's imperial project could have be hindered but due to some fluke of weather, or a miss written message, or a military officer has a case of diarrhea at an importune moment that turned the tide of a battle or business deal or a political gambit to England's favor.
A growing number of elites, go out and carve out something for themselves as fast as possible in any way possible. So long as there was a frontier to be exploited, those trying to lay claim to it would be less likely to fight their own and take their claims, so all efforts could be focused outward on Africa and Asia and South America and North America instead of Sir Reganald Cockswaller, III getting into a pistol duel with Sir Richmond Baldknobb, Jr over who gets to be the sole supplier of sheered sheep scrotums to the Southwest part of TERF island.
It was the creation and spread of Capitalism, before this Europe was technologically and economically backwards compared to Eurasia. First applied by the Dutch in the 15th and 16th centuries, then significantly improved and expanded by the English a couple centuries later. Capitalism was not adopted by most of Europe at first, the feudal monarchs and Catholic church kept stomping out the budding capitalism enclaves in most of Europe.
Nation states however had to begin to form to protect themselves from other nation states. Napoleonic France, for instance, smashed apart the continental feudal system and forced them all to adopt modern systems to even come close to competing with French military concentrations and artillery production. As soon as there's one or two Liberal Bourgeois nation states with the engines of Capital roaring, the others had to follow or be destroyed.
However, capitalism has to constantly expand and could not remain on Europe. This is where we see colonialism come into full swing. The first waves of colonizers and settlers and conquistadors and explorers were all hugely debt-ridden, fleeing from their debtors or seeking fortune in the new world and colonies. It was also mostly the poor dredges of society in Europe that were forced out into the colonies (see: Australia where they sent their prisoners and debtors), the actual foot soldiers of colonization had a gun trained on their back by banks and capitalists, even while they had their guns trained on the natives and indigenous people they colonized. Here you can see the system dumping its "externalities" and contradictions onto others outside the capitalist internal system, and sucking up resources and wealth and labor to fuel itself. Capitalism is not sustainable, it requires these inputs and outputs. A global capitalist system cannot exist in perpetuity without crisis and war.
Nowhere else in the world had this hot-zone of bourgeois nation states warring against each other that then had to expand outwards by force or face internal crisis and revolution.
I am a big fan of material essentialism. There are other theories though. Basically, europe was always a tiny unimportant peninsula on the coast of Asia. We had no noteworthy resources at all. Ad such it was never worth it to steal from us. However eve5yohe especially hat to deal with us constantly stealing from them and messing up their plans. Overtime that imbalance just snowballed and then we were best positioned to take over the new world.
It's called 'The Great Divergence' – searching that will find you the theories on it
I'm a fan of the Matt Christman take. I may be roughing this up pretty badly but: it's got a lot to do with European geography having enough natural borders to create small individual states, but not sturdy enough natural borders to prevent conflict. You end up with a shitton of small-ish states in a perpetual arms race, which means they'll be looking for every advantage possible. Even if it comes at a cost to the stability of the existing order writ large, they'll take it because losing in the arms race is a much more immediate existential threat to the individual states. China had those warring states, but the natural borders were weak enough that they eventually settled into a single state. There's a thousand other factors, too, but I hadn't seen this mentioned from skimming the top few comments in this thread.
Plague, slave trade and the Americas
Honestly I blame the Moroccans for not re-conquering Al-Andalus and instead invading Songhai, without Spain jumpstarting colonialism and the post-invasion chaos of West Africa, the European savages never would've gotten a toehold on the worldstage.
There's a good book I'd recommend which seeks to answer this exact question called Escape from Rome. Read the blurb to get a very basic picture.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172187/escape-from-rome
I suggest Robert Marks The Origins of the Modern World. He's not a Marxist, but he takes a materialist stance on this exact question.
Basically since Europe didn't have an abundance of mineral resources like gold and silver, they couldn't compete with the other major cultures in Eurasia. China and India had much better manufactured goods, Indonesia had spices, and the Ottoman empire had Afghani silver and were the middleman if Europe wanted to trade with the east.
What European nations could do was fight, all they did was fight each other for the last 1000 years. So they turn their warfare on other nations via gunboat diplomacy. I could go on, but by the time of the industrial revolution England's coal deposits put them in a powerful position. English coal combined with slaves and looting of the continents propelled them until WW2. After that America took over as world hegemon.
Basically it's not a simple answer, there were many points where the dice could have rolled the other way. The materialist answer is not supposed to be predetermined, that's where Jared Diamond gets it wrong. A lot of things went right for European empires and they capitalized on it with their barbarity.