Need help with Imperialism and tecnology diss.

[Guardia Rossa]

there is a thread going on in historum, where there is a discussion of why the europeans were the "most inventive people"

The main points are imperialism (either they diminush its influence or legitimize it), european inventiveness, sources of inventiveness

I need sources and some ideas on how to prove them that Europeans ain't more inventive then other people and that they only managed to become so by geopolitic (fragmentation and military tech focus)

I also need sources on non-european great inventions, on how europeans stole inventions and brain drain effects. I will need it in max a hour, that will be the time I will be offline

thank you

[Guardia Rossa]

If you can help me, help me, otherwise, help me, if you only look I will hate you forever.

(Reason: I don't keep sources for anything. I need sources)

I do have the 3 first hobsbawm books (never read third, NEED HALP THATS WHY) and the Man's Worldly Goods from huberman

[Invader Zim]

If you can help me, help me, otherwise, help me, if you only look I will hate you forever.

(Reason: I don't keep sources for anything. I need sources)

I do have the 3 first hobsbawm books (never read third, NEED HALP THATS WHY) and the Man's Worldly Goods from huberman

ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (http://www.amazon.co.uk/ReORIENT-Global-Economy-Asian-Age/dp/0520214749)

The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Divergence-Economy-Princeton-Economic/dp/0691090106/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8)

[Guardia Rossa]

Anyone else?

[Invader Zim]

Anyone else?

Well... me again, but as far as I recall, Paul Kennedy (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Rise-Fall-British-Naval-Mastery/dp/0141011556) made the argument that the rise of the West was in large part due to the developments in naval technology. The competition between numerous relatively small and regularly warring European states led to an acceleration in the development of Naval technology in the early-modern period. The invention of powerful artillery which could be placed on ships, and in turn defeat other ships (resulting in the loss of trade and facilitated the capture of ships) and destroy land defences led to a rapid technological arms race. Ships became bigger, and rather than multi-functional, increasingly militarised. The larger ship designs were then instrumental in the conquest of the New World, which opened trade possibilities which powered the rise of European supremacy. So, it isn't that Europeans are naturally 'better' at technology, but a wide array of material conditions combined with coincidence led to a specific trajectory in the early modern period. That's my memory of it from quite a number of years ago, so best to check.

[Rafiq]

Hegel could be of use here: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/introduction-lectures.htm#s3

The argument racists use is nonsensical, because had particular historic developments made it possible that Asia would emerge as the end of history, by mere chance, then this same argument would be used. One thing which is interesting about Hegel is the notion that more temperate climates served as the basis of the theatre of history. What we know of "Europe", in other words, was only made possible by the historic developments which could only have ever occurred in the Mediterranean, before which "Europe" (Germany, England, etc.) had absolutely no history. Hence why it is the Egyptians the Romans and Greeks looked upon with respect while deeming the Germanic tribes barbarians only good for manual labor. The question of why Europe, or what Hegel calls the "German" phrase of historic development following Rome inherited this history rather than say North Africa is a matter of very specific and particular historic developments that to attribute to "race" would be so laughable that it would disqualify any serious analysis of history in general.

Europeans could very well have been more inventive than other people(s) around, say, the 16th century, but it is beyond idiotic to attribute "inventiveness" as some kind of characteristic in-itself. What we call "inventiveness" requires not some kind of magical inclination toward creativity, but real social developments that make this possible. Capitalist relations to production proceeded, necessitated and then made possible "inventiveness", not some kind of bare desire to make 'cool stuff'. The point is that the widespread application of "cool stuff" and inventions on a social or practical level requires more than imagination. Wasn't it a Greek who invented the steam engine, or something akin to it, thousands of years before it actually came into existence? And it was nothing more than a stupid gimmick which no one could imagine to have any practical use.

So capitalism made "inventiveness" possible, not some kind of spontaneous endevour to invent things. Europeans were not consciously trying to become superior to Asia, indeed, in talking about a mass sum of millions of people, the collective coordination to become "advanced" as a society would require a monolithic, centrally coordinated endeavor. For all the wars, barbarity, strife, famine and chaos that defined the transition to an epoch of "inventiveness", itself stricken with some of the same problems, it would appear that there was no conscious basis to Europe's greatness. Europeans are, like any other peoples before Communism, stupid and historically non-conscious. They subverted the people's of other civilizations not out of any kind of innate superiority, but totally consequential. The same stupid, subconscious class-based drives were present in Asia as they were in Europe. Euro-chauvinists, as we might call them, crypto-fascists and other such scum, all of them think with their ass. Their arguments rely on a set of assumptions which the minute you point out would render their whole edifice of grandeur a fucking joke.

At the same time, let's not play this stupid game and pretend Europe did not dominate the world. It did. The point is that this does not translate into any kind of innate superiority of European people(s), and to even imply a connection between the historic sophistication of a civilization and the innate properties of the peoples who inhabit it is already racism, the logic of colonialism.

[Workers-Control-Over-Prod]

Like Rafiq already said, "inventions" and technological advances are not exempt from the mode of production, its constructed social relations and the boundaries of the real existing world. The ancient Romans had many "inventions" concocted by wily slave masters but never thought of applying them to make the labor of the slave more productive, because the point of most class societies is to maintain the power of the ruling class and maintain the subordination of the workers.

[Invader Zim]

Europeans could very well have been more inventive than other people(s) around, say, the 16th century, but it is beyond idiotic to attribute "inventiveness" as some kind of characteristic in-itself.

Indeed, what is "inventiveness"? What they did was invent certain things which gave them a specific edge in specific arenas based on the material conditions of Europe at that time.

[Guardia Rossa]

I love you Rafiq. Your texts are awsome. Thanks.

I will read Lenin and Hobsbawm on Imperialism before I go back to that den :lol:

[ckaihatsu]

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If Gernet’s account is correct, then China was undergoing a technical and intellectual renaissance at more or less the same time as Europe.133

There were some similar social changes. The state increasingly commuted the old labour services of peasants and artisans into money taxes. The commercialisation of agriculture led to the production of industrial crops like cotton, dyes, vegetable oils and tobacco. Poorer peasants, driven from the land by landlords, sought a livelihood in other ways—taking up handicraft trades, emigrating to the mining areas, seeking work in the towns. Trading and craft enterprises flourished, especially in the coastal regions of the south and east. As in Europe, most production was still in artisan workshops. But there were occasional examples of something close to full-scale industrial capitalism. Small enterprises grew into big enterprises, some of which employed several hundred workers. Peasant women took jobs at Sung-chiang, south west of Shanghai, in the cotton mills.134 At the end of the 16th century there were 50,000 workers in 30 paper factories in Kiangsi.135 Some Chinese industries began producing for a worldwide, rather than a merely local, market. Silk and ceramics were exported in bulk to Japan.136 It was not long before ‘Chinese silks were being worn in the streets of Kyoto and Lima, Chinese cottons being sold in Filipino and Mexican markets and Chinese porcelain being used in fashionable homes from Sakai to London’.137

It was a period of economic growth despite continued poverty among the lower classes. After falling by almost half to around 70 million in the 14th century, the population rose to an estimated 130 million in the late 16th century and to as high as 170 million by the 1650s.138 Then the empire ran into a devastating crisis similar in many ways to those of the 4th century and the 14th century—as well as to that occurring simultaneously in much of 17th century Europe. There were a succession of epidemics, floods, droughts and other disasters. Famines devastated whole regions. The population stopped growing and even declined in some regions.139 Once-flourishing industries shut down. By the 1640s reports from northern Chekiang (the hinterland of Shanghai) spoke of ‘mass starvation, hordes of beggars, infanticide and cannibalism’.140

By 1642 the great city of Soochow [on the lower Yangtze] was in visible decline, with many homes vacant and falling into ruin, while the once-rich countryside had become a no man’s land which only armed men dared enter.141

Historians often explain this crisis, like the earlier ones, in terms of overpopulation or harvest failures due to global changes in climate.142 But ‘rice was available in the Yangtze delta even during the terrible “famines” that plagued the country during the early 1640s... People simply lacked sufficient funds to pay for it’.143

The crises were, in fact, rooted in the organisation of Chinese society. The state and the bureaucratic class which staffed it had encouraged economic expansion in the aftermath of the crisis of the 14th century. But they soon began to fear some of the side-effects, particularly the growing influence of merchants. There was a sudden end to the great naval voyages to India and Africa in 1433 (so ensuring it was ships from Europe which ‘discovered’ China, rather than the other way round).144 ‘The major concern of the Ming empire was not to allow coastal trade to disturb the social life of its agrarian society’.145 Its rulers could not stop all overseas trade. What today would be called a ‘black economy’ grew up in coastal regions, and there were bitter armed clashes with ‘pirates’ controlling such areas. But the state measures cramped the development of the new forms of production.

Meanwhile, the ever-growing unproductive expenditure of the state was an enormous drain on the economy. Under emperor Wan-li, for instance, there were 45 princes of the first rank, each receiving incomes equal to 600 tons of grain a year, and 23,000 nobles of lesser rank. More than half the tax revenues of the provinces of Shansi and Honan went on paying these allowances. A war with Japan for control of Korea ‘completely exhausted the treasury’.146

Acute hardship led to social discontent. Almost every year between 1596 and 1626 saw urban riots by ‘workmen’ in the most economically developed parts of the country.147 In 1603 the miners from private mines marched on Beijing, the 1620s saw rebellions by the non-Chinese peoples in the south west, and there were major peasant rebellions in the north of the country in the 1630s. A sort of opposition also emerged at the top of society among intellectuals and former mandarins which was crushed by a secret police network.148

Political collapse followed in 1644. The last Ming emperor strangled himself as a former shepherd leader of a peasant army proclaimed a new dynasty. A month later Manchu invaders from the north took Beijing.

The economic and political crisis bore many similarities to that in Europe in the same period. But there was a difference. The merchant and artisan classes did not begin to pose an alternative of their own to the old order. They did not even do what the Calvinist merchants and burghers in France did when they exerted some influence on the dissident wing of the aristocracy. They certainly did not remould the whole of society in their own image, as the merchant bourgeoisie of the northern Netherlands and the ‘middling classes’ in England did.

As in the previous great crises in Chinese society, the trading and artisan classes were too dependent on the state bureaucracy to provide an alternative.




Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 222-224

[Sewer Socialist]

Another way of viewing it is that people who grow up in societies with the most advanced development and education are generally the ones who advance that development and education.

If a metaphor will help, the best hurling players in the world are Irish. This isn't because the Irish possess genetic advantages which make them better at hurling, but because people in Ireland are already familiar with hurling and young hurlers in Ireland have plenty of hurling to partake in; someone who has lived in Hawaii their entire life won't be very competitive amongst the best hurlers. Similarly, someone who has lived in Fiji their whole life won't invent new, better insulation for winter boots; someone in Qatar won't revolutionize corn crops, etc.

"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." - Isaac Newton