On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 2:38 PM, Lakshmi Rhone <[email protected]> wrote: > There were obstacles to revolutionary productivity growth by way of capital > accumulation everywhere, including the Christian world. Like Weber, Kuran > seems motivated to find that which was a distinctive obstacle in non Europe > vis a vis Europe and then conclude that those distinctive obstacles explain > non Europe's putative stagnation. But the question is why Europe was able to > overcome its obstacles. Well the merchant class became powerful enough to > reshape institutions. Perhaps the Atlantic trade, enabled by land grabs and > the slave trade, was a huge source of power for merchants who grew powerful > enough to reshape institutions; perhaps American land removed ecological > obstacles; and well placed coal deposits helped too.
I think the question of American land and resources are key. The Muslim world had plenty of slaves. I seem to remember (but my memory is awful) that more slaves were shipped to the Middle East than to the Americas even at the height of the Atlantic slave trade. On the other hand the America's had huge resources taken from American Indian nations. Even before coal there was timber. >.. all Europe is not able to afford to make so great fires as New England. A >poor servant here is he that possesseth but 50 acres of land; he may afford to >give more wood for timber and fire as good as the world yields than many >noble men in England can afford to do. Here is good living for those that love >good fires.. Francis Higginson in his 1630 pamphlet "New England's Plantation" And before and simultaneous with timber, furs. And farmland for food crops. And farmland for cotton and tobacco (though cotton really became king cotton only wiht the cotton gin). And just space to build larger building. And gold and silver. and as you say a bit later coal. "Empty" land . "Empty" in the sense that its people could be rapidly displaced. The difference between what became the USA and Canada was that a huge area was split between essentially two colonizer, the USA which started grabbing 13 colonies from Britain and ended up spreading the way West and far South conquering not only Indian nations, but much of Mexico incorporating it into a singe nation under control of a ruling class supported by a white ruling caste with no ties outside the U.S. Similary, Canada, though remaining a nominal British colony to this day, was in practice independent not that long after the U.S. was and in regard to American Indians followed a very similar path. I know you are concerned with the broader question of the difference between Europe and the Muslim center countries. But I think North America may be the most extreme case of different circumstances. Africa, China and India were also great sources of natural resources. But in all cases the occupiers were split among different colonizing powers who often warred with one another and always intrigued against one another. In China and Indian, the populations could be conquered but not exterminated or driven from most of their land. They could be dispossesed of great swathes often the richest most important, but not the majority. And even on land the colonists too, labor was mostly native labor, not labor from colonizer nations. In Africa, extermination and dispossesion did take place on a large scale, but again with colonists divided among different powers, and with colonizers enslaving or employing African labor on a scale British colonizers and succesors USA and Canada never enslaved or employed American Indian labor. So European colonist had access to natural resources on a scaled that dwarfed what Muslim nations could access. And North America in particular also had a unified colonization that operated differently than Colonizers in other nations. Also England was one of the richest colonial powers. I've seen some data that English settlers that settlers in non-English colonies (both free and voluntary bond in the sense that voluntary bonds slaves still contracted to better terms than say bond slaves in French or Spanish colonies). And even prison bond labor, once their sentence was served could find employment on better terms than bond prisoners who had served their term outside of English colonies in North America. Of course there were African slaves, chattel slaves which none of this applied to In fact slavery may have been far more brutal in the America than in Muslim nations. _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l > > -- Facebook: Gar Lipow Twitter: GarLipow Grist Blog: http://www.grist.org/member/1598 Static page: http://www.nohairshirts.com _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
