Why and how did Europe advance and invented the modern world?
I've heard a lot of opinions about this, and they can be summarized
>naval focus
>church - international law system
>transparency of social classes and relative untraditionalism
>periphery of known world - relative peace
>fertile land
I am not a historian, so is this true or bullshit?
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It's meme insofar that the "modern world" was created by multiple actors both in and out of Europe.
Naval access, fertile lands and a series of other lucky coinsidences.
t.MUH GERMZ GUNZ AND STEALZ
whites invented the world
german/anglos mostly
>naval focus
Only the Atlantic empires. Germany was never navy-oriented.
Literally what other reasons are there? I know what you’re gonna say but go ahead anyway.
Ameridumb spotted
Mediterranean = trade highway = tech spreads rapidly
After the heavy plow, 3 field crop rotation, the horse collar and other innovations, europe to the north saw increases in population. Also high volume trade spread to the north sea and baltic.
All this created an environment where the manufacturing centers of flanders flourished as well as trade centers in Italy. Europe was about on par with the middle east after the Mongol invasions and by the 15th century there were clear indications it was moving ahead with the printing press and long distance trade by the portuguese.
Not him, but Europe also had two interesting things going on.
1) Most European states had noticeably higher taxes than say, China, in the 17th and 18th century. Thus their governments were much more effective.
2) Europe, particularly Britain, had much higher wages than China. Thus the potential benefit from investment and mechanization was much higher than China.
I'm Russian, but prove me wrong.
Britain and other European kingdoms were experiencing a lot of Economic growth in the 1300’s.
warwick.ac.uk
>Africans are literally medieval tier
Jesus Fucking Christ
>Medieval England had better living standards than modern day Afghanistan
Lmao
>Applying modern economics to preindustrial society.
Wanna argue on how HIV is technically the dominant species on Earth?
Viruses aren’t living organisms.
Arbitrary distinction.
It doesn’t matter, what you said was a false equivalence. The point is that a typical person living in Medieval England could afford more food than the average person living in most third world countries.
No it doesn’t. It says they had higher Per capita income (a dubious claim to begin with). It says nothing of how this wealth was destributed or their actual living standards. Modern third world nations have vaccines and medicin, sanitation, education, internet, etc. And yes these things are poor compared to modern first world nations but vastly superior to medieval England.
>“Our work sheds new light on England’s economic past, revealing that per capita incomes in medieval England were substantially higher than the “bare bones subsistence” levels experienced by people living in poor countries in our modern world. The majority of the British population in medieval times could afford to consume what we call a “respectability basket” of consumer goods that allowed for occasional luxuries. By the late Middle Ages, the English people were in a position to afford a varied diet including meat, dairy produce and ale, as well as the less highly processed grain products that comprised the bulk of the “bare bones subsistence” diet."
Basically you can split this into two questions: why did the West become so advanced between the 15th and 18th centuries, and then why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries?
The West became became the most influential civilization on Earth, initiated a new era of globalisation, pioneered the Scientific Revolution, became the centre of most new technological innovations, etc, after the 15th century. There's no one explanation for this, since it involves so many different developments which sometimes have little to do with each other, like colonialism and modern science. I'm not going to go into detail explaining everything here, but I'll try to sum it up:
>Constant warfare between small, weak states encouraged military development such as bombards, bastion forts and caravels which by the 16th century gave Europeans a significant edge in Asia (thougn mostly in coastal regions)
>The inheritence of Greco-Roman, Islamic and Medieval Christian natural philosophy layed down the basis for a scientific understanding of the world, and once combined with the 15th century invention of the printing press and the early modern rise in literacy this allowed for the rise of a much more dynamic scientific culture - the same factors lead to the Enlightenment
>Nothing preventing the full adoption of printing - contast the religious reverence for calligraphy in the Islamic world and China's writing system which is inefficient for printing
>Western Europe, especially Iberia, was geographically suited for colonial expansion - the combination of Atlantic and Mediterranean naval technologies in the late Middle Ages resulting in the development of sturdy ships that could sail against the wind, comparative isolation from the Indian Ocean encouraged the search for new trade routes, and proximity to the Americas made its discovery inevitable once people started exploring the Atlantic
There's more to it that this, but I'm not going to write an essay.
How is it a dubious claim? There’s a scholarly study backing it up.
As for the second question:
As a result of its success in the new global economy, Britian (and the Netherlands) was economically propserous and had a very high-wage economy. Usually wages for ordinary labourers fall as population rises, and wages steadily fell across the world and most of Europe as populations rose after the end of the Black Death. Britain and the Netherlands were exceptional due to their global economic dominance and escaped this trap, with extremely high real wages that actually rose rapidly from the 17th century. High wages encouraged entrepreneurs to replace labour with natural energy and machinery - and in Britain the presence of cheap coal offered a new avenue for development. Alongside certain scientific discoveries like atmospheric pressure (necessary for the steam engine), this lead to the rapid development of labour-saving machines by entrepreneurs. Without a high-wage, cheap-energy economy 18th century ventures like the steam engine and spinning jenny would not have been profitable, which is why they were not widely adopted outside of Britain until the 19th century when they were developed into more versatile forms that could make a profit in economies like those of Continental Europe and Japan.
>Of course this paper focuses only on average per capita incomes. We also need to have a better understanding of the distribution of income in medieval England, as there will have been some people living at bare bones subsistence, and at times this proportion could have been quite substantial.
T. Eu4
Germany owned islands in the fucking Pacific
They didn't have sail ship armadas because Germany as an unified agglomeration wasn't even a thing until shortly before WWI, they did step the fuck up in 19th and 20th century though
Poor people existed in Medieval England? Gee, thank you for clarifying.