Really? "The literacy rate in England in the 1640s was around 30 percent for males, rising to 60 percent in the mid-18th century." - Wikipedia

There's more to Europe than England, and if England's rate was 60% at the beginning of it, I'd suspect the more feudal parts of Europe were a lot lower.

Well, I do not know nothing about Catholic part of Europe, but there was a man named Martin Luther who lived between 1483 and 1546. The whole point (or cover story at least) of European protestant movement (in contrast to the English one) was to make the word of God accessible to the people (i.e. remove the Church monopoly of scripture reading).

Printing press was already invented in 1440 to print all the bibles necessary.

Please stop turning this HN thread into a flamewar.

Sounds like an accurate statement to me, how is it incendiary?

That's not a factual statement, it's a made-up one taking the form of one. But that doesn't matter. Scattering dramatic claims with no common element other than a generic colonialism-was-good guarantees a flamewar whether factual bits are in there or not.

Repeatedly moving the goalposts to keep the drama going is a sign of flame-fanning as well.

Add on top of it the "for males" tidbit and things looked even bleaker overall.