How did Europe become the richest part of the world?

Re:How did Europe become the richest part of the world? by UncleMeat on Friday February 17, 2017 @04:09PM (#13671729)

This sort of question is itself poor history. We cannot cleanly use today's popular cultural boundaries like "europe" and "arab world" to describe people 600 years ago. The assumption that we can bake all european nations into one civilization that has coherent and universal cause-effect relationships is not really solid.

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Re:How did Europe become the richest part of the world? by woodandsteel on Friday February 17, 2017 @05:40PM (#13672356)

So what is your explanation as to why the West charged ahead, but the Middle East stagnated?

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Re:How did Europe become the richest part of the world? by UncleMeat on Friday February 17, 2017 @07:02PM (#13672797)

Its the wrong question, which is why you don't tend to find a lot of respected historians writing books that seek to answer this question. A lot of assumptions are baked into this question that historians do not think are valid.

The sort of "why the west won" pop history makes experts cringe in the same way that articles on AI hysteria might make experts here cringe.

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