That fact is certainly a stain on history, but sidesteps the observation that European powers were able to militarily overpower so many other regions because they were already richer and technologically advanced compared to other regions.

Agreed. I just finished reading "the English and their history" by Robert Tombs, along with many of the references he uses, and I was frankly shocked at how little revenue from the colonial era was generated abroad. I highly recommend the book to everyone.

All of my modern education left me with the idea that we, like postit mentions, had squeezed every colonial nation for everything it was worth and left nothing but husks; producing little to nothing of value ourselves. In actual fact, with the exception of British India in the 1700/1800s, the revenue made from colonies was a fraction of a percentage of Britain's GDP. The same can be said of much of Europe.

Europeans became and stayed wealthy by producing goods internally and trading between themselves, and England particularly by the invention of steam power, mechanised factories, improved tooling, and better iron and chemical processes. It's difficult to fathom in the modern era such a technological leap.

If a European country created wealth in its factories, but those factories used slave-grown inputs (cotton, sugar, whatever) imported from colonies, would that count as wealth produced internally?

Even with cotton being produced via slave labour in the Americas, textiles produced from it were still in stiff competition with textiles produced in India at the time. That competition led to the investment in labour saving machinery that continued to fuel the industrial revolution. Slave labour is not a magic ingredient that makes economies flourish, if anything it's probably a drag on those economies.

> Indian cotton textiles, mainly those from Bengal, continued to maintain a competitive advantage up until the 19th century. In order to compete with Indian goods, British merchants invested in labour-saving technical advancements, while the government implemented protectionist policies such as bans and tariffs to restrict Indian imports.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_manufacture_during_the...

The revolutionary nature of certain advances seems underappreciated in histories.

You could have been the most scientifically advanced culture in the world for centuries (see: 8th - 14th century Islamic world), yet missed out on being so for a few key inventions and lost most of the benefit.

I think it's appropriate to wonder why the article uses that picture - Dam Square with the New Town Hall under Construction (1656) by Johannes Lingelbach - to illustrate European wealth, without mentioning where the money used to build the town hall came from.

That scene was during the Dutch Golden Age, in the era of the Dutch East India Company ("The prosperity gained from this was accompanied by horrors against the local population. For example, in 1621, Jan Pieterszoon Coen had almost all the inhabitants of the Banda Islands massacred." quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Golden_Age), and Dutch involvement in the slave trade ("It is estimated that more than 550,000 people were brought to America in slavery by Dutch ships" and "Asian slaves were also traded extensively. The slave was indispensable in the economy of the Dutch colonial empire in the Golden Age as a labor force; in the second half of the seventeenth century, half of the inhabitants of Batavia were unfree", ibid).

Certainly a good fraction of Dutch power came from "exploiting and pillaging colonies" and slavery.

I therefore find it odd that the text doesn't mention those components of European wealth. Don't you?

While your point might be valid, it's rather irrelevant to the author's thesis, which specifically concerns "The Great Enrichment" of the 18th century, with no mention of why Portugal, for example, was able to conquer Goa in 1510 and Malacca the next year.

So the Mongols were richer and more technologically advanced than all the countries they grabbed?

Militarily, the mongols were FAR more advanced. The best analogy is, imo, modern US air supremacy in the middle east. They were simply untouchable until the advent of long range gunpowder. It was their political structure that prevented them from conquering the entire world. Dan Carlin has a good podcast series called Wrath of the Khans that goes into this in depth, in a very entertaining way.

Not really. China had their own nomadic allies. And so did the Qara Khitai. The Mongols also destroyed the Cumans. And many Turkish Empires that were still connected to the steppe and had the same technology as the mongols.

but previously they squabbled bitterly and thus reduced each other to nothing more than nomadic tribes. The “upside” of ceaseless internecine conflict served to sharpen their tactics to a mental ferocity and lethality that hadn’t been encountered anywhere in the more “Pax catholica” European areas or Pax-Jin empires. And as far as weaponry: Steppe warfare / Persian horse archer tactics weren’t new obviously, but the mongols employer recurved bows and multiple mounts exclusively whereas the Jin empire relied more on spear warriors and some archery which was helpless against Mongolian siege tactics and again —- once the walls were breached —- horse archers who could shoot by some estimates further, with more accuracy and with a shorter draw than the British longbow ( another nearly untouchable weapon (when massed) of the same period ). Europeans relied on their heavy cavalry which was basically like Putins tanks today vs Javelin missiles.

why can't there be two different ways of accomplishing the same thing?

> European powers were able to militarily overpower so many other regions because they were already richer and technologically advanced compared to other regions.

This is a false premise. European powers didn't show up with massive armies and overpower regions until very late (19th century). Cortez didn't show up and just win with his guns; he joined a Native American civil war.

https://np.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/2r3svv/myths_of_...

See a more general critique of this kind of observation here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6meq1k/a_det...

More technologically advanced yes, richer no.

> they were already richer and technologically advanced compared to other regions.

Citation needed, some evidence to back up such a grand claim would be good. The article doesn't show any data to substantiate such an extraordinary claim. You also don't define who exactly you mean when you say "European powers".

I get that they were technologically advanced. But how were they richer?

What did the post say? It has been removed.

And Europe was the only place where they ever thought of taking over other places. Its a unique invention in history.

Never before has any king or leader conquered somebody else and pillaged it.

What an amazing invention these Europeans made. Somebody should have told that idea to Ottoman and Persian Empires.

Really unfair to keep these amazing ideas to themselves.

So, in order to exploit and pillage colonies, you need to already be so overwhelmingly more powerful and rich than they that you can colonize them.

Otherwise, you're just warring with your neighbors (does anyone say the Norse colonized the Saxon land of England? Did the Normans colonize France?)

So the question remains: How did Europe quickly go from inferior to their neighbors in the ~1200s to colonizing the world by the 1700s?

Mongols are proof of the opposite. I'd argue that Europe got militarily advanced because European countries were literally constantly in a state of war and they had to adapt.

I don't think that the Mongols are proof of the opposite, as evidenced by the fact that they, like "world conquerors" before them like Alexander the Great, failed to colonize the places they conquered, and those places largely returned to their former political systems within a generation or two with very little evidence of Mongol rule. The Mongol state extracted little in the way of wealth and power that didn't come directly from conquest.

Colonization as we know it is more than just conquest and pillaging and setting up a loyalist government (did Napoleon colonize all of Europe? Was Hitler a colonizer?), its a reorganization of the state into an economic tool of the Colonizer country.

There was no colonization or exploitations by the Mongol state that lasted after the figurehead died, while the European colonization not only lasted for centuries, it was reinforced generation after generation with continuing military force and by economic systems designed to basically transform the entire colony and all its people into an economic machine for the host state.

Also, the idea that Europe was constantly at war and other places weren't is very Euro-centric, and I don't blame you because our schools teach ridiculous minutiae of centuries old European politics while not even touching a single iota of say Chinese history or Indian history or African history, so to us, we literally don't know about those regions' and civilizations' millennia's of wars.

Also cold winters, so farming was difficult in northern europe during winter.

People had to store food for winter. Wintertime could be spend on other things than farming, e.g. science.

This is the reason, exploitation and colonization are the consequences of more power and wealth, not the causes.

> How did Europe quickly go from inferior to their neighbors in the ~1200s to colonizing the world by the 1700s

This is the question that needs to be answered. Guns, germs and steel attempts it

European ships, canons and muskets were already superior to anything found elsewhere in the world by the 16th century. That is why Portuguese ships could sail to India and pressure the locals despite being vastly outnumbered.

> So the question remains: How did Europe quickly go from inferior to their neighbors in the ~1200s to colonizing the world by the 1700s?

Colonization started more than 200 years earlier. I'm deeply suspicious of these theories seeking to unify an explanation of the development of centuries, even more so if the ideology used to explain an era is coincidentally the dominating one today. Just to point out two hugely important factors that have nothing to do with free market competition:

- Europe is geographically close to the Americas compared to the Middle East and East Asia.

- The introduction of New World crops like potato massively increased agricultural yields.

So that's why scandinavia is so rich today - because they were raiding/pillaging europe starting in the 8th century?

Pillaging what? What part of the welfare of Europeans can be explained by colonial pillaging?

That was maybe enabled by the thing that made several European nations rich to begin with. Also, it's hardly unique to European history. As long as humans have been around, they've been fighting with each other. The thing is that technology helped European nations to get much better at this than the rest of the world. And that in turn was enabled by a free flow of information.

Basically, 14th and 15th century Europe was when it started pulling away from the rest of the world economically and technically. At the time, other parts of the world would have rivaled it in terms of technology, science, philosophy, etc. For example Chinese, Japanese, Arab cultures were relatively advanced and arguably a lot more sophisticated at the time. That started changing around that time slowly bur surely. It's not so much that they declined but that they did not keep up with the pace of invention and development and were slow to adapt. By the time the British Empire reached its peak, the difference was huge. After that the gap started narrowing as the rest of the world caught up and educated itself.

There's also no mention of trade, which includes slavery.

The Europeans were supplicants to the courts of Mughal Indian and Imperial China in the 1600s. By the late 1700s and 1800s the Europeans were stomping on everyone due to their advances in weapons.

The question that is being asked is: what caused the change in those 150-200 years?

That's not unique to Europe though.