Could be good, if the presentation would've been recorded, too. Like this the arguments remain interesting, but remain lacking of the graphs.

Excellent!

27:36

Isn't the question more: why did the economic development spread to other European areas so quickly. While not spreading to any non European places (except Japan) until much later?

@ivanmaisterra9612

3 жыл бұрын

I don't know if that's the right question either but I can think of a couple of reasons as to why some European regions (not all of them) industrialized first during the 19th century. - The process of mecanization soon expanded to those continental countries with the necessary requirements (namely, during the first half of the century, coal and population requirements). When the railways industry developed, hauling costs were greatly reduced in a peninsula where bodies of water already favored low hauling costs. A context of heightened inter-state rivalry favoured conceptions of unification and industrialization as ways to secure a nations sovereignty in the 'grand orchestra'. State backing for the industrialization processes was also important, especially in France, Prussia and even Russia. Hobsbawm tackles these issues on 'The Age of Revolution'. - Other non-European states also attempted industrialization processes during the first half of the century, the most famous of all being Muhammad Ali's Egypt. It's common knowledge that Britain and France, together with the Ottoman Empire coluded to avert this process: European nations eliminated a potential competitor (Egypt was becoming increasingly involved in the international dynamics of competition between the two biggest European rivals) and the Ottomans got reassured that they would not lose such a strategic province such as Egypt. - As for Japan, Ronald Robinson argues that the Japanese ruling elites managed to close ranks during the days of Comodore Perry. Japan had been until then under the isolations Tokugawa shogunate (which dated from the late XVI-early XVII centuries). The Meiji movement managed to preserve Japan's sovereignty and implement the new industrial technologies in a country that met the requirements for the mechanization of the manufacturing process. China simply did not have that possibility, because of the ecological constraints that Pomeranz mentions (and their societal repercusions) but also because China's sovereignty had already been hugely curtailed after the first Opium War. Japan managed to avoid exactly that. The British Raj was under EIC rule, and later became an English colony after the EIC suffered the consequences of its actions during the Great Rebellion. Britain's 'jewel' was instrumental in it's function as a secure market and a de-industrialized raw materials-provider. - As for many Latin American nations, they simply could not compete with Britain, and, for extension, other European nations. For example, many manufacturing from Nueva Granada or Venezuela just couldn't keep up with cheap imports from the Northeast of the United States. The lack of bodies of water apt for navigation made for huge hauling costs (a lot of energy needs to be inverted in a pre-industrial context for land transport) and on the other, national unification, and the emergence of a 'national ruling class' came much later after independence, considering how many economic macro-systems were teared apart after indpendence from the Spanish, wich resulted in a relative impoversihment of regional commercial circuits and favored other economic reorientations. Next, in places like the southern cone (present-day Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia) to industrialize during the first half of the 19th century you needed coal and the necessary workforce. None of those were available, so these new states inserted themselves in the new international order as raw materials providers for the new manufacturing centers, which was a purely rational choice in that context. I can't even attempt to scratch the surface of a debate of this kind on a KZread comment, but in my opinion those are some things to consider when pondering questions like yours. As for my part, I tend not to ask questions like 'who won' and 'who lost' or 'who got there first and why and who got there last and why', and prefer to point out systems of interrelations and exchanges that shed light on the intercontectedness of history's developments, instead of focusing on narrow and misguiding nation-states approaches.

@efrainruiz8793

2 жыл бұрын

@@ivanmaisterra9612 I think that the best approach is the urban and rural relationship and how the elites invest in society. This video is on point, because talk about how the agriculture system can’t keep up with the urban population. The professor say that the city attract many people and the country side become isolated, that was like a RedPill for me because I thought that the country became so populated that people were pushed to the city, but the professor had other data

@efrainruiz8793

2 жыл бұрын

@@ivanmaisterra9612 the problem with Pomeranz is that he is trying to explain the Great Divergence with a 1820 phenomenon, but the real phenomenon happened with the creation of Classical Civilization in the Mediterranean, that is the only model that make the oligarchy an active agent in the economy, is the elites that create the logistics to make economic progress possible. So the coal and the colonies are not something that you can take for granted, the west have a tendency to expansion and to create a banking system. If you combine that with the scientific revolution (that is a European thing) you have a Industrial Revolution in no time, like is was meant to be, even the Bible contributed to the illustration and the fight with the Catholic Church. (The telescope 🔭 create a revolution in Europe like in no other place)

@coronadesona5100

Жыл бұрын

@@efrainruiz8793 He addresses all those claims in the book that shares a name with the lecture, actually. In South Asia with the "Portfolio Capitalists" of Iran and India, Edo-period financialized daimyos, and capital-investing elites in Qing China (for which we know they had dynastic investment trust funds not unlike how they work in the West today) all demonstrate a sophistication of capital-leveraging on par with the richest areas of Western Europe. So the phenomenon of an elite "oligarchical" class with free capital to invest is not unique to the West in any respect. Towards your point about the banking system, he also compares the financial instruments available to elites in China and Japan and notes that capital was in fact freer in many respects than in most of Europe, with the key difference that armed and coercive trade advantaged Europe (think the BEIC and DEIC) which translated into ecological surplus as he explains in the video. He also examines the claim regarding the scientific revolution, but as far as productive technologies (metallurgy, weaving, freight), the scientific revolution did not immediately convert to any type of advantage before the Newcomen engine provided an obvious use case in coal mines.

@efrainruiz8793

Жыл бұрын

@@coronadesona5100 The European elite had a lot more wage worker like no other elites in the world, so is not the same type of oligarchs. The industrial revolution can’t happen in a void, the data show a explosion in surplus in the 19 century but was thanks to centuries of wester history.

read amitabh ghosh's book, riffing on this