HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 8 months ago
Everyone seems to be focusing on colonialism, but that really only brought Europe to a standard of living near India and China.
The real major thing that happened was that “the West” started industrializing before the rest of the world did. Some of the wealth came from colonial holdings that industrial countries had, but a lot of it came from having citizens who were more than a order of magnitude more economically productive than citizens of other countries for over a century.
Why the Indian subcontinent and China didn’t industrialize at the time is up to debate, but some theories are related to lower labor costs not sparking the positive feedback engine of industrialization until it was too late to compete against the West and going into periods of relative decline that Western countries could take advantage of.
The West was able to make itself the factory of the world, pushing the rest of the world into resource extraction.
It wasn’t until after World War II that other parts of the world were able to industrialize.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I have always assumed that white people have a leg up because they’re white. That is, they’ve lived for an evolutionarily relevant duration of time in places where you need low melanin to get sufficient vitamin D to survive. Places with low sunlight and harsh winters, which means places where failing to develop efficient agriculture, food preservation/storage, insulated shelters, and textiles meant starving or freezing to death.
Non-white people lived for an evolutionarily relevant duration of time in places with more consistent sunlight and milder winters, where sun over-exposure was a more pressing threat than under-exposure. That means more forgiving crops and climates, so less pressure to streamline agriculture and subsequently industrialize.
sparky@lemmy.federate.cc 8 months ago
I get what this guy is trying to say but the phrasing and unnecessary racialising explains the downvotes. A better and less offensive way to put this could simply have referred to climate: that you suspect the harsher climate in Europe rewarded industrial and penalised agrarian lifestyles in a way that wasn’t true for civilisations near the equator. Being white or not has nothing to do with it - correlation versus causation.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Yes, correlation is exactly what I’m saying. I’m not saying “white” as a race, I’ve been explicitly saying “white” as skin tone. The same environmental conditions which reward efficient agriculture and the conditions for industrialization also correlate to pressures toward sun-absorbant skin.
My position has nothing to do with “race” and everything to do with coincidentally correlated environmental effects. Was I not sufficiently clear? Even did I even bring up race, distinct from skin tone in-and-of-itself? “White” isn’t even a race, so far as race is even a rational concept.
sparky@lemmy.federate.cc 8 months ago
I do understand the point you’re making actually, but you’re wading into emotionally charged waters here. I would argue “white” is an inherently racial term, but the more importantly, the correlation is not really relevant to the discussion and needlessly muddies your broader point (that climate may inspire or disincentive industrialisation) by injecting it with racial discussion.
barsoap@lemm.ee 8 months ago
There’s something to say about winters leading to social orders around food storage and planning ahead, but then England didn’t really need to do that and they were the first to really start the industrialisation game. It was plain and simple pure capitalism. The Nordic countries, where those climatic conditions are very much real, are way more naturally Socdem than the Anglos.
Another geographic, not so much climatic, factor is the availability of water power: Europe is blessed with a metric fuckton of small streams large enough to build a mill on. That meant a comparatively productive agriculture, which meant more tradespeople, traders, and with that finally a bourgeoisie which could do that capitalism and industrialisation thing and exploit the serfs harder than the nobles ever managed to do, being stuck in age-old social relations which didn’t allow for ordering people around like that.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 8 months ago
There are several times in history that Europeans would not be considered the peak of human development due to very measurable differences in quality of life.
You’ll also find other pseudoscience bullshit trying to justify the superiority of one group over another from at least Roman times.
The fact of the matter is that several areas had the resources and technical development to start the Industrial Revolution; it just happened to spark in the United Kingdom first and spread through Europe quickly.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Okay. I dunno if you think I’m saying any group “superior” because I I’m very much not . I thought I was very much exploring saying that their advantage was much more based on incidental environmental conditions than any kind of genetic superiority or anything even remotely close to that. Just brainstorming explanations for history that cut that exact “superiority” bullshit out of the picture
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 8 months ago
Romans literally thought they were the best because the people north of them were too emotional due to cold weather and people south of them weren’t hard enough due to hot weather.
And I also brought up that the most developed part of the world shifted over time, something that you’ve talked past rather than addressing to how it affects your theory of vitamin D.