MooDengist [he/him]

The only reason I made a comment is because you got shit wrong before I do not believe you when I correct you and you go “Ah yes that’s actually what I meant I just assumed everyone knew” stop this like weird ‘marxist intellectual’ aesthetic and either make better posts or stop being a little weirdo throwing materialist around.

I’m saying it’s much much later and it wasn’t industrial capitalism kicked into high gear that did it this is just you going. “The British woke up one day and found themselves at the helm of an empire.” You now saying… “Well of course I also was saying all those other things.”

But here’s the kicker you said and I’m going to quote you

Europe was pretty much a backwater until the late 1400s* and England had the unique conditions to develop agrarian capitalism and later industrial capitalism.

*Even at 1500 CE, China and India’s estimated domestic production massively outstripped Europe and it wasn’t until industrial capitalism kicked into gear that this changed

You are quite literally off by more than 300 years giving people just like wrong timeframes and you haven’t adressed the main point which is this:

The usual sterotype of nineteenth-century economic history is that Asia stood still while the Industrial Revolution propelled the West forward. That’s only true in a superficial sense for one asia lost it much later, around 1850s, and it was not because one region industrialized while the other didnt but that there was a deliberate attempt at deindustrialization of Asia through policy.

Again you can say all you want about what you meant or intended but that isn’t how it’s read how it’s read is

*Even at 1500 CE, China and India’s estimated domestic production massively outstripped Europe and it wasn’t until industrial capitalism kicked into gear that this changed

‘A short time after 1500 Europe started to do capitalism with manufacturies and then industries while asia stood still.’ When again Asia didn’t which I pointed out like sorry you weren’t saying that in your initial post and are just now retroactively saying that ‘Obviously this is what I meant’ when you simply didn’t write it out and it read exactly like ‘The West industrialized while Asia stood still.’ which is doubly ironic because it is something I hear libs say so many times why the third world exists, it just happened. When the reality is that the third world was made.

The usual sterotype of nineteenth-century economic history is that Asia stood still while the Industrial Revolution propelled the West forward. That’s only true in a superficial sense for one asia lost it much later, around 1850s, and it was not because one region industrialized while the other didnt but that there was a deliberate attempt at deindustrialization of Asia through policy. The looms of India and China weren’t defeated by ‘the market’ but they were forcibly and violently dismantled through wars, invasion, opium and one-way tariffs.

Bairoch

“It is very likely that, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the average standard of living in Europe was a little bit lower than that of the rest of the world. When the sans culottes strormed the Bastille, the largest manufacturing districts in the world were still the Yangzi Delta and Bengal, with Lingan (Modern Guandong and Guangxi) and coastal Madras not far behind. India along produced one-quarter of world manufactures and while its ‘pre-capitalist agrarian labour’ productivity’ was probably less than the Japanese-Chinese level, its commercial capital surpassed that of the chinese.”

Philip Huang

“The overall economic development of the Yangzi Delta in the Qing exceeded that of ‘early modern’ England”

Bin Wong

"Specific conditions associated with european proto-industrialization - expansion of seasonal crafts, shrinking farm size, and good marketing systems - may have been even more widespread in China [and India] than in Europe.

Pomeranz:

“The lower Yangui appear to have produced roughly as much cotton cloth per capita in 1750 as the UK did cotton, wool, linen and silk cloth combined in 1800 - plus an enourmous quantity of silk.”

Maddison

"The Chinese GDP in absoulte terms grew faster than that of Europe throughout the eighteenth century, dramatically enlarging its share of world income by 1820 (32.4% vs 26.6% of europe)

Shit even Marx pointed out that the brits liked to hide their incredibly bloody business when it came to capitalism so I don’t know how yours is like materialist. If you are going to correct someone try to be correct I guess?