[ SECRET POST #6341 ]

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⌈ Secret Post #6341 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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[Happy Saint Sheol]















Notes:

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Comments

Re: Controversial opinion.s

[(Anonymous)]

Uhm. So. I sort of agree, sort of disagree.

First, general point - one major problem with trying to think about the industrial revolution and on the onset of modernity is that it's very much a sample size of 1 situation. It's extremely hard to think through which features of it were necessary which were contingent because there just is not the evidence available to us. We can't run a thousand simulations seeing how it would play out in different scenarios. So it's just generally fucking hard to think about.

Second - I do think that colonial trade was a very crucial factor in setting off the industrial revolution. But there are a lot of different ways for colonialism to impact the industrial revolution, and some things where it seems obvious that it was important were actually not super crucial IMO. So for instance, cheap materials and free labor - it's hard for me to see that this was a major sine qua non for the industrial revolution to take place, because of course the whole point of the early industrial revolution was to increase labor productivity significantly through technological development and investment. So, the point is not to increase productivity by increasing the number of man-hours worked; the point is to get more product out of the same man-hours. So free labor is not necessarily a huge part of that equation.

It seems to me that the main impact of colonialism was the profitability of global and colonial trade, and my view is that the main effect of this is that it had a demand-pull effect on industrialization: in other words, the high profitability of global trade led to significant increases in real wages in trade cities, hence led to massive increases in consumer demand, hence provided an economic incentive for industrial development. Now, obviously, the profitability of the colonial trade did depend to an extent on the exploitative nature of the colonization of the Americas. And certainly, especially later in the 18th century, the Atlantic trade was very profitable. And earlier, exploitation of precious metals was absolutely a huge aspect of the whole situation, and the Spanish engaged in pretty horrifying labor practices there. So you absolutely couldn't say that colonial exploitation played no role.

But I would also question how necessary those practices actually were for colonial trade. Like, I think it's possible to imagine colonial practices and colonial trade that were highly profitable for European traders without being so exploitative. A ton of the advantage of European traders during the period was essentially being arbitrageurs between America and Asia: America had unexploited stores of precious metals, Asia had a huge dearth of precious metals but produced a lot of highly valuable trade goods. So given the extraordinarily advantageous position European traders were able to place themselves in as middlemen between those two regions, I think their trading would have been extraordinarily profitable no matter what.

And then the other thing is that it's not really clear how capital-intensive the industrial revolution actually was, especially in its early stages. Like, a lot of the early investments in industrial productivity were carried out on an entrepreneurial basis by relatively small firms. And they weren't really reliant on banks for financing or loans. So while colonial trade and exploitation definitely played a role, it's not necessarily clear how crucial that role was.