Comment by myrmidon
3 months ago
> Wether we like it or not these are the pillars of the western world
Not sure I understand you correctly, but I strongly disagree that colonialism was a necessary foundation for todays wealthy western democracies.
I would consider it more another symptom-- once the perpetrators realized how outmatched the rest of the world was in military/logistics (especially compared to their direct neighbors).
Older cultures acted exactly the same way, compare e.g. Romans, Huns, Egyptians, Persians (European colonialism just had the naval logistics to make this work on a bigger scale).
> Not sure I understand you correctly, but I strongly disagree that colonialism was a necessary foundation for todays wealthy western democracies.
Then go visit Sevilla and enjoy the output of the mines in the cathedral (no danger at all). And then think a little how amassing enough silver by slavery to make a 60feet high altar 300 years ago didn't give you quite a nice headstart on dominating a world where most other competing cultures valued the same metals as currency.
Not saying this is particularly wrong in the grand scheme or we need to all be in eternal deference to anyone claiming to be a descendant of the people our ancestors exterminated for this. But it should be clear, getting access to these resources and ruthlessly exploiting them made Europe rich and enabled all the other colonialization which followed.
> And then think a little how amassing enough silver by slavery to make a 60feet high altar 300 years ago didn't give you quite a nice headstart on dominating a world where most other competing cultures valued the same metals as currency.
This is where we disagree. My position is that colonialism was a consequence of post-medieval Europe being dominant, instead of the other way around.
I'm not disputing that colonialism profitted the perpetrators, but I think giving it major credit for 20th-century Europes wealth is just a misattribution (if I had to reduce that to one word it would be "industrialization" and not "colonialism", very clearly).
Early ~1900 power dynamics are another strong indicator-- even at the height of colonialism, the nations engaging very heavily in it (British, Spanish, Portugese, Dutch) struggled to keep up with Germany which did not get significant benefit from it at all.
I would also argue that the biggest value of colonies was less in the raw extraction of ressources, but instead in the trade/arbitration (and additional markets) that they enabled (i.e. the big value-add was not so much stealing the silver out of the ground in Argentinia, but instead the act of getting/selling it to China).
> But it should be clear, getting access to these resources and ruthlessly exploiting them made Europe rich and enabled all the other colonialization which followed.
I'm not GP, but the connections you're making between this sentence and the sentences prior to it are the suspicious ones. What you need to do is argue against the claim that it those things that allowed for the accumulation of all this silver that allowed for the success of colonization.