A big silent intellectual change of the past quarter century. The West got rich because Westerners are different. People from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies are WEIRD. The most important argument: this came from the Catholic church, which banned cousin marriage.

submitted by Chipit from astralcodexten.substack.com

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[–]jet199 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

The West got rich and better tech which then enabled them to conquer the rest of the world.

After that it was still industrialisation and not empires which made the West richer.

[–]weavilsatemyface 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The West got rich and better tech which then enabled them to conquer the rest of the world.

You have it backwards. The west got better tech, which enabled them to conquer the world and get rich.

British India is the perfect example. For 1800 years, India was very possibly the single richest nation in the world, with around 25% of global GDP, based on trade as far away as Rome and Egypt. But after the British got their hands on it, between the British Raj and the East India Company, India fell to one of the poorest countries in the world, with less than 1% of global GDP.

After that it was still industrialisation and not empires which made the West richer.

Where do you think the west got the raw materials to feed the factories? They got it by exploiting the subject empires.

And the man-power to keep the empire going? In WW2, the British famously spoke of "standing alone" against the Nazis, but they conveniently ignored the Empire and Dominion. Britain mobilised about 6-7 million men and women for the Armed Forces (which was a slightly smaller percentage of their total population than Germany) but they also mobilised another 7-8 million from the Empire. To say nothing of the millions of (mostly Indian) subjects who aided the war effort in non-combat roles as labourers.

The same applied in WW1. France had their African colonial troops. Britain had Africans, Indians and others. It has been said by historians that the typical French or British soldier in the trenches in WW1 had black or brown skin, a fact which is entirely absent from our western collective memory.