Ahaie Tengwar Angulócello

Another thinky thought post brought on by a video seeking to answer the question why Europeans enslaved Africans specifically.

And while the video didn't contain any misinformation, it felt a bit incomplete because I've recently read David Graeber's "Debt the first 5000 years," and because of a recent post on the Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry Blog which talked about slavery in the process of critiquing a world conquest strategy video game

( Read more... )Lastly, have a table from Debt, showing just how miserably poor Europe was compared to essentially everyone else in Eurasia, even when comparing them to nations from centuries or millennia previous. Crappy climate > low agricultural productivity > low population densities > few and small cities > economic backwater.

Copying just one column of data from a table showing population and tax revenue for several ancient and early medieval nations:

Persia 350 BCE, 41 grams of silver per person per year
Egypt 200 BCE, 55 grams,
Rome 1 CE 17 grams,
Rome 150 CE 21 grams,
Byzantium 850 CE 15 grams,
Abbasids, 850 CE 48 grams,
T'ang, 850 CE 43 grams
France 1221 2.4 grams
England 1203 4.6 grams