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An anonymous substacker has written up a good piece on the Rise of the West. Essentially, he comes to the conclusion that the divergence began in the 1000-1500 A.D. period and that subsequent colonisation efforts by Europe of the rest of the world was simply an outgrowth of those earlier advantages.
This of course upends the familiar trope of "the West got rich by the backs of the Third World" so popular with leftists in the West and in countries like India, across the political spectrum. I bring this up because if the poor countries of the world today have any hope of catching up, they should first re-examine honestly why they fell behind in the first place. Yet I see precious little of that, except mostly moral grandstanding about the evils of the exploitative West.
This also has domestic political implications because a lot of white guilt-driven narratives are sprung from the narrative that the West got rich by exploitation and thus the logical corollary is that evil white people should repent (preferably through monetary reparations). The narrative that colonisation was simply a natural outgrowth of European pre-existing advantages that grew over time naturally undermines it. One could also note that the Barbary slave trade, or the slave auctions in the Ottoman Empire, shows that the Third World was far from innocent. But of course these historical facts don't have high political payoffs in the contemporary era, so they are ignored or underplayed.
I'm one of those Third Worlders.
Honestly: we discuss this constantly. I remember hearing from a Muslim intellectual that it's also a constant topic of conversation around the Arab dinner table how they went from the Umayyads to...this.
The West gets blamed but it's not all external - Islamism for example often centers the problems (in line with the Deuteronomist view) on the moral decay of Muslims. This does implicate the West but often their loathing is vastly more intense for the "near enemy" and the people resisting the imposition of Islamic law. Don't get the average African ranting about the corrupt elites either.
Not really. There's two easy counters:
Colonization was a product of advantage that may have reinforced said advantage (e.g. Roman advantage in manpower allowed them to conquer which then led to more manpower) and thus was to the benefit of the West so something is owed regardless.
It was still wrong. Rome being able to conquer Gaul doesn't change that allegedly enslaving a million Gauls is wrong.
What it does debunk is the view that Westerners are uniquely evil or cruel. But that is a view that hardly needs debunking for any serious interlocutor - one need only look at the empires of "PoC" when they had the capacity. Or how some of the ills they later perpetrated were already common (e.g. sub-Saharan Africans selling slaves to lighter skinned, monotheistic foreigners)
It persists due to some mix of the need for slave morality to sooth the ressentiment in the "PoC" losers in the Great Divergence and to help the PoC elites to harangue or outcompete their colleagues in the West. And for the whites with some guilt to center themselves in some inverted version of white exceptionalism. EDIT: or cowed by DEI commissars.
None of these impulses seem particularly soluble to argument.
Cousin marriage, which if practised serially reduces IQ by perhaps ten points deviation was internally never proposed as a major cause of the backwardness of middle East, right ?
Yeah, that one never comes up AFAICT.
To the point where, if I hadn't seen it in the BBC first, I might have thought it was a far right thing (not the only case of this - see "Muslamic ray guns")
And I grew up in a Muslim country - albeit not a Middle Eastern one.
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