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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.
This assessment lines up more or less with Charles Murray's mapping of significant historical figures in his book Human Accomplishment, which shows disproportionate numbers of notable people being born in the European core i.e. Northern Italy, Western Germany, France, the Low Countries, and England starting in the late Middle Ages. This in turn lines up more or less with the Hajnal line, suggesting that changes in family structure and social organization in western Europe during the centuries between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance were the proximate cause. England in particular may have been making moves in this direction earlier than the rest of Europe (the loss of specific terms for extended family members in the English language and simplification of rules for blood money payments in the event of clan feuds seem to have happened there first).
This is very interesting to me, can you elaborate?
As far back as we can look, Old English seems not to precisely distinguish between the different types of cousins. It has been noted that:
This is quite unlike that of most continental Germanic systems at that time, in which such distinctions were of paramount importance in both criminal and inheritance law. Weregild payments in compensation for a crime, while present among the Anglo-Saxons (which is why we have the word), seem to have been a smaller-scale affair i.e. you pay the aggrieved party's immediate family, rather than one in which everyone out to your nth cousins had to pay blood money to every extended relative of the aggrieved party to the nth degree, with decreasing amounts based on your distance from the subject of the dispute. The latter system seems to have been in place among the Old Franks in France, the Old Norse in Scandinavia, and indeed in many modern tribal societies today.
All this would seem to suggest an earlier transition in England to living in nuclear families, in which it is both unnecessary and impractical to distinguish between cousins that are older or younger, male or female, paternal or maternal, or of increasing distance from oneself. It may also go some way towards explaining the cultural distinctiveness of the English and the broader Anglosphere as compared to other Europeans.
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Most languages have different words for eg maternal and paternal uncles, brothers in law married to your sister and brothers in law related to your wife, maternal and paternal grandparents, 1st and 2nd cousins, aunts by marriage and aunts by blood, etc. I’m not an old Germanic scholar but my understanding is that old English was no exception- however, English today does not have those terms, and their disappearance is probably linked to the hajnal line setting in.
Likewise blood feud payments were drawn from an elaborate clan structure; each relative of the killer paid a certain amount based on how closely related to him he was(or else the killer was killed in turn) and each relative of the murdered man received his share of the payment, again, depending on how closely related to him he was. Where the law codes governing this survive, it’s possible to track the extent and closeness of extended families by looking at the codes- in laws and 3rd cousins being dropped indicates smaller extended families.
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