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SlothfulCobra posted:I know that Portugal and Spain were buying African slaves even long before they found the New World, but I don't really know how they were used in particular, or if other countries like England were buying. I suspect if England wasn't buying it was probably more because they didn't have the money or trade connections to buy much. the iberians definitely had a little bit of slavery going on pre-colonialism, but there's not an overwhelming reason to buy african slaves for use in europe when yeah, you've got serfs, etc. right there. if europeans didn't die in droves when they set foot in the caribbean it's entirely possible that just shipping poor europeans over would have been more economical than going to africa for slaves, even - there wasn't yet a corpus of racial theory justifying slavery on the basis of skin color after all.
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Sep 11, 2020 16:32
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Was the population decline caused by Plague (which IIRC bargained-up wages and led to farm -> city migration, to the point where there were  "No more farm -> city migration, you guys!" laws passed) a driver for African slave-taking?I want to say I remember reading something like that somewhere? 
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Sep 11, 2020 16:39
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feedmegin posted:'Everyone' did, huh? How many slaves do you think there were in western Europe in the 1700s, precisely? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Portugal
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Sep 11, 2020 16:50
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LingcodKilla posted:We started at the coliseum, forum, pantheon and just got to the Vatican. Saw a bunch of stuff in between. It’s been amazing. Jealous, Rome is fantastic. Biggest thing I didn't see and regret is the Etruscan museum. Also head over to Ostia if you weren't already planning to. Even when there isn't a plague it doesn't have a lot of tourists, right now you'd just about have the whole city to yourself.
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Sep 11, 2020 18:07
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Schadenboner posted:Was the population decline caused by Plague (which IIRC bargained-up wages and led to farm -> city migration, to the point where there were The short version is that colonial ventures needed slaves to be profitable, and sugar made them INSANELY profitable. There was an existing slave trade in the Arab world going way back, and sugar was insanely work intensive to cultivate and process. IIRC the plant is native to India or Indonesia or somewhere thereabouts and the Indian Ocean trade brought it to the mid-east in something like the 9th or 10th century. Europeans get introduced to it during the crusades, and it becomes a major export of the various crusader kingdoms. Cyprus picked up the slack for both production and importation once those collapsed, and that's where you start seeing European-owned slaves growing it. When the Portugese start expanding westward into the islands in the Atlantic they figured out that the climate was decent for growing sugar, but no one really wanted to move out to some lovely rocks in the ocean. They plugged into the existing slave networks in North Africa to provide labor. The big kicker was when they took Sao Tome and Principe off the coast of West Africa and started grabbing slaves themselves from the nearby coast of sub-saharan africa. IIRC this is also when they demonstrated that slaves could process sugar as well as cultivate it, which meant that you could have plantations way the gently caress off. From there it's a pretty direct line to setting up huge as hell slave plantations in Brazil, and then everyone else in Europe realizing there was insane money to be made taking Africans to the Americas to grow sugar.
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Sep 11, 2020 18:29
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Cyrano4747 posted:The short version is that colonial ventures needed slaves to be profitable, and sugar made them INSANELY profitable. Yeah, the Portuguese started experimenting with sugar plantations in their Atlantic islands, implanted a perfected model in Brazil, and afterwards were emulated by every European power who were able to grab a few Caribbean islands in the 1600s. It's impressive how influential those Madeira plantations ended up being. Related links with basic info: https://daily.jstor.org/madeira-the-island-that-helped-invent-capitalism/ https://www.bl.uk/west-india-regiment/articles/an-introduction-to-the-caribbean-empire-and-slavery http://discoveringbristol.org.uk/slavery/routes/places-involved/west-indies/plantation-system/
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Sep 11, 2020 18:58
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feedmegin posted:'Everyone' did, huh? How many slaves do you think there were in western Europe in the 1700s, precisely?  I'm pretty shocked at just how whitewashed history becomes where someone can make a post like this.
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Sep 11, 2020 19:34
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Grand Fromage posted:Jealous, Rome is fantastic. Biggest thing I didn't see and regret is the Etruscan museum. Also head over to Ostia if you weren't already planning to. Even when there isn't a plague it doesn't have a lot of tourists, right now you'd just about have the whole city to yourself. We spent two hours at the Vatican musuem but I could have easily spent a whole day. poo poo was amazing. Really cream of the crop for statues. Makes the stuff in the US look like sun baked playdough.
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Sep 11, 2020 19:39
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Rome is awesome. Everyone needs to go
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Sep 11, 2020 19:40
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euphronius posted:Rome is awesome. Everyone needs to go I've never been to Europe. 
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Sep 11, 2020 19:42
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Mr. Nice! posted:I've never been to Europe. It was easy to go when j ok was like 23 It would probably be harder ($$$$) now because I can’t stay in sketchy hostels for 18€ a night
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Sep 11, 2020 19:43
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LingcodKilla posted:We spent two hours at the Vatican musuem but I could have easily spent a whole day. poo poo was amazing. Really cream of the crop for statues. Makes the stuff in the US look like sun baked playdough. Pieta might be one of the most impressive things I've ever seen. I also spent something like 30 minutes just looking at the marble floor in St. Peter's.
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Sep 11, 2020 19:43
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Beamed posted:
I think that was less whitewashing and more drawing a weird nationalistic distinction between Europeans in Europe and Europeans in America that didn't really exist at the time. Although I guess contemporaries at the time would've had a heavy "out of sight out of mind" perspective on the whole industry of human suffering that they only saw snippets of.
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Sep 11, 2020 21:22
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Perhaps it's my own fault for being so ignorant yet insisting on reading scholarly philosophical and historical texts but I get the feeling many of them assume you know at least some Latin. At least I'm pretty sure this is Latin. I am fluent in no languages except good ol' 'merican so in this book I'm reading on Greek political thought and its influences, I'm kind of annoyed the author doesn't translate a footnote quote he includes from the Catholic humanist thinker Erasmus who is, according to the footnote, criticizing Aristotle for departing too much from Plato on the idea of property. The footnote reads: "He writes in the Dulce bellum inexpertis (1515) that from Aristotle "didicimus non esse perfectam hominis felicitatam, nisi corporis & fortunae bonae accesserint. Ab hoc didicimus non posse florere remplublicam in qua sint omnia communia. Huius omnia decreta cum Christi doctrina conamur adglutinare, hoc est, aquam flammis miscere." I wasn't totally lost until the end there. I was actually thinking maybe it wouldn't be so hard to learn Latin, I can guess at a lot of these words, like my Spanish class in high school. But then at the end I just had tot throw up my hands in defeat.
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Sep 11, 2020 22:59
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Having cheap coffee,sugar etc from slavery in the colonies is not the same thing - economically or socially - as having dominant amounts of slave labour Right Here as you see in the USA or Brazil, and conflating the two is just bad history.
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Sep 11, 2020 23:08
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Nothingtoseehere posted:Having cheap coffee,sugar etc from slavery in the colonies is not the same thing - economically or socially - as having dominant amounts of slave labour Right Here as you see in the USA or Brazil, and conflating the two is just bad history. Of course it’s not the same thing. It’s much more palatable.
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Sep 11, 2020 23:15
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The original statement was that "everyone" had masses of slave labour in the 1700s. While most of europe profited off the backs of slaves, direct access to slave labour was very much limited to new world colonies - there was nowhere near the supply of cheap exploitable labour in Europe at the time.
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Sep 11, 2020 23:21
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Beamed posted:
What nothingtoseehere said. Im not denying Europeans benefitted from slavery abroad. I'm querying what influence 18th century industrialisation could possibly have on slavery because the poor people doing all the work in Europe where the industrial revolution was happening then were not slaves.
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Sep 11, 2020 23:35
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NikkolasKing posted:Perhaps it's my own fault for being so ignorant yet insisting on reading scholarly philosophical and historical texts but I get the feeling many of them assume you know at least some Latin. At least I'm pretty sure this is Latin. I am fluent in no languages except good ol' 'merican so in this book I'm reading on Greek political thought and its influences, I'm kind of annoyed the author doesn't translate a footnote quote he includes from the Catholic humanist thinker Erasmus who is, according to the footnote, criticizing Aristotle for departing too much from Plato on the idea of property. My Latin is rusty, and someone else could probably correct me on the details, but I think it's something like "We learn that a man would not reach perfect happiness, unless of body and of good fortune. From this we learn that it would be impossible for a republic to flourish in which all would be in common. We attempt to glue all these principles with the doctrine of Christ, that is, to mix water with fire." In other words, Erasmus is arguing that Aristotle rejected the idea of a society where all property was held in common because of the materialistic element in his idea of the good, and that this aspect of Aristotle's thought isn't really compatible with Christianity even though many Christians accept it in practice. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Sep 11, 2020 |
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Sep 11, 2020 23:43
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Silver2195 posted:My Latin is rusty, and someone else could probably correct me on the details, but I think it's something like "We learn that a man would not reach perfect happiness, unless of body and of good fortune. From this we learn that it would be impossible for a republic to flourish in which all would be in common. We attempt to glue all these principles with the doctrine of Christ, that is, to mix water with fire." In other words, Erasmus is arguing that Aristotle rejected the idea of a society where all property was held in common because of the materialistic element in his idea of the good, and that this aspect of Aristotle's thought isn't really compatible with Christianity even though many Christians accept it in practice. Cool, that makes sense. Thank you very much. The book is arguing about how Greek Philosophy as we know it differed significantly from Roman philosophy and politics in a few key ways, one of them being Greek vs. Roman conceptions of property. What I'm reading now is how every Roman historian hated these "Agrarian Laws" while Plutarch, a Platonist, was hugely in favor of them. Well there was one Roman historian who liked them apparently but he came from a plebian family or something. Anyway, thanks again.
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Sep 12, 2020 00:34
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feedmegin posted:What nothingtoseehere said. Im not denying Europeans benefitted from slavery abroad. I'm querying what influence 18th century industrialisation could possibly have on slavery because the poor people doing all the work in Europe where the industrial revolution was happening then were not slaves. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40579739 and https://www.jstor.org/stable/2116262. There's a lot more if you look for them. They're a pretty good examination of how slavery slowed down the USA from developing, and thus made them not as competitive vs states that had abolished slavery and industrialized. A common argument against slavery is that industrialized societies tend to have more specialized jobs unsuited for slaves, as you require a certain level of training and education that a slave would not generally have access to (and if you did give them such access to training, they would become far too valuable to just beat or kill whenever you needed to make an example of some disobedient worker). These freed laborers would be exponentially more efficient at general production (in terms of both cost and rate of production) compared to their enslaved counterparts. The more advanced the industrialized state got, the larger the advantage for that particular state vs another that still depended on slave labour. For the slave owning states, ultimately they either have to adapt, or they eventually just get out competed and made irrelevant by their more efficient counterparts. (This is the economical argument for ending slavery; there are of course the philosophical and moral arguments for it, but these arguments never worked on states that did support slavery.) Then there's also the fact how a fully industrialized society doesn't need slaves to function, and if they ban slavery, and has control of the world's oceans, then any society that did rely on the slave trade would instantly get screwed economically. Therefore, if a state that is industrialized has a geopolitical rival that does still use slavery, they can weaken the slave trade to economically attack the enemy state. As for European industrialization, most scholars agree that it would have been impossible without slavery. The fact that the European states got so much profit out of their faraway colonies (many which were powered by slaves) allowed them to spend a lot more domestically developing new technologies. https://www.jstor.org/stable/204653 (I'm sure you can find many other sources on it too). Cetea fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Sep 12, 2020 |
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Sep 12, 2020 03:29
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I've heard this bit on CBC radio a few times lately that pointed out in the 1830s that the value of slaves in the US exceeded that of all industrial activities in the US, and that the plantations were pretty much all financed by banks in London. So the Brits were happy to beat the enlightened abolitionist drum but even more happy to keep making money off of slavery.
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Sep 12, 2020 04:05
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Spanish is much easier to learn than Latin because the older the form of a language you study, the less sense it makes because it's before a lot of standardization and abbreviation. English is just a very extreme example where it went farther than a lot of other european languages and dropped its case system and grammatical gender entirely.
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Sep 12, 2020 04:52
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Do languages always lose complexity over time or do they ever regrow their declensions and stuff?
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Sep 12, 2020 04:53
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OctaviusBeaver posted:Do languages always lose complexity over time or do they ever regrow their declensions and stuff? Language never recomplex why think?
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Sep 12, 2020 04:55
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OctaviusBeaver posted:Do languages always lose complexity over time or do they ever regrow their declensions and stuff? Complexity is not something that can be meaningfully measured but for example modern Finnish has 14 noun cases compared to 9 in reconstructed proto-Finnish
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Sep 12, 2020 04:56
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Presumably they started off simple and got more complex to begin with?
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Sep 12, 2020 04:58
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I also question the claim that declensions are inherently more complex. Even in extreme cases you're learning maybe a hundred noun forms--a tiny fraction of the total memorization associated with learning a language. And is that really any more complex than memorizing the prepositions or word order constructions that languages without noun cases use to encode the same meaning?
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Sep 12, 2020 05:01
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cheetah7071 posted:I also question the claim that declensions are inherently more complex. Even in extreme cases you're learning maybe a hundred noun forms--a tiny fraction of the total memorization associated with learning a language. And is that really any more complex than memorizing the prepositions or word order constructions that languages without noun cases use to encode the same meaning? This is true in that it's probably a very personal difficulty as well as a first-language difficulty. Some people might find learning a bunch of irregular forms and varying cases and declensions harder than, say, learning Chinese or Japanese and having to memorize characters--others may think the other way around. Or English with its wild array of sounds and super inconsistent etymology might actually be the hardest! Very up to how you approach memorization or what you consider "memorization" at all. (And it's also true that the thread just came off of someone claiming an objective sense of 'progress' in history, so the implicit idea that nothing is objective might not be so implicit.) I may or may not also be particularly frustrated with the ancient Greeks because of their brand of bullshit. It feels like all of modern German in its unwieldiness was just training wheels--it seems like you can almost use the same sort of methods and reasoning, but the way they approach the same systems is different in very crucial ways and I keep tripping myself up, and being told that these are problems very particular to ancient Greek and the modern language is much more 'rational,' but also from the Latin students in the class that something will come up that's similarly awkward or tricky in Latin and there'll be a collective groan--but of course, that's because the two languages had such sustained and intense contact, partially, isn't it. Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 07:33 on Sep 12, 2020 |
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Sep 12, 2020 05:57
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The reliance on slavery did suppress industrialization, but so far as I know, that wasn't particularly a driver for abolition, since most of the powerful people in the south were married to the order of things and suicidally dedicated to preserving it at any cost. Even after forcible emancipation, racism and slavery-lite continued onward at great economic cost to society (on top of the human and moral cost). Long-term economic advantage of a free and equal society normally gets overlooked compared to moral imperative to end suffering and inequality, and even then it can be tough to get anything done about it. Considering how prevalent slavery was throughout the ancient world, it's weird that it died out anywhere. I know that it held on for a long time in the Ottoman Empire, and in Africa even after European/American demand for slaves died down the practice stuck around to the detriment of local development.
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Sep 12, 2020 05:58
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Grand Fromage posted:Jealous, Rome is fantastic. Biggest thing I didn't see and regret is the Etruscan museum. Make time for it. It's amazing.
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Sep 12, 2020 06:58
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There's an interesting linguistic theory* that people are born with grammatical constructions basically hardwired into our brains, and in the absence of structured language, we invent our own. Some of the most dramatic examples of this actually originate in the Caribbean slave system, where slaves were ripped from their home environment and into a deadly one often with others who spoke unrelated languages, and masters and drivers and slaves needed to communicate despite sharing no language in common. Hence, pidgin develops; very basic grammar, mostly just nouns and verbs, rarely any kind of conjugation or modification of words, and mostly drawing on words from the various mother tongues of the speakers. But then the slaves have children, and with this second generation comes a new creole language, using those same words but generally in all new ways. One of the most interesting features of a creole (which is a true language) is that it is very often more complex than either or any of the superstrate languages from which its vocabulary derives; more complex grammatical constructions, more tenses and moods, more conjugations; or, if not more complex, then it has different features than are present in the older native languages. *It looks like Bickerton was the writer I first read this from.
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Sep 12, 2020 07:14
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CommonShore posted:I've heard this bit on CBC radio a few times lately that pointed out in the 1830s that the value of slaves in the US exceeded that of all industrial activities in the US, and that the plantations were pretty much all financed by banks in London. So the Brits were happy to beat the enlightened abolitionist drum but even more happy to keep making money off of slavery. Turns out 'the Brits' aren't a monolith.
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Sep 12, 2020 12:01
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Mr. Nice! posted:I've never been to Europe. I dont even know how much it costs anymore It was expensive back when I went in 2004 or something
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Sep 12, 2020 13:02
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Mr. Nice! posted:I've never been to Europe. If it makes you feel any better, I've never been outside Europe. I teach ESL, and I've never even visited the United States! 
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Sep 12, 2020 14:02
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Buttulus and Beavus?
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Sep 12, 2020 16:38
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What fairy tale does the Wild hunt come from? I only heard about it from the witcher or maybe Warhammer.
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Sep 12, 2020 16:40
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Widespread across European folklore, associated with a variety of regional legendary figures (Odin, Arthur, Dietrich von Bern, Gwyn ap Nudd, etc), not really based in any particular origin as far as is known. The modern name comes from Grimm.
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Sep 12, 2020 16:48
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euphronius posted:I dont even know how much it costs anymore Rome is naturally one of the more expensive parts of Italy, but the further south you go the cheaper it gets. The one specific thing I remember was a Coke in Rome was 5 Euro, but in Campania was 0.50 Euro. Also good bottles of wine down south were like three Euro.
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Sep 12, 2020 17:12
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I haven't been to Rome yet, but I can warmly recommend Pompeii, the archaeological museum in Naples and pizza.
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Sep 12, 2020 17:13
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