But answer me, is Haiti more prosperous than the United States for abolishing slavery almost half a century earlier?
Is Eastern Europe much more prosperous for abolishing slavery several centuries earlier than Western Europe?
- 9
- 1
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Is Eastern Europe much more prosperous for abolishing slavery several centuries earlier than Western Europe?
But to make car batteries, rare metals are needed, which are extracted using child labor in Africa and their components are assembled in factories with almost 14 working hours a day in China and India... So even today the Unfortunately, slavery exists, the free market has promoted this type of modern slavery, so I do not see the "malus" for being a consumer of such products in the current United States.
- 5
- 3
Yes is only a different type of slave: the wage they offer are so close are slavery job!
- 1
Once again, you are lying. Open a history book, dude. The free market is the oldest economic system bar-none. It's been around since mankind has been around. It didn't just begin in the Victorian era. Economic and social development slowed to a crawl once the top-down feudal economic system took over in Europe. Meanwhile, the bazaars of India and the Middle East were thriving centers of free market wheeling-and-dealing trade. Same thing with the Italian merchant republics that was the left-over legacy of the Roman Republic.
Once the idea of freedom and individual autonomy began to creep back in, not just in the USA, but all over Europe, that's when things really began to take off. Once the USA banished slavery for good, economic output began to really take off. Until corporate communism started taking over in the 1880s with inefficient business practices just to put smaller businesses out. Like the railroads inefficiently opening restaurants, dropping prices to rock-bottom levels that were unprofitable, just to drive out a small restaurant next door. Then raise their prices beyond what normal people could afford.
Heroes like William Jennings Bryan and Teddy Roosevelt fought against the corporate communists, and won. And American productivity went skyrocketing again.
- 4
- 3
Yes, exactly. Rightwingers are allowing the corporate communists to destroy the economy once again. We haven't learned our lessons from the 1880s,or from slavery, or from feudalism or from communism.
- 4
- 3
I don't know your country, but in my country the leftwingers abbandoned the workers...for...help the corporate.
- 1
Let's ignore that Rome subsidized Egypt's grain and controlled the price of essential products, let's ignore the monopoly it had with purple dye, let's also ignore the internal routes of the empire made by the state, let's ignore the hundreds of ships annually that transported the central government to give them to poor Roman citizens.
Let us ignore that India had a monopoly on spices, let us also ignore the state monopoly on fabrics in the subcontinent, let us ignore the policy of ports closed to unauthorized merchants that was maintained until the Mughal empire.
Let's literally ignore the ENTIRE Chinese economy for more or less 3000 years.
Let us also ignore that the Italian republics imposed multiple state monopolies on goods arriving from the Far East until the Ottomans dissolved the Italian monopolies, to now control prices themselves.
Is this the free trade that has always existed?
- 8
Austria-Hungary, and Poland-Lithuania were pretty prosperous, clear to the end of WWI. As was the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire had slaves, Austria did not. Austria is still around, the Ottoman Empie is not.
In ovation is driven by free men and women. NOT by slaves. In all cases, slave-holding societies fall behind free societies.
Even better allowing women full equality. Women constitute about 51% of the population. The larger percentage of your population that can fully partake in economics and individual autonomy, the more efficient the nation utilizes the population it has. It really is that simple.
- 4
- 3
Tecnically Ottoman empire uses slaves only in the ships (like europeans) and as soldiers (jannassiers)
- 1
No they also used slaves in farms and plantations, sourced from the balkans, russia, and africa
The Ottomans were the ruling family of what we know as Turkey, otherwise England would have to be different from the United Kingdom... But Austria-Hungary does not exist, since everything was dissolved, including the most basic institutions of what it was before, It would be like saying today that Yugoslavia still exists because Serbia still exists.
Besides... Guess who were among the first to give women a voice and vote... The communists XD
- 2
- 1
And let's not forget that literally Poland, and even worse, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ceased to exist a few centuries ago, so the Poland that exists today has nothing to do with the Poland of the Renaissance.
- 3
Poland Lithuania was long gone by ww1
Austria is a republic and a tiny slither of what the Hapsburgs once were. The Ottoman Empire was abolished and a Turkish Republic estabilshed in its place, holding onto both Thrace and much of Old Armenia
If that was the case, why was the Ottoman Empire faster to adopt gunpowder compared to numerous Eastern European states, which it would go on to conquer
Then I'd reccomend reading into Ottoman slavery, Egypt being the province that was the biggest consumer of slaves
- 4
US didnt have much of a hand in it. Britain more important due to embargoing slave trade and getting various countries to sign treaties ending it, then Europeans writ large due to conquest of what remained sans a few empires
No. The free market is an 18th century concept that only found support later on and absolutely doesn't fit with the economy of early tribes.
Early tribes are either hunter-gatherers, who have such a simple lifestyle that makes it hard to even talk about an economy at all, and early agricultural peoples, who are only slightly better. Neither of these groups have any place for "diverse sets of individual skill" because these peoples are focused on survival and employ all of their resources into either agriculture for the settled peoples or hunting and gathering for the nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples (and the few odd sedentary hunter-gatherers).
With the development of further agriculture sometimes a surplus can be created that eventually leads to the development of urban societies and civilization, which is the kind of polities that have existed from Ancient Sumer, passing through Rome, up to Louis XIV's France. All these polities still have in common the same fundamentals: the overwhelming majority of the population works in the field to produce the agricultural surplus necessary to feed everyone and also support advanced urban society. Most of the population is forced to work in the field, in highly collectivized rural communities, because agriculture demands it and without it there's no civilization. People do not have a free choice, even if there weren't serfdom or slavery or whatever awful system of government control people would come up with, because the fundamental economic system in pre-industrial societies doesn't allow for individual freedom as we understand it in modernity. It's intrinsically only something a few elite can enjoy.
People struggle to understand how fundamentally the industrial revolution changed human society to its very core.
No, mercantilism is about maximizing exports and minimizing imports with the aim of not having to rely on foreign imports while having other people buy your goods, with the government playing a major role in ensuring that national interests and protection of national goods are ensured. Slavery isn't necessarily part of the picture, but mercantilism is a 17th century European economic theory and all European trade empires traded in slaves, so...
Also, as explained before, the free market is at most as old as Adam Smith, and only ever makes sense as an economic system for industrial societies. That's 300 years while being way too much generous.
However, slaving societies dominated large parts of Eurasia from Sumer to Louis XIV, and are clearly way older and have existed for much longer than any system where "the vast majority of the population freely makes choices as to what they need or want", because these other societies only came into existence very recently.
I'll have to repeat myself, but this is important: the modern ideas of people choosing the profession they want, living where they want, with their individual worth having a great deal of importance even if they're not economically or politically important are all modern concepts brought forth by 18th and 19th century economic and political revolutions that changed radiacally the way society worked. Egyptian peasants under the Pharaoh had no chance in life except staying peasants unless absurd luck came their way, and Medieval peasants several millennias later were in the same situation, but at least agriculture had got somewhat more reliable thanks to technology.
While having slavery themselves?
Britain developed its industrial revolution well before outlawing slavery, and while profiting off it.
It seems that Spain went into decline apparently because of slavery, not the fact that they kept importing tons of silver without realizing that "inflation" isn't just a fetish on DeviantArt, and then Britain took their place, even though they were the guys who brought slavery to North America to begin with.
Make it make sense.
Well, it was a fantastic failure, morally speaking, but practically speaking it actually lasted a very long time, definitely more than the lifespan of actual free trade economies, and was seemingly sustainable enough to survive through antiquity and the Medieval world even with the new Abrahamic religious clearly disliking the institutions because Christianity tried to make it illegal for Christians to enslave other Christians, and that prohibition barely worked even in the Middle Ages, and Islam tried to limit the practice of slavery to non-Muslims only as well, and there was endless abuse on their end of things as well.
This is such a slop of messy, politically-infused historical misconceptions and ideological nonsense.
- 6
- 1
- 1
- 1
I have to disagree with this. Free trade makes sense for any interconnected society, the main question is if the state can effectively tax it. If not what you get is a mix of sanctioned merchants and smugglers who are trying to create value by moving good around, a concept that isn't usually intuited as actually creating value hence why merchants are so vilified in so many cultures. In this period free trade would actually be useful for maximizing economic growth, but the problem is that you, as a state, want that sweet tax revenue to remain competitive, and also don't like being dependent on other states which aren't clearly subordinate you you. So for this reason a mercantilism policy makes sense for strategic reasons, you want other states to be dependent on you for trade while still having strategic flexibility yourself, even if it's suboptimal for your long term economic growth in an idealized scenario.
- 2
- 1
- 1
For a simple reason: if they embargoes you by vitals resource you are screwed, if they ask more money they can freely ask (demaging you), they can be possible enemies!
- 1