The EU are toothless, and I don’t think they would actually do much outside of a few half-hearted condemnations. Without the empire, the EU are nothing, and would get annihilated by Russia and China. Hell, even with the US they would have a really bad time. The EU are posturing against the US now, but when it comes down to it, I don’t think they would risk a full on confrontation with the US if they were to try to annex Greenland. What are your thoughts?
Great Divergence’s traditional interpretation has been fundamentally challenged and refined by new data . New data shows that, the most advanced parts of Eurasia (the Yangzi Delta in China, Japan, parts of India) were on par with Western Europe in terms of standards of living, commercial sophistication, and agricultural productivity as late as 1750. There was no inherent European superiority. The divergence was not caused by earlier European superiority, but by contingent factors: access to New World resources (especially land-intensive products like sugar, cotton, and, crucially, silver) and readily accessible fossil fuels (British coal) that alleviated ecological constraints Asia still faced.
I’m not going into details more about euro-centrism and exceptionalism of the theory. Another issue is that the most advanced country was the UK it’s not the whole of the Europe. For example, Germany was a backward country until 1880s. We know how much Engels & Marx complained about the Germany’s backwardness philosophically, and politically.
I would suggest you to read Marxian historian Andre Gunder Frank. As a ML and historical materialist, Andre Gunder Frank is the most correct analysis on capitalism and why ‘Great Divergence’ is irrelevant now. We should focus on Great Convergence.
According to him, when viewed over the long period of history, Asian economies have always been superior. European supremacy in the 19th century was a short-term deviation brought about by industrial capitalism. Asia’s resurgence in the 21st century is actually a return to the historical norm (“Great Convergence”).
This view supports Kenneth Pomeranz’s thesis (which emphasizes similar geographical and ecological factors) but is more radical than his. Frank argues that Europe never had any inherent superiority, but only managed to integrate into Asia’s trade network thanks to the enormous transfer of resources (silver) that came with the conquest of the Americas, and that it gradually took control of this system.
Where did I state that I advocate/endorse the traditional interpretation of the Great Divergence? I did nowhere claim that europe was superior “earlier”. Europe diverged due to the resources it got from exploiting the new world and then africa - but it was not an exceptionally poor and irrelevant place as you claimed.
You sidestepped the whole point and then scoled me for not talking about the current convergence, which is irrelevant to my answer in the first place, because I wasn’t talking about the present.
You used the outdated term of dark ages, especially the victorian interpretation of the ye olde days of peasants living in shit-stained hovels and doing nothing until they invented colonialism. And I corrected that.