Conditions of relative political anarchy in Europe following the dark ages led to the development of capitalism and the rest was history. When I say relative political anarchy, of course i do not mean that Europe did not have a state (save Iceland, for a while) but rather it was divided into many local fiefdoms. This meant it was relatively easy to vote with your feet and things improved rapidly.

Capitalism had very little to do with Europe becoming dominant because for most of Europes history it wasn't capitalist. Trade was more commonplace amongst Muslim India than it was in Europe during the early years of the Renaissance. Europe became dominant because of numerous social, political and economic factors that happened to occur at the same time as when the Midde East was undergoing runaway inflation.

I think we ought to define our terms here. "Capitalism" when used in the historical sense, does not simply refer to the existence of a market or presence of an international trade network. Those have more or less always existed. Capitalism refers to a particular form of industrial organization, since it is capital, what Marx might have called "the means of production," that is the center of economic activity.

In that sense capitalism has never been unique to European society.

Excellent point. As we move closer to present times the term has taken a more narrow meaning.

I think there is general agreement a capitalism is an economic system that includes private ownership by more than a few, creation of goods or services for profit the accumulation of resources by more than an elite few, and competitive or semi completive markets, with voluntary exchange of goods.

Heard a new argument tonight on European supremacy. Went to a talk by Charles Mann, author of 1491 and the sequel 1493. We already know that when the potato reaches Europe from the Americas, it allows a large population increase. Mann takes it a step further, and says that due to food security, the governments are able to become strong enough to be imperialists. Periodic famines are hard on governmental authority, so the potato allows institutions to be more stable. Don't know how well he develops or proves this in the book 1493, but it's an interesting thought.

He makes a similar argument about the decline of China. The introduction of corn from the Americas allows fast new areas of China to be settled. Very hilly regions are heavily terraced and planted with corn, also sweet potato from Americas. This leads to vast amounts of erosion which change the nature of major rivers like the Yellow river. The way the sediment builds up, it makes whole river valleys very prone to catastrophic floods. He said to think a Katrina flood per month for 100 years, somewhere in China. And that helped destabilize the dynasty and allows a walk over by European imperialists. Don't know how significant the corn really was in governmental collapse, but very interesting.

Other crucial points: labor becomes a commodity. You sell your labor, rather than the food you grew or the baskets you wove.

Capital itself: the systematic creation of surplus wealth that must be reinvested or it vanishes. So capitalism is in constant crisis as it desperately searches for new outlets for all the capital it accumulates.

Very interesting thread, guys. I initially jumped to the Jared Diamond answer when I read the first post, then I saw it was the first answer to the thread. So, thinking about it a little bit more, there is a little incident that explains why Islam and the East weren't able to develop their huge knowledge edge in the middle ages into world hegemony.

The Mongols.

The Mongols didn't get around to conquering Europe, but they totally decimated two entire civilizations. Genghis Khan hated cities and liked to burn them to the ground and slaughter everyone who lived there. This set Islam and China back centuries, literally. So, that left Europe essentially unchecked to expand globally.

No, not really. The Khans liked cities just fine, and were happy to collect the income that they drew. They usually offered cities the choice to surrender, and were *relatively* merciful to those who submitted (relative since we're still talking about fairly brutal conquest here), but utterly merciless to those who resisted (like Baghdad). The Mongols never tore down Chinese cities in this way, and the Yuan Dynasty mostly conducted business as usual in China. The extent to which the Mongols "set back" China is almost certainly exaggerated, since it was they who opened up China to trade to a much larger extent than the preceding and succeeding dynasties. This was the highly-advanced court that Marco Polo visited, after all. I'd recommend looking at Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and/or Janet Abu-Lughod's Before European Hegemony for a couple fresh take on Genghis Khan and the Mongols, who probably take a little more heat than they deserve relative to their contemporaries.

The fate of the Islamic world is more complicated, and frankly tragic. Baghdad was brutally sacked (by Hulagu Khan, not Genghis Khan), destroying the cultural and intellectual center of the entire Near East. Though the city was rebuilt, the great libraries were burned, creating an incalculable loss for generations of Islamic scholars. Subsequent Islamic regimes south of Turkey became increasingly paranoid, skeptical, and reactionary toward outsiders, leading to a general decline of the Islamic world, especially during the key years of European ascendancy.

I would, however, agree that the collapse of the Eastern Mongol Empires helped set the stage for a rise in the West, partly because European merchants began searching for cheaper ways to acquire the goods they'd become accustomed to in the heyday of the Mongol trading system.

Interesting, but I'd have to dissent from this. Afaik, the Yellow River was known even in ancient times to be violent or unpredictable, hence its alternative name, "the river of sorrows." I think Mann does have a good point on a link between food production and the centralization of government (since a food surplus means less reliance on feudal lords), but there is also a corresponding change in military technology (ie gunpowder) that had the advantage of nullifying the traditional military advantages of the feudal aristocracy (this is what happened in the Middle East, allowing the creation of three strong, centralized states in the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals). So I'd argue it's a dual process. But in any case, the advantage conferred on Europe through the domination of the New World should not be underestimated. Two continents essentially emptied of their people (via conquest and especially disease), ripe for mineral extraction and the raising of cash crops is a huge advantage in both the short and long term.