None of those hold up to much scrutiny.
1) Unusual incentives related to economic backwardness (Europe's ruling class imported luxury products from richer but distant places while having virtually nothing to trade in return, creating centuries of grinding deflation until they stumbled ass-backwards into pillaging precious metals from the Americas and militarily imposing maritime trade monopolies in Asia)
2) Access to the Chinese/Indian/wherever technology from the Mongols which some other backwaters lacked (not getting destroyed by the Mongols in the process also helps)
3) Weak and violent states (by global standards) fighting each other endlessly for 800+ years with little consolidation or interruption, recreating the state/military modernization process that incidentally also happened 2000 years earlier in China
4) A pre-modern tradition of thin and high walls that incentivized use of heavy artillery (this incentive was absent in places that entered the gunpowder era with better economies and thicker walls, but heavy cannons on ships, walls, and in sieges ended up being the future)
1. Very few states had any major precious metal influx from the New World. Only Spain did so in huge quantity (the English and Dutch stole a fair bit of this), and the economic effects of that much specie were
not good. One of the big contributors that led to Hapsburg Spain being replaced by Bourbon Spain was that massive inflation had gutted the economy.
Equally important, the trade networks in question brought great wealth to everyone involved. It wasn't just a matter of "all our gold and silver goes out, spices and silks come in". The crippling effect you're talking about didn't happen.
2. Any technology desired could flow along the same trade networks, and Europe wasn't the total technological backwater that people think it was. The biggest difference between Europe and elsewhere is that we don't easily recognize a lot of what they did as technology, because it was improvements of a sort that are invisible to moderns no matter how big they were at the time.
3. Also nonsense. The only reason that some places (like the Muslim world) were relatively less violent was that they'd already "progressed" further along that same path. Many areas that would later be subject to colonialism were rich and powerful empires at that time.
4. All medieval fortresses were obsoleted by gunpowder. The most expensive and formidable curtain walls ever built could be (and, IIRC, were) knocked down by cannon with ease. Having slightly thicker walls didn't help a damn - resisting cannonfire required the demolition of the fortifications and replacement with a completely new system.
Exploiting fossil fuels in industrial machinery first was made possible by:
1) Northern China's 13th century huge coal+iron industry getting destroyed and the region depopulated by the Mongols in a 100 year conquest that erased its innovations and memory until modern times
2) British and European lack of sustainable forest management eventually creating a non-industrial market demand for household coal-use in Britain (coal is extremely undesirable for household use compared to burning wood and wouldn't have been mined if European forestry had been less unsustainable)
3) Britain's high water table compared to northern China (ideas behind steam engines had been around for thousands of years in various places, but it turns out one of the few places where the extremely inefficient prototypes with very high bulk fuel transport costs are economical is when pumping water out of a coal mine itself, which is unnecessary in dry Chinese coal mines)
1. Meaningless. Mined coal was replacing charcoal everwhere in the early 1100s, not just in China. The only major exceptions were places like some of the Germanies, where careful forest management had ensured a much more reliable source of charcoal.
2. Only Britain had a near-total deforestation, and that long predated the industrial use of coal. This was because their naval and maritime traditions required huge quantities of lumber to build the ships (which also made the virgin forests of North America extremely valuable). Coal replaced wood in household heating not because of unavailability, but because it is far more energy dense and thus much more practical to transport and stockpile.
3. It is true that the need to pump mines dry was the first practical use of the steam engine. However, the notion that "ideas for steam engines were around for thousands of years" is nonsense. That claim is based on the Aeolipile, which did exist. However, the Aeolipile was useless, and it is utterly impossible to adapt it into something that can be used - trying to power anything with it would instantly overwhelm the tiny amount of torque you can get out of it. Experiments in practical use didn't crop up until the late 1600s (a handful of patents exist from a century earlier, but no evidence of any practical experiments has been found), and those were very impractical because getting to useful working pressures would often make the things explode.The mid-18th century devices, and more importantly the 19th century ones, were the first to exist because this was when materials capable of handling them began to exist.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 13204307 times)