AH Expedition to Europe

[ZayoTVRadio]

Snipping Away

It may be the case, but it still appears that man-for-man the Westerners surpassed all else; Ottomans armies consistently lose to smaller opposing armies and Ottoman victories almost always involve a clear numerical advantage. Sieges differ from battles, as the defender normally has an obvious initial advantage, and are not counted. The Ottomans were already beginning to recede by the early 17th Century after a conflict with Austria. It just goes to show that the Ottomans may be a bit overrated.

The Caliphates seem to have the only real non-Western armies I can find that can actually pull off victories when outnumbered, against the Romans, no less, and the Westerners are masters at pulling off victories when outnumbered...besides the Persians against the Romans, apparently.

Unfortunately, the number of battles to go through for both cases are immense, and will lead to lack of nuance, as well as the fact that they merely represent the tactical level. Data regarding Antiquity is always unreliable, and that is the case for the latter.

Defeat of numerically large opponents is relevant to the question, as one can wonder if any non-Western military could pull off the feats of Western militaries.

 

[John7755 يوحنا]

It may be the case, but it still appears that man-for-man the Westerners surpassed all else; Ottomans armies consistently lose to smaller opposing armies and Ottoman victories almost always involve a clear numerical advantage. Sieges differ from battles, as the defender normally has an obvious initial advantage, and are not counted. The Ottomans were already beginning to recede by the early 17th Century after a conflict with Austria. It just goes to show that the Ottomans may be a bit overrated.

The Caliphates seem to have the only real non-Western armies I can find that can actually pull off victories when outnumbered, against the Romans, no less, and the Westerners are masters at pulling off victories when outnumbered...besides the Persians against the Romans, apparently.

Unfortunately, the number of battles to go through for both cases are immense, and will lead to lack of nuance, as well as the fact that they merely represent the tactical level. Data regarding Antiquity is always unreliable, and that is the case for the latter.

Defeat of numerically large opponents is relevant to the question, as one can wonder if any non-Western military could pull off the feats of Western militaries.

What do you mean with the final point?

I also disagree strongly with this assertion of man to man superiority of ‘Western’ (Ottomans are Western) fighters. The Ottomans were the outnumbered foe, not the the Europeans or Russians.

Also, please address the points regarding the Roman Empire, the Arsacids and Sassanids. This is important. So that we can pinpoint what you actually are discussing, modern successes of Europe.

 

[ZayoTVRadio]

What do you mean with the final point?

I also disagree strongly with this assertion of man to man superiority of ‘Western’ (Ottomans are Western) fighters. The Ottomans were the outnumbered foe, not the the Europeans or Russians.

Also, please address the points regarding the Roman Empire, the Arsacids and Sassanids. This is important. So that we can pinpoint what you actually are discussing, modern successes of Europe.

Ruling class of the Ottomans were Turkish, which was a large ethnicity in the region, the Empire was greatly Islamic in nature, of the Sunni branch, and the culture had influence from both Arabic and Persian cultures.

The Ottomans generally were at a numerical advantage in most of their victorious battles, though they may have been outnumbered on the strategic level in their victorious conflicts.

I already acknowledged the merit of the various militaries of Persia when compared to the Western Rome, though the statement itself my seem slightly dismissive with the addition of the word "apparently" at the end; this is to acknowledge that there is an uncertainty about the time period.

The Caliphates seem to have the only real non-Western armies I can find that can actually pull off victories when outnumbered, against the Romans, no less, and the Westerners are masters at pulling off victories when outnumbered...besides the Persians against the Romans, apparently.

There.

 

[Gwyain]

The Ottomans generally were at a numerical advantage in most of their victorious battles, though they may have been outnumbered on the strategic level in their victorious conflicts.

That's a load of shit. Firstly, a pretty cursory look at Ottoman battles shows several examples of cases they were outnumbered and won, or were equal numerically and won a massive victory. It took me literally 40 seconds to find just two examples, you are clearly not bothering to actually put in research to this. Secondly, numbers are a huge tactical and strategic advantage - and guess what? Europeans used them too! It took a coalition of literally half of Europe to actually beat the Turks back significantly in the Great Turkish War. The glorious unbeatable Europeans clearly never used numbers to win wars, and they clearly never lost wars in spite of superior numbers. 🙄

I cannot fathom how you are able to ignore all evidence to the contrary that Europeans aren't some Übermensch that beat everyone. Perhaps you might want to actually learn some history about the rest of the world. It would likely do you a lot of good.

 

[ZayoTVRadio]

That's a load of shit. Firstly, a pretty cursory look at Ottoman battles shows several examples of cases they were outnumbered and won, or were equal numerically and won a massive victory. It took me literally 40 seconds to find just two examples, you are clearly not bothering to actually put in research to this. Secondly, numbers are a huge tactical and strategic advantage - and guess what? Europeans used them too! It took a coalition of literally half of Europe to actually beat the Turks back significantly in the Great Turkish War. The glorious unbeatable Europeans clearly never used numbers to win wars, and they clearly never lost wars in spite of superior numbers. 🙄

I cannot fathom how you are able to ignore all evidence to the contrary that Europeans aren't some Übermensch that beat everyone. Perhaps you might want to actually learn some history about the rest of the world. It would likely do you a lot of good.

That first particular battle does seem to imply better Ottoman army quality than expected, though it was against relatively minor powers. That second battle is a contentious one; number of combatants involved is disputed among multiple sources and Ottoman history around the time period is somewhat unreliable. Napoleonic France is a classic example of a polity that could handle coalitions, better than the Ottomans. The German Reich in the First and Second World Wars also fared better against multiple opponents. The FLN utilized psychological warfare (including PR and the like) to defeat the French; they fared poorly against the French in actual battle. A better example of non-Westerners exceeding in battle against Western opponents would be the Rif War, where the Rif would see success in recovering territory from the Spanish, and crushing them in the disastrous Battle of Annual. A loss, yes, but it did show that Westerners were not invincible.

Insufficient.

 

[Prince di Corsica]

Let us not exaggerate. Europe has not been a backwater really since the Iron Age. Even during the Bronze Age, Europe is comparable to China or South Asia. The Iron Age was a true decline for Europe and heralded the ability for Roman conquests which were rapidly rescinded and subsumed by the reviving Bronze Age European styled peoples, primarily the Germanic folk pushing southward.

In the Middle Ages, Frankish Europe was the second largest population centre in the world, preceded only by South Asia or the wider 'Aryan' world. One could argue that, as I have, Europe is in its worst position than what could have occurred, at least in terms of demogrpahic centrality. A recent post I made, postulated a population exceeding 820 million only for the Frankish world, Italy and Denmark. Combining England, Scandinavia, and other lands in Europe, the region could overtake all but South Asia. Truly, the Black Plague and the end of European Medieval Universalism was a serious loss.

It is also not true that Europe lacked luxury goods. Amber for instance was one of the most vaunted items in the trade networks of the Bronze and Iron Age. The break in European luxury good reach towards the east may be correlated with the slow decline of Steppe stability in Asia and the fall of the Kushan empire, which threatened a revival of European-Chinese-Indian trade networks, but was cut short by the Sassanid surge east during Kushan faltering after defeats in the Deccan.

It is as such not isolated, it sits upon the old Bronze Age trade network that formed the basis of Bronze proliferation across Eurasia. Alongside many other items, which the Chinese consumed copiously until the decline of steppe stability.

Matters of the Bronze Age aside, since it's not exactly the same era the post discusses and things tend to change throughout time, come the Early Modern Age and the European powers, when trading in China, found themselves in a relationship that was quite one-sided, with them trading silver for Chinese goods (I remember reading of an explicit confrontation on this regard with the Portuguese, but I can't find it right now and would probably be in Portuguese anyway), which also harmed China due to getting too much silver in and depreciating its value, but this would hardly have been on purpose.

To make a long story short: the fact it was Europeans coming to China and not the other way around was not any genetic or even technological supremacy, but the fact the Chinese weren't particularly interested in getting to European markets, white the Europeans certainly were interested in getting to Chinese markets.


In a final remark, a few people seem to be overblowing the term "backwater": I mean it more to say having less attractive products for others to come and get, when compared to Asia. Europe did not remain unmolested by others for being too strong to take, but because there wasn't anyone around who had a real interest in taking it.

 

[John7755 يوحنا]

Matters of the Bronze Age aside, since it's not exactly the same era the post discusses and things tend to change throughout time, come the Early Modern Age and the European powers, when trading in China, found themselves in a relationship that was quite one-sided, with them trading silver for Chinese goods (I remember reading of an explicit confrontation on this regard with the Portuguese, but I can't find it right now and would probably be in Portuguese anyway), which also harmed China due to getting too much silver in and depreciating its value, but this would hardly have been on purpose.

To make a long story short: the fact it was Europeans coming to China and not the other way around was not any genetic or even technological supremacy, but the fact the Chinese weren't particularly interested in getting to European markets, white the Europeans certainly were interested in getting to Chinese markets.


In a final remark, a few people seem to be overblowing the term "backwater": I mean it more to say having less attractive products for others to come and get, when compared to Asia. Europe did not remain unmolested by others for being too strong to take, but because there wasn't anyone around who had a real interest in taking it.

I understand the point. However, a major difference is that the old roots that would have familiarized the Chinese realms with European goods, was ended shortly after the fall of the Kushan empire. However, the routes by which Europe gained Chinese goods, namely by sea, were still relatively open. Hence the creation of a memory of trading with China in Europe and its forgetfulness in East Asia. As such, the movement east, was an attempt we might exaggerate (sometimes exaggerations are necessary in historical reasoning for creation of possibilities), to rebuild a subconscious memory of Eurasian trade networks that Europe possessed the greatest memory of.

That being said, I do believe an economic and social change occurred in Europe. Europe transitioned into somewhat of an entity that was self contained and hampered on its many sides by aggressive enemies. The Umayyad state, the Later Sassanid state, the Avar Khaganate, the Scandinavian realms and so forth all gathered expensive luxury goods at the expense of Europe, namely slaves. This led to a decline in the once great trade of amber, furs, gold and so forth. Even the rise of Altaic powers was something of a disaster for Europe, in the sense that for whatever reason the new Altaic steppe of Eurasia saw the decline in interest of gold, amber, rubies and other precious metals and prestige items once produced en masse in Europe.

 

[ZayoTVRadio]

Bump.

I base my knowledge of historical GDP per capita on three sources:
- The Maddison Project (2018), a revision of Maddison's previous work on historical GDP per capita
- Clio Infra (2015), dates before the Maddison Project by about 3 years or so, and in that respect can be considered to be slightly out of date, though it remains important to consider, especially as it is sourced by the following paper...
- Broadberry's China, Europe, and the Great Divergence: A Study in Historical National Accounting, 980–1850 (2018), which also complements similar papers associated with Broadberry, such as JAPAN AND THE GREAT DIVERGENCE, 730-1874 (2018) and the fairly dated INDIA AND THE GREAT DIVERGENCE: AN ANGLO-INDIAN COMPARISON OF GDP PER CAPITA, 1600-1871 (2014).

It was the latter paper that I based my information on when I mentioned the disparity between the Yangzi Delta, a prosperous region then and a fairly prosperous region of China in the present day, according to statistics of the Chinese Government. Figure 8 in Page 36 of the document on China and the Great Divergence in particular is what I was describing in my post. According to Broadberry's data, by the Renaissance, leading regions of Europe were already beginning to overtake the Yangzi Delta in terms of economic output, and the last time the Yangzi Delta had a comparable GDP per capita would have been in around 1700, during the reign of the Kangxi Emperor. This is with the optimistic high estimate series, based off data from Li Bozhong and Jan Luiten van Zanden (2012), as opposed to Maddison, whose work is used as a basis in the data of the lower estimate series, based on work from Xu et al. (2017), which assumes that Maddison's (2010) estimate of Chinese GDP per capita in 1933 is correct; it may be that this lower estimate is more accurate, and if so then this implies regions in Europe, as far back as the Middle Ages, and likely beyond, of greater individual wealth, implying a greater hard technological base, than the rest of the world, and any setbacks such as the collapse of the Western Roman Empire short and temporary. Even if China's leading regions remained on par with Europe for much of the Early Modern Period, there remains the cases of India and Japan, two regions included in Broadberry's estimates, and other regions of the world, who may have been poorer, or were poorer in the cases of the former two, and that would imply that the leading economies of Europe were of some notable significance on the world stage. Tokugawa Japan is claimed to have experienced a minor divergence of its own when compared to China, a phenomenon virtually all the sources agree occurred .

All sources listed do contradict each other, even among the papers of Broadberry, for constant revisions to the GDP per capita figures listed were made. The Maddison Project has higher estimates of some non-European regions of the world, with India apparently maintaining some parity with European economies as late as the 1700s, though has lower estimates for those of Qing-era China, based on date from Xu et al., and also shows that Japan apparently kept pace with Germany, and other European economies such as Poland, as late as the onset of the 19th century, a surprise to say the least. The Clio Infra data is more closely aligned with Broadberry's estimates however, and have a less optimistic view of the non-European economies, though it is technically an earlier version of the Maddison Project, and has been since been superseded by the 2018 version, so it is perhaps inaccurate and outdated. Overall, all of the sources mentioned imply a great disparity between the Western and non-Western worlds as early as the Renaissance that cannot be ignored.

Most rebuttals of such figures presented in the sources I have listed are aimed at the very premise that all such sources share—as opposed to the figures they present—namely, historical GDP per capita of periods preceding the Industrial Age and beyond (reliability varies heavily among the regions of the world), and they may have a point regarding the unreliable and daunting task of estimating historical per capita GDP, especially those outside Europe, particularly in any period before 1800 or much later, where information is likely to be more sparse and qualitative. Regardless, the sources I have listed are serious attempts to quantify the per capita outputs of the various regions of the world, and in the case of the Maddison Project and the works of Broadberry, to try and explain the Great Divergence that led to European domination of much of the world. They serve as actual quantitative evidence, however flawed, and imply a noticeable disparity between Europe, its successors in the Americas and elsewhere, and the rest of the world that can be traced as far back as the 1500s, if not earlier.

More to come, eventually.