[cracrecry]

Modern capitalism was not invented by the British. It was invented by Italian people and Catholic religious orders. The British adopted the system and amplified it, just like the Industrialisation that came from the Netherlands.

The British made most of their capital(that financed industrialisation) from slavery trade and piracy in the Atlantic. It made huge profits and industrialisation paid off giving multiples of the inputs for the first time in History.

That also financed the "colonising of half of the world". But this colonisation came very late.

>dispensing with Catholicism early and inventing modern capitalism came precisely because our society was so hierarchical.

I am reading a book that argues that Europe's success comes from all the competence of different powers fighting each other and none of them taking over the others. The Muslims and later the Ottoman empire tried to take over Europe. The Spanish or Napoleon tried to take over Europe and UK, but they could not, because the others joined against them. Napoleon tried to conquer Russia. Then the British tried to take over as well. Austria, Bismarck and Hitler tried to conquer Europe. Then the Soviet Union.

Even the Roman Empire could not take over the British islands and Germany.

This is different from China, where different groups take over of everything. Centralisation and stagnation happens as a consequence.

[borissk]

>> It was invented by Italian people and Catholic religious orders.

Interesting. Do you have any sources on that?

[notahacker]

> Modern capitalism was not invented by the British. It was invented by Italian people and Catholic religious orders. The British adopted the system and amplified it, just like the Industrialisation that came from the Netherlands.

I nearly qualified the original sentence with a reference to Dutch trading companies who built stock exchanges to fund colonies alongside us and apparently used the word "capitalist" to describe the sort of person that invested in them before us, and obviously the basic concept of markets and trade goes back long before the Venetian republic. But the Industrial Revolution and economic growth going exponential - the modern bit of capitalism - was definitely a British quirk