Lecture Notes: Framing the “Dover Circle”’s post-1500 economic breakthrough as a historical anomaly, the result of a failure to find an equilibrium society-of-domination configuration. It thus...
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Lecture Notes: Framing the “Dover Circle”’s post-1500 economic breakthrough as a historical anomaly, the result of a failure to find an equilibrium society-of-domination configuration. It thus emerged from specific ecological, social, financial, and imperial configurations. All three of the Crone, Wyman, and Allen readings argue that most agrarian-age “great empires” were highly successful solutions to the pre‑industrial problems of keeping the population alive while running an effective society-of-domination extraction machine for the thugs-with-spears and their allies at the top of the societal pyramid. From this perspective, the Dover Circle’s post-1500 exceptionalism reflected the inability of its mediæval elites to Do the Job—its failure to stabilize such an equilibrium. That by itself would not be interesting. You had to add on contingent access to coal, late female first marriage, high wages, and imperial profits. Crone’s Europe is an odd, unstable outlier—feudal, fragmented, weak on kinship, and unusually urban‑bourgeois—which made continued transformation into capitalism and modern science hard to avoid. Wyman’s 1490–1530 “critical juncture” shows how Europe’s flexible credit culture financed mutually reinforcing complexes of war, exploration, printing, and state‑building, setting up a Europe‑centered world system. Allen’s “great empires” chapter recasts 19th‑century Asian deindustrialization as the outcome not of any civilizational stagnation, but as stable gunpowder empires opened up to the global market by caravels and cannon, and the global market’s subsequent acid bath on the previous society-of-domination equilibrium…Share
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