Status Updates From Civilization and Capitalism...

And in the wider international unity that money represented on a world scale, each society had its place, some favoured, some backward, some heavily handicapped. Money gave a certain unity to the world, but it was the unity of injustice.

All the instruments of credit - bills of exchange, promissory notes, letters of credit, bank notes, cheques - were knoan to the merchants of Islam, whether Muslim or Not, as can be seen from the Geniza documents of the 10th century AD , principally found in the Old Cairo synagogue. And China was using bank notes by the 9th century AD.

It was logical that the monetary history of India should correspond to movements in the West: it's currency was remote controlled
It appears that the resumption of the minting of silver coins in Delhi after 1642 had tones of for silver from America to first reach Europe and then to spread beyond it

-rupees were minted from Spanish teams and Persian lardons, gold coins were reissues of Portuguese coins...

There has always been a third world. It's regular mistake was to agree to the terms of a dialogue which was always unfavourable to it. But it was often forced to.

End of chapter 6. Three great technological innovations, artillery, printing, and ocean navigation. Many reminders that"no innovation has any value except in relation to the social pressure which maintains & imposed it" = that something is invented doesn't mean it will be used, technology is barely worth considering beyond its social context. E.g. European ships found the Indies because they needed to

Paul Valery's remark bears repeating to remind us of this ancient & long-standing fact of life: 'Napoleon moved no faster than Julius Caesar'.

In the 13th century, the price of English grain increased by 15%for every 80kilometres it travelled overland, whereas wine from Gascony shipped to Hull or Ireland via Bordeaux only cost an additional 10% despite the long des journey.

The great region for water transport in Europe, even more than Germany, was the zone beyondcthe Oder, Poland & Lithuania. River transport had developed there from the middle ages, with the aid of immense rafts of tree trunks. Each of them had a cabin for the sailors...taking the world as a whole, there was nothing to equal southern China, from the Blue river to the border of Yunan.

sea routes were also fixed in advance...ships were dependent on certain winds, currents & ports of call. Coasting was the rule...as for voyages on the open sea, they too had their rules, dictates by experience. The route between Spain & the 'Castilian Indies' had been established by Columbus; it was only slightly modified by Alaminos in 1519, & after that did not change until the 19th century.

Perhaps the merit of the West, confined as it was on its narrow 'cape of asia', was that it 'needed' the rest of the world, needed to venture outside its own front door. None of this could have happened according to an 3xpert on Chinese history, without the growth of the capitalist towns ofctge West at that time. They were the driving force. Without them technology would have been impotent.

The fleets the Turks launched on the Red Sea in 1538, 1539 & 1588 were taken there in pieces on the backs of camels & put together again. Vasco de Gama's voyage (1498) did not destroy this ancient traffic between Europe & the Indian Ocean. It made a new route for it.

Paper had neither the strength not the beauty of parchment. its sole advantage was its price. A 150 page manuscript on parchment required the skins of a dozen sheep which meant that the actual copying was the smallest expense of the operation.

There were artillery schools in towns throughout Europe at which men would train to use cannon every Sunday as a result there were European mercenaries in the ottoman empire, North Africa, Persia, Siam, the Indies, & muscovy. "Until the death of Aurangzeb (1707), the great Mogul's gunners in India were European mercenaries."

Cost of defence in a gunpowder age - the cost of gunpowder in 1588 to allow 300 shots for each of the 400 artillery pieces in Venice's fortresses was 1.8 million ducats which was equal to the annual revenue of the city of Venice, there would have been other incomes I guess from the empire, but also other costs - even defence requires more than just gunpowder.

End chapter 5, spread of technology
Consideration of energy - human and animal Labour, Watermills,Windmills, wood, charcoal, coal.
Iron, slow evolution of production - still an age of wood.

In 1789, france used about 20 million tons of firewood.

2 tons of firewood are equivelant to 1 ton of coal, which surprises me, I had assumed that coal had much more heat out put than wood, but I suppose it makes sense since its fossilized plant matter!

A blast furnace built in Dolgyne in Wales in 1717 was not fired until four years later when enough charcoal had been accumulated for 36 and a half weeks work. It only operated for an average of 15 weeks a year, again because of a lack of fuel.

One of the reasons for Europe's power lay in its being so plentifully endowed with forests. Against it, Islam was in the long run undermined by the poverty of its wood resources & their gradual exhaustion.

Civilisations before the eighteenth century were civilisations of wood & charcoal, as those of the nineteenth were civilisations of coal.

The windmill arrived late in certain regions of Spain, notably La Mancha, somuch so that according to one historian Don Quixote's alarm was quite natural: the great monsters were new to him.

On the eve of the french revolution estimates are for circa 600,000 Watermills across Europe, approximately 1.5 to 3 million horse powwe.

"Windmills appeared very much later than water-wheels. they were previously thought to have originated in China; more probably they came from the highlands of Iran or from Tibet".

In the Roman period horses were badly harnessed (the yoke harness throttled them) & they could only draw a relatively light load: in terms of work they were notwieth more than four slaves. In the 12th century, their performance suddenly improved, like an engine increased to four or five times it's power, as a result of the invention of the horse-collar.

A caravan of 6000 camels could carry 2400 to 3000 tons, or the load of 4 to 6 reasonable-sized sailing ships of that period.

-hence ships of the desert 😁

In the vast kingdom of Peru, in 1776, 500,000 mules were employed for trading along the coast or through the Andes & for drawing coaches in Lima. The kingdom imported about 50,000 of them a year from the Argentine pandas in the south...
- Braudel estimates that there was 1:5 or 1:10 mules to humans in Latin America compared with 1/4million mules to 10 million people in spain

A splendid sentence by Henri Pirenne neatly sums up the question:'america [when the Vikings reached it] was lost as soon as it was discovered, because Europe did not yet need it'
...there are times when technology represents the possible, which for various reasons- economic, social or psychological- men are not yet capable of achieving or fully utilizing

End chapter 4; houses, clothes & furniture

Development of furniture, shifts in housing leading to the possibility of privacy. Fashion perhaps as evidence of a preparedness to change - not just dress, but ways of living, technology too?

Is fashion in fact such a trifling thing? Or is it, as I prefer to think, rather an indication of deeper phenomena- of the energies, ...can it have been merely by coincidence that the future was to belong to the societies fickle enough to care about changing the colours, material & shape of costume, as well as the social order & the map of the world-societies...which were ready to break with their traditions?