I've recently read"The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World" and want to hear what all of you think the answer is, because I feel like the book was missing something in its thesis and I am not very sure what that is.
I've recently read"The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World" and want to hear what all of you think the answer is, because I feel like the book was missing something in its thesis and I am not very sure what that is.
I'm a fan of the Matt Christman take. I may be roughing this up pretty badly but: it's got a lot to do with European geography having enough natural borders to create small individual states, but not sturdy enough natural borders to prevent conflict. You end up with a shitton of small-ish states in a perpetual arms race, which means they'll be looking for every advantage possible. Even if it comes at a cost to the stability of the existing order writ large, they'll take it because losing in the arms race is a much more immediate existential threat to the individual states. China had those warring states, but the natural borders were weak enough that they eventually settled into a single state. There's a thousand other factors, too, but I hadn't seen this mentioned from skimming the top few comments in this thread.
I don't know if I buy the geography take, the European plain is fairly wide open from France to the Caucuses (excluding the Alps basically). From what I've read Europe rushing military tech was because they didn't have valuable enough goods to trade, so they had to use violence to open up markets for them.
The core reason is you have many small to medium sized states in constant competition. Geography is a factor but its not the entire picture. They militarized first, then they colonized. But they did not militarized for the sake of opening markets. They opened markets so they could continue militarizing.