Perfidious Albion takes the largest slice of the blame of course
although I think you're sleeping on the fact that a lot of the "excess capital" (though it wouldn't be understood as such at the time) that allowed the buildup of productive forces and industrialization like of the English textile industry (that we point to as kind of the birthplace of this whole thing) was thanks to the Spanish bullion trade injecting enormous amounts of specie into european economies. People who owned gold and silver mines were literally :brrrrrrrrrrrr: for their time
also while it's not necessarily a fair accusation and we're starting to reach a bit, the mercantilism we attribute to have being popularized by Italian city-states like Genoa (I think can be attributed as having) laid the foundations for an understanding of nation-state economies before we even really had a concept of nation-states.
spoiler
Also blame the Prussians for assisting the English in defeating Napoleon.
It's kind of funny because after all the murder and torture and slavery Spain never really built up it's economy and as soon as the cheap silver ran out they foundered and their empire fell apart.
Isn’t that because they spent all that money fighting religious wars which were basically impossible to win given the technology of the time as well as the poor understanding of disease?
I don't know how much was spent on warfare, but I do know that right as Spain was becoming an economic super-power on cheap, unlimited silver they were also violently exiling all the Muslims and Jews in Iberia, and it just so happened that the Muslims and Jews who had been there for centuries constituted most of the non-agrarian economic base of the region. So in their religious zeal to create a purely Christian Kingdom they were kicking out or killing everyone with a skilled trade or a university education, essentially enforcing a massive and long lasting brain drain on themselves. And once all those people were exiled or killed the Spanish leadership never effectively replaced them.
This is a consequence of feudalism becoming absolutism, isn’t it? The old decentralized feudal way of doing things just wasn’t cutting it anymore (probably because there just wasn’t enough people to work the land), so they decided to make just one big feudal kingdom and blame Jewish and Muslim scapegoats for their problems. The same thing happened in France.
It's kind of a funny crank position, Napoleon Did some kind of hare-brain economic reforms to rescue the French economy and alt-hiatory nerds like to think capitalism as we understand it would not have emerged from a Europe dominated by Napoleon's economic system. I don't think there's really anything concrete to support this and alt-history is pretty woo anyways.
Forgive me for knowing almost nothing about pre-1900 history outside of North America, but am I right to think that relative to most of the people fighting against Napoleon, Napoleon was usually the less bad one?
Perfidious Albion takes the largest slice of the blame of course
although I think you're sleeping on the fact that a lot of the "excess capital" (though it wouldn't be understood as such at the time) that allowed the buildup of productive forces and industrialization like of the English textile industry (that we point to as kind of the birthplace of this whole thing) was thanks to the Spanish bullion trade injecting enormous amounts of specie into european economies. People who owned gold and silver mines were literally :brrrrrrrrrrrr: for their time
also while it's not necessarily a fair accusation and we're starting to reach a bit, the mercantilism we attribute to have being popularized by Italian city-states like Genoa (I think can be attributed as having) laid the foundations for an understanding of nation-state economies before we even really had a concept of nation-states.
spoiler
Also blame the Prussians for assisting the English in defeating Napoleon.
even the libs agree napoleon should have won
It's kind of funny because after all the murder and torture and slavery Spain never really built up it's economy and as soon as the cheap silver ran out they foundered and their empire fell apart.
Isn’t that because they spent all that money fighting religious wars which were basically impossible to win given the technology of the time as well as the poor understanding of disease?
I don't know how much was spent on warfare, but I do know that right as Spain was becoming an economic super-power on cheap, unlimited silver they were also violently exiling all the Muslims and Jews in Iberia, and it just so happened that the Muslims and Jews who had been there for centuries constituted most of the non-agrarian economic base of the region. So in their religious zeal to create a purely Christian Kingdom they were kicking out or killing everyone with a skilled trade or a university education, essentially enforcing a massive and long lasting brain drain on themselves. And once all those people were exiled or killed the Spanish leadership never effectively replaced them.
This is a consequence of feudalism becoming absolutism, isn’t it? The old decentralized feudal way of doing things just wasn’t cutting it anymore (probably because there just wasn’t enough people to work the land), so they decided to make just one big feudal kingdom and blame Jewish and Muslim scapegoats for their problems. The same thing happened in France.
im confused by the pro-napoleon take pls explain
It's kind of a funny crank position, Napoleon Did some kind of hare-brain economic reforms to rescue the French economy and alt-hiatory nerds like to think capitalism as we understand it would not have emerged from a Europe dominated by Napoleon's economic system. I don't think there's really anything concrete to support this and alt-history is pretty woo anyways.
Forgive me for knowing almost nothing about pre-1900 history outside of North America, but am I right to think that relative to most of the people fighting against Napoleon, Napoleon was usually the less bad one?
yes