Has anybody read this? What do you guys think about the notion

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It is of course correct that the Ottoman expansion cut off the silk road and drove merchants into the Atlantic, but the institutions and culture which allow that to happen must be prior. The British Empire did not significantly benefit the British economically as Leninist "anti-imperialists" argued in the 1900s, and it was not simply economic exploitation. Indeed, one of the strongest arguments for dismantling the British Empire after the Long War was that it was a net drain on the nation's wealth, and the nation was bankrupt. (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236702216_British_Imperialism_Revisited_The_Costs_and_Benefits_of_Anglobalization)

Some argue that the wealth of nations are determined by geography. It is not profound to say that "countries without access to the sea do don't become naval powers", but this is essentially the depth of the geographical determinist. The alternative to the geographical argument is the institutional one. Western European institutions of political economy are distinct from the rest of the world. Indeed, without Diocleatian's reforms, would medieval European institutions exist? without the Roman bureaucratic system, would the Christian faith have survived the fall of Rome? the Catholic church as an institution would surely not have had such a great influcence on Post-Roman Europe. Would property right exist?

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>>2692029
Why were there such stark institutional differences between Western Europe and the rest of the world during the early-modern period where Atlantic facing nations began to expand into the Atlantic (partly because access to the silk road was controlled by the Ottomans)? D. C. North writes:
>fragmented European political units accentuated by changing military technology which forced rulers to seek more revenue (by making bargains with constituents) in order to survive (North and Thomas, 1973; Jones, 1981; Rosenberg and Birdzell, 1986). That is surely part of the answer; political competition for survival in early modern Europe was certainly more acute than in other parts of the world.
(http://www.jstor.org/stable/1942704?origin=JSTOR-pdf&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents)

The significant relationship between trade and institutions can be shown to have been established at least since the commercial revolution in the 13th century (Grief 1992), and for a more general view of this period I like Spufford's "Power and Profit: The Merchant in Medieval Europe".

Now, the commercial revolution is arguably the most significant event before the industrial revolution institutionally. In that period the relationships between lord and peasant began to transform into employer and employee. Lords demanded liquidity, and bushels of grain could not be traded with Italian merchants for luxury goods. To increase their liquidity in cash so that landlords could consume, lords began paying wages, and workers would rent the land they occupied. In England, a new "agricultural proletariat" began to form, where workers sold their labour for wages. (see: W. Hasbach A History of the English Agricultural Labourer). Here, in the 13th-15th century, you have the necessary foundations required to allow a consumption economy to form.

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>>2692043
It is no surprise that it was in Holland, the first "nation" to exist without real feudalism in Europe (ignore the Italian merchant republics), where the first consumer society emerged. The art of the dutch masters shows "still life", whose object is the "consumer good" rather than some religious icon.

The geographical determinists ultimately rely on circular logic. They assert that the centuries of often imperceptible institutional changes can be explained causally by geography. They begin with the assumption that national economic development is a product of geography, and that the converse institutional argument actually supports their view, since, in their minds, these institutional developments are themselves a product of geography, why? because national economic development is a product of geography. They tie themselves in knots because there's is an ideological argument. J.D. in Guns, Germs, and Memes, argues that civilisation is no better than hunter-gatherer society and that all races and cultures are the same, and his book is an attempt to prove that. It's quite explicitly an ideological and particularly reductionist argument that assumes what has happened will always happen; a culture's will, passion, and creativity are all determined geographically. Are there any counter-examples?

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>>2692049
Two examples spring to mind. The Aztec and Inca societies both developed independently in identical environments. One developed the wheel, the other did not, one had a cyclical view of time, the other a quasi-linear where "past", "present", and "future" run together in parallel. J.D. explains this away by saying "well if you gave them enough time they would develop it", because it preserves the consistency of his theory. The second counter-example is the industrial development of England v. Germany. Germany had little access to the Atlantic and few resources of their own, they did however possess the most productive labour force in the world. And in the 19th century, the German industrial labourer was the most productive in the world. Why was this so? surely not for any geographic reason. Perhaps the competition between principalities in the "HRE" and the introduction of "Ora Et Labora" (Pray and Work) by the Benedictine Monks.

I have only briefly scratched the surface of the alternative school of thought to the geographical determinists. There is a whole world out there. I believe that culture and institutions are more important all things considered.

some further reading:

Why Nations Fail -- Daron Acemoglu
A Farewell to Alms -- Gregory Clark
An Economic History of Europe-- Karl Gunnar Persson

There are some other more esoteric theories. One book you might like to read is
IQ and the Wealth of Nations -- Richard Lynn (the type of theory that rustles J.D. so much)

>>2692070
I'm not a fan of geographical determinism, but the Inca's alpine environment was not at all like the aztecs'

>>2692107
someone specious, but the geographical differences are not significant enough to explain the specific differences in cultures.