At 04:53 PM 9/22/99 -0400, Jim Blaut wrote: >"The sufficient condition can be questioned by the >counterefactual of Spain and Portugal that in th einitial >phase of colonial expansion seemed to be main beneficiaries >of colonial exploitation. The Spaniards, for example, are >'credited' with plundering virtually ALL Inca gold. Yet, >both countries became thrid rate industrial and military >powers by the 18th century - which indicates that plunder >alone was not a suffcient condition for the capitalist >takeoff." > >Spain and Portugal were the conduit through which the >merchant-protocapitalist community in NW and Central Europe >and Italy acquired the wealth from colonialism. This is >perfectly well-known. The lack of development of Spain and >Portugal is of no theoretical interest in this discourse. Jim, I think this passage exemplifies the fundamental difference between your and my position on the subject. I am an empirical scientist, not an erudite, I am concerned with emprical facts, not their interepretations in the literature. The empirical fact is that countries that benefited the most directly from plundering South America were not able to transform that advantage into a capitalist system (i.e. system that reproduces itself). That seems to me a very important counterfactural evidence to the claim that colonial exploitation was a sufficient condition for capitalism. Your strategy seems to be declaring that fact irrelevant by a semantic gimmick - calling the countries in question "conduits." That is, you implicitly affirm the fact that these countries passed their riches instead of using them for capitalist development, but call it by a different name and consider the case closed. That may be good lit-crit, but poor empirical science. An inquiring mind would like to know what *internal factors* made the difference bewteen "conduits" and "accumulators" i.e. ordinary brigands who plundered civilizations for centuries, and capitalists, a uniquely modern phenomenon. In the same vein, you use a semantic gimmick to dismiss my argument about the necessary condition. I stated that neither Germany, Sweden or Japan received any meaningful benefits from colonial exploitation - which is an emprical fact, if the "meaningful benefits" are defined as those reaped by Spain or England. You dismiss that fact by changing the subject and saying that the countries in question "partricipated" in colonial ventures (without giving specific examples of the magnitude or character of that 'participation'). Well, my friend, Turks, Poles and Yugoslavs also 'participated' in the German post 2nd world war economic miracle - as "guest workers." Would you say that Turkey, Poland or Yugoslavia owes its post-war development to their 'exploitation of the German economic boom?" You also dismiss my argument that you may not have sufficient empirical evidence to sort out effects of different variables by simply calling it "babble." Well, my friend, if you ran a multiple regression with twelve variables plus interaction effects and six cases - you would be laughed out of the stage. What makes you think that a case-based approach is any different, from a methodological point of view. To summarize, your strategy seems to be based on drowning your causal model (if any) in a constant stream of quotations, name dropping, and literary references. That makes good literary criticism or talmudic scholarship, but do not quite qualifies as empirical science. regards, wojtek
