Chapo Trap House - Hinge Points S2E1: Dog-gone-erland

Episode Date: November 17, 2022

Hinge Points is back for a new season, baby! This first ep is free, but expect new episodes for the next 5 Thursdays, only at patreon.com/chapotraphouse. Matt and Danny Bessner (from American Prestige) invite Chris to discuss the question: What if Doggerland (the area of land between Britain and France) was never filled in with water?

In a world where points depend on hinges, there are hinge points inside us all. History, on a segue, it's over-determined. We are the points that our hinges have been seeking. What this podcast asks is, what if, agriculture, fail or epic win? What if it was Johnny Bango Pitt? What if the Ottomans had AK-47? Maybe climate change was a good idea. What if the Ottomans had lightsabers?

What if the Buffalo killed the ox? What if Santa Claus was real, like an actual guy who gave presents everywhere? This is Hinge Points. Hello everyone and welcome to the second season of Hinge Points. I'm Danny Bestner, usually of the American Prestige Podcast, but I am back here to discuss with my friend Matt Crisman the various hinge points in history. Just to give everyone a little bit of a guidance, hinge points don't really refer necessarily at least to alternative histories, but rather we're drilling down on specific moments or

specific alternatives that we believe help us illuminate larger social processes. That will include an element of alternative history, but it's more an element of these big moments where things maybe could have gone in a different direction. That's really what we're going to be doing here on the second season of the show and we're also going to be having more guests than we did last time to hopefully get people with specific expertise and given areas to help us think through some of these large historical problems. Before this first episode, Matt and I are overjoyed to welcome to the podcast producer

Chris Wade of the Chapeau Trap House podcast. Chris, thanks so much for joining us. Folks, they're hinge points. We love the hinge points. The points were history hinges. We love looking at them and focusing on them and figuring out what they mean. Exactly. And we thought Chris would be an especially good person to bring on the show because

of the topic we're going to talk about today, which is... I was blushing a little bit when you said specific expertise because I think that way overshoots me, though a bit of Chris lore. I do have an undergraduate degree in history with a focus on European medieval history as much as my undergraduate would allow, which I believe was like two courses, one of which was medieval sexuality, so sounds hot, right? So I'll be trying to bring all of that memory back to this. And that's why we had you on.

And so today, the hinge point we're going to be talking about might be a bit arcane for some of you, but we actually think it's really crucial to understanding the specific historical trajectory of modern capitalism in Europe and beyond. And that is Doggerland. So what is Doggerland? Doggerland was basically the land bridge that existed between the modern UK and France in the English Channel. And about 8,000-ish years ago, it was filled in by rising sea levels.

But what we're going to talk through on this podcast, this podcast episode in particular, is what if Doggerland was never filled in? In other words, what if the United Kingdom never became an island and was actually always connected to continental Europe? And we think this would have enormous implications for the history, not only of the UK, but global capitalism writ large. So just to set the scene, Matt, this is probably for you. Why is Doggerland important?

Why is England being an island specifically crucial to the development of capitalism itself? Capitalism, like any biological system, has to emerge in a certain band of conditions, a Goldilocks zone. And in Europe, that Goldilocks zone was provided by the specific conditions of England, which allowed it to exist at a level of state capacity because of its separation from continental rivals that allowed it to experiment and to allow the sort of destabilizing things that larger powers refused to countenance because of their role in undermining legitimate authority. Those sort of innovations were encouraged in the UK specifically because they were this

country that was able to basically punch above its weight continentally and compete with other powers rather than be cowed by the other ones, which it would have been if it had just been another province of the low countries or whatever. So it's really crucial, I think what Matt is saying is that the isolation of England allowed for the particular conditions that enabled the rise of a particular form of capitalism that eventually took over the globe. There were obviously other capitalisms elsewhere, but it's in England where we get that Ur form, that most advanced form that eventually comes to dominate the United States and North Atlantic

world writ large and through colonialism, the world itself. So getting rid of England, what we're going to propose on this podcast as an independent space is really crucial to changing the course of modern capitalism. I also don't think it could be undervalued how much having to compete as a naval power and focus on the seas is essential to the history of England, which would be radically different if it, again, was just another one of these continental powers. And this also raises interesting questions about Ireland. If Ireland is now the island is facing Europe, does capitalism develop there?

Does a different form of capitalism develop, which is something that we'll be exploring. But because this is such an ancient change, this happened 8,000 years ago, there's a lot of different potential hinge points that emerge from it. So Chris, why don't you start with the first one and that relates to Roman rule. Yeah. So when you guys proposed this to me, I thought it was a great idea. And it is the most, probably the most sweeping one that you've proposed in this series just because, yes, this concept of the doggerel and never being filled in immediately drifts

all of European history, Western history, world history into the realm of almost pure fantasy speculation. But hey, it's our podcast and we can do whatever we want. So the way that I've tried to conceive of how you would go about talking about this is trying to break down modern or at least post year zero England into four kind of crucial historical moments, which I can list off now and then we'll get into each of them individually. And the ones I thought were the first Roman rule, the Roman invasion and conquest or subjugation of England and its subsequent collapse as a political entity, the timeline that that

would take, then following that the various medieval invasions, the Saxons first, followed by the Vikings and Danes in the early medieval era. And then following that, the prolonged conflict with continental France in the Hundred Years War period and kind of the late medieval era. And then finally, focusing in on England's development as a colonizing power and empire in the early modern age. So those are the four, like, taught discussion points I have. And basically going back to the first one, Roman rule, okay, so there's a land bridge

to Britain. It seems to follow that Roman occupation would probably come quicker and be more complete. It would say the reason then that after the collapse of Rome or the Gothic invasions, Britain would end up looking a lot more like the areas closer to the center of empire, like Gaul, Spain, or the other Mediterranean polities. So that's where I just kind of want to start this. Maybe it starts with would Rome get to England faster and conquer it more completely? And what's particularly interesting to me about this potential hinge point is what if

the collapse doesn't come like it does? Because I think what's really crucial to the future of British history is that that collapse happens. So you get this mixing of Celtic cultures and Roman cultures, which develops that pure stew that is England. So what if England effectively serves as like Gaul? You know, what if Gaul is governed by the Romans for hundreds of more years? I think that that's actually really interesting because you don't get together the particular

concatenation of factors that basically make the United Kingdom a province. And more importantly, and Matt, this is what we always talk about. You get that early medieval period. It's very different because you don't have North Umbria. You don't have Wales all fighting each other necessarily, because I think that conflict is really crucial to developing the particular character of what would later become the United Kingdom and British capitalism. Yes, because, as you said, the character of the collapse of the Roman Empire was a catastrophe

in the British context, which created a vacuum that was filled by competing powers from northern Europe, all fighting each other, as you said, and failing to assert like a central authority and only doing so through like this hundreds of years process of like of small scale warfare. And if you have a more integrated Brittany into the Roman Empire with a less dramatic drop off when the central authority of Rome collapses, then yeah, like maybe you have a more stable polity there that I mean, is the implication there that that like the land contained by the Mediterranean, the Alps and the Pyrenees would be like some sort of super state, like like a precocious super state because of that.

I don't know. Yeah, like what if you get in the Western Empire, your version of like Byzantium? You know, what if what if the Holy Roman Empire actually encompasses everything to the West? And then it's so interesting because then you don't get what if what if Charlemagne is able to control the United Kingdom, and what if you get this pseudo feudal territory that isn't able, I think, to contain itself, which is what happens in the medieval period, Charlemagne is never able to go West, really. It's effectively isolated for hundreds and hundreds of years, which leads to the development

of this particular, I think, proto, not only capitalism, but this very early ancient liberalism that that leads to things like the Magna Carta, because it was an integrated Western Europe, a totally integrated Western Europe without that English offshore, British offshore territory. I think you get a more integrated economic space, and particularly you also don't get a bunch of those British and French wars that happen, of course, of the first 1400 years AD. And just you kept saying the word integrated, and I think just focusing on this last this early period, this early medieval period, you know, you talked about the relationship

of England to the rest of empire, but I also think just the application of a heavier application of Roman infrastructure then gives England itself the political area of it a more integration on itself, it's more of an identity of a thing starting from the beginning. My knowledge of early English history is it's defined by these warring factions, these small kingdoms that are all competing against each other to form a national identity, and it's kind of their high points of some, and then everybody gets conquered by some other person. I think that if there is a more established trade networks, more established centers of political power from early on, I think that that also makes the entire thing more of the

entirety of the English geographic area more of a centralized area that is easier to be taken over by, say, a Charlemagne and be like, okay, there's an administrative structure here that can be conquered rather than 100 little warring chiefdoms of Eiffelricks and whoever that are in charge of it in the early medieval period. I mean, and that has not gone effects with, if you think about like, quote, unquote, Muslim Spain. If there's this integrated territory, maybe you don't have the fracturing of the Western Roman Empire and the way that it does, and then you have a totally different history of

Western Europe. I mean, you could have us, if you had a unified, like, yeah, Holy Roman Empire as it was originally conceived, which was centered in France, not in Germany, that drift came later, that you could have like a continental orientation between, like, Muslim Spain and this, like, more unified Holy Roman Empire. And I think this leads next, almost directly into Chris's next point, Chris, do you want to talk about it? Because I think the way you pose it is actually really interesting, given the centrality of

the Viking invasions to the development of this Anglo-Saxon Norman culture that eventually gives rise to capitalism. Yeah, so I think this next phase of history is quite interesting to consider in this context. Because again, if we're assuming that this vast geographic space is filled in, it does immediately throw all the early medieval kingdoms of Europe into total disarray. But you can plausibly still consider that an independent Norwegian power base arises that is this Viking culture and that it still is launching these raids onto Western Europe, which were, you know, very dramatic and cataclysmic for all the policies there.

But if there's more space, if it's closer to Norway, if it's more spread out, if there's more geographical territory to cover, perhaps these Viking invasions are just more dispersed and less cataclysmic and less of a wholesale invasion of this island that is separated from everywhere else that is part of this, you know, much more recognizable North Sea kind of circle of lands that includes Norway, Denmark, and England during this time. So perhaps, you know, the Viking era is less of a thing. Right. The question that I think is really compelling here is what if there's no Dane law really?

You know, what if you're able to come together as, even if the Western Roman Empire, you know, is no longer as connected to Rome itself, but has these sorts of large polities, you have, you know, Western Gaul is now a unified unit, do you actually either, if not totally fight off the Vikings because their military capacities were just like very, very effective at the time, do you have like a much lesser influence of the Dane law, which I think is actually pretty crucial towards proto-individualism and proto-liberalism. That's sort of what makes England interesting is you have that unique blend of the Northern European with the collapsing Western Roman.

Yeah. And I'm, again, I'm just thinking about this as like, if you don't have the specific place of island England to focus on, you know, even if they're bringing these, you know, Norse traditions over, you know, perhaps instead of a concentrated area, you end up with just hundreds and hundreds of little settlements, little raiding villages, little trade posts scattered across this vast space in the now filled in Northern Sea, or perhaps you don't even get that kind of, you know, seafaring raiding type of society because it's just the primacy of the North Sea as a transit location is just vastly diminished by the

virtue of it not being a big sea, being a big land area. And that's also really interesting because what then potentially happens, which we haven't talked about, is what if let's say you have in England, the Western Roman structures, you adopt the North Sea raiding technologies and then you get a British empire that's not seafaring but goes east, you know, like it pulls almost like a Hitler or a Napoleon, where it begins to conceive of itself, not as this territory that needs to get spaces. But like now you have a land based empire emanating from the UK into Europe. That's pretty wild, if you think about it.

Yeah. You have like an acceleration of that eastward push that like was characterized by the the Teutonic Knights after the failure of the Crusades. So you'd have to assume, you know, if you still have a Christian Europe, you'd still have that push east, but maybe a more concerted and effective push east than the disorganized bumblefuck that the Crusades ended up in because you had a bunch of these assholes all competing with one another. And they'd be in the middle of a campaign and then they'd have to go home because the

other guy quit so he could go and try to take his throne, that kind of bullshit. Like the second crusade was, I don't know, the fourth one, the Richard DeLionhard one was completely undermined by the fact that he was in competition with his cousin, the King of France, and they were both supposed to be leading armies there. And then the cousin went back to France and then the English had to go back because they thought he was going to try to take his throne. Like, if you don't have that kind of, you know, horse hockey going around, you have a more unified imperial administration, then maybe you have like an actual effective recolonization

of the Middle East. This is also making me think, you know, as these points blend into each other and we're talking about the competition between England and France. When you first suggested this topic, my shoot from the hip first thought was, oh, England just becomes France too. It's like, has basically the same trajectory and political history and very similar like political evolutions. And so when you're talking about that push to the east, I'm thinking that maybe the

100 years war, the 100 years war is probably not fought in France, but as far, maybe between England and France in Germany or something like that over, you know, if they held it together or against, you know, the Saracen, you know, it's a continual crusade on a stable and perhaps expanding border as opposed to what it was, you know, just the petty swabbles or yeah, like they're an attempt to conquer Germany that then like breaks into a factionalism. I mean, I do love even with this massive geographic change, the assumption can stay the same that Germany is still fucked for a thousand years of political history. Well, that's the question, right?

So this is actually a big question. So Germany, obviously what actually happens is they break up to a million principalities. But if you have Anglo-French power coming together and not only that, if you, France was never able to develop the Navy partially because they had England right there. So what if you have England, France, mega power in which it develops on one hand the land-based military tactics that France specialized in, plus the seafaring taxes of England because it's still a promontory, it's still a peninsula that is like, that is pushing out into the ocean.

So Doggerland, what it allows to do, it depends, Doggerland could be one of two things. It could either be like the reach, you know, in Game of Thrones, where it's impossible to, cool reference, where it's impossible to be totally conquered, or it could be like a linking space that allows two relatively different geographical areas to come together in a mega power that combines both the best of land and sea powers. So you might even get an earlier colonialism. You know, what if you get rid of all of those British-French wars? You get an earlier colonialism.

You get an earlier conquest. It's just focused not to the oceans, like because the technology wasn't there yet, you know, to even conceive of going to the Americas and the desperation didn't exist. It would have been East, and if there would have been, like, if there would have had this sort of effective administration emerging out of this like hyperpower coming into being, it absolutely would be able to effectively assert, yeah, like that basin of Germany, which could not be ever like brought into a single unit, that's in the context of Europe where there can be no main, you know, power that is able to consolidate beyond a certain

level at which point it breaks up, and that you get back to a inefficient level of small state conflict that won't allow anyone to take power. And so in that context, Germany is and has been ungovernable until the modern era. This could have accelerated that significantly because it's not like there was any other competitor state that could have built resistance to an effective Anglo-French empire. They would just be unable to resist them because of their limited capacity. And that's interesting because if you think about Europe in the medieval period, what's unique about it is that there's a million polities, you know.

If you think about the Islamic world, it's these gigantic governed spaces. If you think about China, it's these gigantic governed spaces. So what if you get the European version of that? So then this is really the question, how much do you guys think capitalism is dependent on those small polities constantly and fighting with each other? I think that that's the conditions that are necessary. I think it's the fundamental social condition that brings everything else into alignment because it is the necessity of conflict that pushes people towards adopting, destabilizing

technologies that are threats to established rule that they otherwise would not want to see encouraged. It's the necessity of conflict. And so the fact that everybody in Europe is always fighting their neighbor at every moment and therefore every momentary advantage over their neighbor is to be exploited out of again necessity because this is an existential question that results in innovations being adopted by these states that are small, but they're big enough to have concentrated enough capital to be able to invest in certain innovations and technologies and then use those in a way

that like the empires of China did not, even though the inventions came just the same way they did in faster in fact earlier, they were suppressed and not adopted because there was not that existential question due to the relative stability of the imperial order, which was why the question that this we're really asking is, if you don't have this little organelle popping off of the continent feeling able to exist as this synthesizing clearinghouse for all of these, all of the innovations that are occurring in the context of this endless tumult of violence where they really are bringing up like they are the runt of the litter here, you know, they're at the far east of the continent, they have access to basically no real resources

except fucking wool and then they have to try to survive in competition with these states that have much greater resources and it puts them into, it orients their entire society towards this expedient acceptance of destabilizing technologies social and otherwise that is not in evidence in other social structures in Europe like Englishmen create capitalism because of the conditions of being English and what we're saying here is if you don't have that, if that part of the world is just integrated into this system and therefore the conditions to create Englishmen don't exist, does that mean that we get relatively stable larger polity that is in imperial war at all times with, you know, the fucking Turks

and hell, probably the Mongolians at some point, they're going to have to have Mongolians because they would take over Germany, right? What if it's an English, French hour in Vienna? Yeah, exactly. That violence is all happening, but like at the lower level, you're going to have more of this steady state, which means that capitalism will have a much harder time emerging in the crisis conditions that brought it into being and the two main crises that lurch a relatively stable European feudalism in the direction of capitalism are first the black death and then the little ice age of the 17th century and those things you have at the point of the black death, a feudalism that was in terminal stasis. It was locked

because there was no more, there wasn't enough gold to stimulate like virtual economic activity and there wasn't enough land for everybody who needed to eat. It was not, and there was no effort to expand because the crusade had failed and the exogenous shock of the black death, the Malthusian check reoriented the structures and destabilized feudalism critically and from that point on, feudalism is doomed. Something has to replace it and that doesn't come into existence though, after the subsequent 200 years of hyper conflict that creates these new military states that are able to call to their power all of these new technologies of bureaucracy and taxation and gunpowder and firearms and this stuff that raises the

stakes of the conflict and requires some new social formation to contain conflict and the only place that that's going to be stabilized is one that is able to experience the conditions of a capitalist power, namely an imperial relationship with a subject other and no other European polity had that experience in that post black death world than England because of their relationship to Ireland, which is wholly unique in Europe. I feel like you want to transition right to Ireland, but I want to bring up one other small example of this European competition before we go to Ireland because I feel like that's going to be a big topic of conversation. Another thing that this, again, this geographic

what if brought up to me in this context is the eradication of the Dutch as a political entity in the way that we would know it. I mean, it's basically turns the low countries into a landlocked territory. And along these innovations, these technological innovations that Matt is talking about, a lot of it in England comes up in direct competition to the innovations brought about by Dutch mercantile seafaringness in this early modern period. And it's just that idea that there is no other, I mean, theoretically some other political entity that would arise would, you know, maybe it's mainland England competing with, I don't know, maybe Amsterdam is now Dundee Scotland or something as like the mercantile capital

of Northern Europe. But just as you're talking about the force, the conditions that force Englishmen to adopt capitalism, you know, if you don't have a power right across the channel right there that you are competing with every day for shipping lanes for trade routes for, you know, merchant supremacy, like it just vastly disincentivizes any kind of the development there. And then England gets to adapt all of these innovations that the Dutch pioneer that they observe this and then they're able to incorporate into their state that then is able to compete on equal terms with the Dutch and eventually overwhelm them because of their superior population

and resources. I mean, the Dutch were punching way above their weight because of the very specific conditions that they existed under, which would not exist in this world. There would be no Dutch Republic to break away from Hepsburg Spain and to frantically due to the necessity of war over the next 80 years, forge this mercantile, proto-capitalist colonial machinery that becomes the like structural apparatus for the imposition of capitalism on the globe. And again, like you don't have that filled in Daugherland. And again, this is such a wild like what if again, maybe the Dutch Republic just exists,

but it's off the, you know, west coast of Denmark that is now extends a few hundred more miles into the sea or something like that. Like obviously, perhaps these conditions arise somewhere else, but it would given we're just talking about what how it would change our conception of European development. Now, I think, yeah, you can't underplay the importance of the development of, you know, the Dutch Republic as pre England, England, England zero, Mark one, Mark one. And then they got the best deal out of anybody, the Dutch for like, there's a there's a premium for being first in any place, right? Like in, and the Dutch have enjoyed it immensely

because they were the innovators that they created the blueprint that the British eventually then took from them and what ended up, they fought a couple of wars, but it ended up being a a leveraged buyout. Like when they brought William and Mary over in 1688, that is essentially a a corporate merger between the Dutch and English colonial enterprises. So, so well, I have actually a couple of things. Do you think then that the Dutch are really Northern Europe is as part of this like greater imperial polity that we're now creating in our minds? Well, right. Yeah, what I'm saying is that they invented the thing. Then they got leveraged

bought out. They didn't have to be destroyed. They weren't there. Their their fields weren't salted. They didn't have their precious clocks and chocolates taken from them. They got to live in a higher standard living and they've been able to hold on to that ever since. And now they're able to tinker with their beautiful little clockwork society there on a subsidy on an imperial subsidy. And meanwhile, England, you know, they're the ones who took it and ran with it. But they're just so fucking miserable. They're just so they're so miserable because they lost it relatively recently. And they still have the psychic scars for that. Whereas the Dutch haven't had it for hundreds of years. So they're just happy to have their their

narrow ass houses. Well, this is then the question. Is there a homogeneity in all these cultures that are pretty much not homogenous partially because the Doggerland was filled in and led to this constant conflict? So is there like, are there in the era of nation states, is there just one gigantic mega Western European state? Well, that's the thing is, I think, basically, what we're asking is, could you have a reestablishment of a imperial social formation in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire? And in the real world, I think that conclusively, no, given our geography, given the layout of things

there can be no way for a central power to reassert itself onto the European continent after the fall of Rome. But again, we're assuming what if you don't have that England down there? What if you don't have this low countries, this specific nexus of broken down authority that can be reconstituted by like with this in this relationship, this sort of a osmotic relationship with the rest of Europe, where it's able to stabilize and innovate around the conflict that defines the rest of the continent. Without that, maybe you could reimpose central imperial authority. And what that means is, you have the continuation of the cycle of boom and bust, rather than the sort of broken straightforward line that the what do they

call it, the great divergence, right? That in the from the 16th to the 19th century, sees Europe just essentially escape gravity with its technological and cultural innovations. And if we don't have that divergence, then we would still be, I guess, not in feudalism because by the 17th century, it's in crisis just naturally. But it would have to be something dramatically different. And I think it would mean that we would be at a dramatically later earlier stage of technological development right now in that world. Well, then this is the Ireland question, because there is still a UK in the sense that there is an Ireland looking at Europe, and it's Ireland. Does that matter? Do we get a form

of Irish capitalism? And if we don't, why do you guys think that wouldn't have happened there? I'd say it's just Ireland is just too small. We're talking about the Goldilocks zone, right? And in the in England is a small island relatively, you know, to Madagascar or whatever, but it's also densely populated and has a lot of, a lot of fertile land on it. And Ireland is is a fraction of its size and population. And, and I don't think it would be able to support the level of social production necessary to really get behind innovations. And also, as I said, it would not be able to have an imperial relationship, what, with itself?

I think it would be more, I think it would more likely be Ireland would be sort of like an Iceland or, you know, like Sardinia or something, you know, just like an island that is a stable thrall to one of the probably the Anglo French Empire there. Because one of the things that makes capitalism happen is it's not just Britain being this backwater with nothing but a bunch of wool and a need to compete. They also have this place where they can experiment with ways of seeing to get academic with it, ways of viewing questions of efficiency and, and, and human like new values, like replacing like the, the stable rhythmic agricultural values that had like defined feudal society with, with abstract

values around production, which are capable when you're not, when you're not dealing with your people in the, in the, in the, in the, in the existential sense, when you're dealing with free real estate and the free labor of subjects and that those structures of, of, of legal thought and of theology and, and just the techniques of improving agricultural yield are all pioneered in Ireland. So I mean, what you're, so when you say about that Goldilocks zone, you know, really what you're saying is the, the, one of the main things about England is that it is a small island off of a competitive continent with a small island off of it. So really for Ireland

to become the England, it would have to have an Ireland off of it. Exactly. But I don't, I don't think necessarily that we wouldn't eventually see capitalism emerge just out of, you know, a some, some sort of response to a crisis that we couldn't even anticipate, you know, because that's the thing that knocks like Europe in that direction are these exogenous shocks. And so we have to assume that those who continue to accumulate because there's still contradictions in this, you know, a cod feudalism that they have, this merchantile proto-capitalism that they get to before England takes off. But I think the difference is the exogenous shocks come within the context of constant

competition and the exogenous shocks come within a world when if you like literally curve the wall of your castle, now you're able to conquer new nation states. And so the difference here is that we might get capitalism, let's say in the year 3000 with the fighting between the various land-based empires that now dominate Europe. And that is just so different that we can't even predict what it was also related to colonization. So without absent these forms of constant competition, which engender competition for seacraft vessels to search for literal capital, what happens to the Western hemisphere? Is that just left totally untouched?

I think it would be a long time, a lot longer before there was any contact. And that raises a very interesting question because if contact is like sporadic and not organized around, you know, like joint stock companies and colonies and these projects, if it's just, you know, getting blown off course or small raiding parties or things like that, then do you have a situation where the Amerindians encounter European diseases and then are able to, you know, adapt to them, have a bunch of people of course die because that's going to happen. It happened in Europe, but not in a context where everyone is dying as Europe is colonizing the continent, but rather while Europe is still basically doing their own thing, probably

concentrating on their Eastern frontiers, so that eventually there would be contact between these extended contact between these two groups, but it would be in one where there is no more biological advantage to the Europeans. And if that's the case, then I don't think you can have European conquest of the Americas, which we'll talk about in a future episode every now matches gave us a preview. Well, I do. I have to ask to clarify because, you know, obviously this scrambles the map of the entirety of European history, but you know, the initial phases of exploration were very much a Southern European project to Spain, Portugal leading the way. And of course, it's

Spain that makes first contact with the New World. So I mean, do you see the destabilizing of Northern Europe to be so significant in this history that, you know, Spain is not and Portugal are still not competing to unlock new, unlock new areas of the map on the African coast and then eventually seeing what's out there further to the West in the ocean. The, all of those projects were motivated by the, in a macro sense, those were all of those trips to the West, all those trips across to the scary edge of the world were inevitable as soon as the Ottomans take Constantinople because it was a move out of necessity to compensate for closure of trade routes to the East. And what I'm assuming in this world is a constant

is that you have a sustainable Eastward project that can orient European politics and in a way that was denied them by the relative weakness of Europe vis-a-vis the rising power of the Turks. And I feel like if you don't have that, if you have like a actual colonial domination of like Near East and Central Europe and, and like land connections to, to trade routes, I don't know if there's the incentive to put that much into Westward, get a very risky Westward expansion or I definitely get what you're saying. I think that it might scramble the timeline a little bit, but I have to imagine, even if there is eventually it's going to happen. Yeah, I can certainly eventually all of this is going to happen because of the

fact that it's just, it's, it's, it's, it's cyclical, but it's also a cumulative like right. The technology is accumulative and that means that it changes the relationship between people and their environment in a way that they don't understand and anticipate at the time. And that leads them to break up without even knowing it, what they're the world they live in and building one without knowing what it is. And that was capitalism in this world, but it would have to be something no matter what, because the crisis continued to accumulate at the center of a class society. But this I think leads us to an interesting question about the mind worlds of these people,

because I would say it's pretty clear you're not going to get a Scottish Enlightenment, which is effectively the early liberalism providing the ideological sheen of capitalism. But what happens to the Catholic Church in this world? That's really interesting. Do you even get a Protestant reformation or is this sort of land based imperial space, it kind of just allows the Catholic Church to continue indefinitely, particularly when you're facing Mongol society to the east and an Islamic society to the south. What happens to the church? So do you not that, do you not get the technology of Protestantism, which is so crucial, I think, to capitalism's dominating Europe and eventually the world?

No, I think you have a wholly unified Christendom, because it was the growing pains of Europe that brought Protestantism to existence, but those growing pains were accelerated by all of these urbanizing trends that were caused by this small state competitive framework that we're sort of getting, we're assuming out of existence. So, yeah, I don't think I think you have, there's obviously you'll never have a stability. There was always going to be cyclical outbreaks of resistance to the church, heresies and whatnot, but I don't think that they get locked into local and then national networks of like state support. So I think you got, you keep the church stays in control the whole continent there.

Yeah. And I mean, as we will get into in Matt and I's future situation, it is no coincidence that Protestantism breaks out in the most disunified area of the empire. And if we're, I mean, it's, I don't know if I'm totally convinced with the, what we've seemed to take in as the given that, you know, the, this leads to a more unified, inevitably to a more unified Europe. I mean, I'm like 5050, because when you look at the two major pulses of the center mass of Europe, you either get a France where things get unified more quickly, or a Germany where everything continues to fall apart. And I, again, the conditions I think are so hard to know, given this big of a what if that perhaps, you know, Northern England

or all of Northern Europe falls into a, a Holy Roman Empire trap and it is, you know, a disunified mass. And in that case, you know, I think that you could maybe see Protestantism breaking out in Scotland, for example, for example, but you know, I agree with Matt, if you take the premise that things are going to be more unified and there is a more singular Christendom because of this change, yeah, I think that, that, that innovation, that the particular mind violence of Protestantism comes much later in a different place, if at all, I would predict, I agree. I would come later and I don't know exactly when, obviously,

but I would say if you had to make, you guess where I would say Switzerland, because of the mountains, baby, religious, religious dissent is always more secure in elevation. Well, and the question though, because I tend to lean toward the unification, because where you have so much exchange between Britain and France over the course of that entire lay medieval period, what if you basically don't have France as a place to escape to for all of these leaders who then escape there and then reconvene and then reconquer England and then they have parts of Normandy and then they don't have parts of Normandy because that gets rid of all of that competition, which I think is, is the more micro regional

context for the development of proto-capitalism in the UK and really proto-liberalism in the sense of focusing on the individual because so what if you don't get that sort of the inventing of the individual argument for Europe and Europe becomes a more socially organized space in the mind worlds of the people living there? I mean, does Europe end up looking more like Chinese history? Right, which is, you know, you get an incredibly different culture. So you get basically the argument being that like Paul, the Saint Paul develops the idea of the individual and then it really takes off over the next thousand years in Northern

Africa and Europe, but what if that entire European part of the equation is thrown out? Do you get socialism in 13th century Western Europe? Not obviously advanced socialism, as we would understand it as a horizon, you know, to transcend class politics or to transcend class rule, but like as a sort of like a peasant equilibrium, perhaps, then you don't get technologically advanced like society. You don't have all the things that we embed in our assumptions of our social goods because they define our society and that's the thing you can't really have. You cannot have socialism without capitalism first and so whatever is going to would emerge

in this world that we're creating, it would have to be some sort of if it was going to be socialism, it would have to be socialism at a very low level of social technological development because and it would and it would be, it would have been perhaps the collective will of people to be like, let's not go down that road. Let's not do that. Let's all choose as we can to do that and and then they could make the choice which would have been a rational choice if it could have been agreed to and understood as such to not open that particular box, but you know, we don't, we didn't get those conditions.

So that means we instead unopen the box which created, you know, the modern alienated capitalist subject who can only be redeemed by participation in socialist class struggle. It's the it's the final secular continuation of Protestantism. So you, you, so, you know, in a sense, you're supposed to say, well, thank God we had Doggerland because it gave us a chance to develop a socialist project. But now we sit sort of stand sort of at the precipice of the of the missed chance of socialism. And this is why we sit here and we ponder like, well, maybe it would be better off if we were all, you know, like in some sort of rural commune, but not trying to escape

who they are. But like in a, in a rooted, you know, social sense, I think a lot of people are fantasizing about that one way or the other on different parts of the political spectrum. But you know, what would it need? What would you need to do to live that way? You would need to literally live in a world where there was no England, where the Doggerland never filled in. That's the only world where that is possible.

So turning that into a political project is it's a fantasy. But what if you get, here, here's a potential hinge point. What if you get capitalism with Ottoman characteristics? Like what if the Ottomans who are, who are in a more central, like sort of middle space literally, where they have to defend various peripheries. And for example, that's why they developed a lot of these military technologies. What if they're able to actually successfully invade central Europe, which seems more likely in a world without an independent England?

And it's also, I mean, again, there's so many ways you could take this. It's also like, okay, if we're imagining a more unified Europe without so much, you know, interstate conflict as it progresses, they're theoretically not developing as sophisticated means of warfare throughout this entire time, which means that a more expansive project like the Ottomans might be able to simply roll over them. Just take over the world. Yeah. You're looking at Ottoman Frankfurt or whatever, you know?

Right. Because like the key, at least in 20th century geopolitics, is you can't let anyone control the Eurasian ecumen. And no one was ever able to control the western portion of that ecumen because of the incredible number of polities in Europe, and hence the violence in the developing military technologies over the course of the late medieval and early modern period. But if you get rid of that, and what if you get like an literally ecumenical empire? Because maybe we do get, maybe we don't get a Marx because the history is so different

with Doggerland that you're able to pass over the violence of capitalism because you have just this gigantic pseudo-world empire. I mean, obviously, you would come into contact with the Chinese on its eastern borders. But imagine if you have an ecumenical space totally unified. I mean, again, I'm kind of thinking that this is even more, I think that there's other ways that you could think that this wouldn't even be that revolutionary, because I'm even thinking about, like, you know, the Muslim invasion of Spain was able to eventually be fought off and rolled back.

And again, that Spain is developing capacity just through its own internal conflicts, internal Christian conflicts, conflicts with Spain, which were with France, which is its only direct neighbor. I mean, I'm thinking of, like, the small regions in which things are able to, would continually develop roughly the same. And thinking about what that would mean for a connected UK. I mean, I think that it is certainly possible that a single united Christendom develops and through the lack of conflict is weakened through it.

But you know, there are still these very strong political, or, you know, political entities that developed just through their own internal conflict, and again, the relatively isolated Iberian Peninsula, you know, I mean, it's just got that one, that the one border with France and it was able to develop enough to push out the, its Muslim occupiers. I mean, does that make sense to you guys? Yeah, it does. And that also, like, what if, relatedly, you don't get the, or relatedly, you do get the development of the Italian city-state system, which is so crucial.

Well, I was also thinking just in the back of my head, it's like, if France and if, you know, there's all this land up here, perhaps the Normans don't go south, and perhaps, you know, Sicily and, you know, Naples are forever connected with Italy, perhaps Italian unification happens hundreds of years earlier as a, like, singular kingdom, you know? Which is, again, I guess that points towards the development of a more unification rather than less unification if there is more land to offset any kind of pressures and conflicts. And to some degree, that depends on what Doggerland would be. If it's swampy, marshy territory, then you still have England.

But if it's territory that's easily crossable by horses, then I think you have an entirely different space. And maybe it's still difficult to cross the Pyrenees, but it's possible, you know. It's certainly not impossible. And you could even imagine a flanking procedure from the South, where you go through the Straits of Gibraltar, and you just go up through there, through your, you know, Brito-Franco super empire that now controls Germany into the Eastern Prussian fields. And that to me, I really do think that there would have been more unification.

And I really do think that it would have tamped down competition in Europe, which just really, in my mind, provides a space for the Ottomans to just come in in the 14, 1500s and just take shit over. Okay. So, best case scenario, we have the imposition of Islamic rule over Europe. Right. Right. Which is what you're always saying, Matt.

That's the way forward. Universal enlightenment coming in the form of a Muslim holy war that sweeps the globe and brings about the return of the Mahdi. Do you get colonialism in that world? Or do you just go to, like, the moon? Like you develop space technology in 1750. Well, again, it's like, it's all about, like, how are, how, what are the conditions under which the Native, the Americans broadly considered encounter the European disease matrix, you

know, the, the, the diseases of, of demographically dense societies. Like if they encounter them over time and not in the context of like a direct confrontation, I think that you don't have your colonialism because it can't be sustained. It cannot be dug deeply enough into the earth to make it worth the effort, which is not true in our world because there was the entire hundreds of miles with inland of, of everywhere that the Europeans touched, they were essentially uncontested for land because of the massive toll taken in the populations of the people who encountered those diseases. If that doesn't happen, then I don't think you have colonialism, which means, yeah,

we either destroy ourselves in a, in a world war somehow, or we, we get it together to create world government and go to the moon. Those are the two options. There's always the ones that are on the table. And that's what's also really implied in all this is you don't pay, you basically don't get the nation state as a political form, which is in the position of like this, this particular European phenomenon. Right.

And I think the nation state is a major cause of humanity's misery. So moving that entire political form, I think does augur a more progressive world, however you wanted to find that. Yeah. So nationalism has been the chief psychic technology of, of, of reaction and of defeating of socialism at every turn. And that's the irony of actually existing history is that you need that conflict to develop the capitalism, to develop the technologies necessary to actually create socialism.

But concomitantly, you get the development of a nationalism that prevents the working class from becoming the subject, the object of history. Yeah. And this is the, the, the, the impasse we are at today. Yeah. So the answer, how do we fix that? Somebody get a time machine and a, and a bunch of bulldozers and just dam it up. Like this.

Well, I mean, that's a funny thing when we were like starting with the very, the premise of this, obviously the, the natural premise is that this geographic formation existed once and wonder if it persisted. But the other funny thing is England's right there. You can see it from France. Like if there was just a bridge, like literally like a causeway that you could get people across like permanently, if there was 500 feet of solid ground, but at Dover, you know, it would, you know, everything would be so radically changed along these axes.

And that's why I think it's, it's fun to think about it because, you know, that's the thing about England so close, but so far. Yeah. And it really is one of the biggest mechanisms, the drivers of all of world history. They get that, they get that little note. And what's interesting to me about this one in particular is that it really does highlight the centrality of geography, the ultimate material to world history, which is something that's not an especially popular topic of conversation, but for most of human, you know,

civic thinking was absolutely crucial. So this is probably the most macro one that we're going to do this season. We've got a bunch of really fun episodes coming up, dealing with Napoleon, dealing with Martin Luther, dealing with the topic Matt discussed about what if there were encounters between the Western Hemisphere and Europe much earlier than they actually occurred. I feel like you guys should do that one next because I feel like it really flows directly from this. If there was just, if we just sent over a few trade boats, if Europe had just sent over

a few trade boats, seen what was up for, and then we're like, eh, we'll get you guys later and gave the new world 100 years or so to cook with cooking up antibodies, wildly different future. Yeah. And enormously different. And then again, organize around that central question of colonialism is foundational to say the least to capitalism. So what if you have a non-extractive relationship there or non-extractive in quite the same

way? I think it opens up entire new spaces to think through what could have been. All right. On that cough, everyone, thank you for listening to Hinge Points. We look forward to seeing you all next week. Bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.