The West seems to be the most economically stable and powerful part of the modern world. This is largely true nowadays, but it hasn’t always been the case. Before the Renaissance, the civilizations of Western Europe were by far the most ignorant, uneducated, and unhygienic in the world, compared to the flourishing societies in India and China. Therefore, it is natural for one to be curious about what factors influenced Europe’s fabulous advance in prosperity. How did Europe catch up and eventually surpass the great civilizations in the Middle East and the Orient? Why didn’t those other societies experience a similar economic revolution? Countless factors influenced this unprecedented (and as yet, unrepeated) historic phenomenon, yet it seems clear that as feudalism gradually fell apart, the birth of capitalism paved the golden road to economic growth and prosperity in Europe.

Feudo-manorialism was mostly a bane to economic, scientific, and technological progress in medieval Europe. While it would be untrue to say progress didn’t happen during the time period of C. E. 1000- 1500, it would be true to say that around 90% of Europe’s population was poor and had no poss

ible way to progress themselves onto a higher financial plane (Rosenburg, 6). Nathan Rosenburg writes in his landmark work How the West Grew Rich that “The West had made progress, perhaps slow and irregular but still substantial, for five hundred years. Yet it was, by modern standards, poverty-stricken” (35). Serfs worked the land their entire lives as payment to their liege-lord for allowing them to live on his land. In return, the lord of the manor provided his tenants protection from marauding bandits, who most often took the form of knights loyal to a land-hungry neighboring lord. Indeed, land was the only kind of wealth that one could have; or more accurately, owning land was the only way of earning any sort of decent income. Therefore, those who weren’t legally born into an existing estate were doomed to life-long poverty (legally being a key word, as bastard children of a lord were often banished from his household). Although serfs made up probably 90% of the population of Europe, the oppressively unfair feudal social structure gave them the shortest straw. Serfs could never acquire any land (and therefore any wealth) because they didn’t have any to begin with.

The new social order forever moved the economy of Europe away from being entirely land-based. Wealth (and therefore power) now came from not only land holdings, but also material wealth (i.e. money). This newfound wealth also profoundly affected the peasant class. As they witnessed especially savvy merchants become privately rich, serfs began to realize that members of the middle class did not have to have humongous tracts of land in order to become wealthy; they only had to have a keen business sense. Peasants now had options that did not involve slaving their entire lives for some noble who never gave them anything except more work to do. They began to leave their manors in huge numbers in favor of earning their own wages doing one of any number of things. Some became crewmen on merchant ships and traveled the world; others opted to live in towns and cities to become apprentices to artisans and craftsmen, or even to set up their own shops making and selling their own goods. They now had the freedom to be responsible for their own livelihood; they no longer had to depend on the rich.

However, in a rather slow process that started with the First Crusade in 1096 and continued to progress for many centuries to come, a middle-income social class gradually filled in the enormous chasm that had for so long separated the rich from the poor. As Crusade after Crusade sent massive waves of Europeans to the Middle Eastern “Holy Land” and back again, traders began to take their wares with them, in order to bring back Middle Eastern spices, textiles, and any other goods they could possibly sell in their homeland. As a consequence, European trade with the Middle East and eventually throughout the entire Mediterranean seaboard flourished, allowing the new merchant class to develop and gradually gain power. As merchants gained power, other middle-class professions appeared to cater to

Some topics in this essay:
Middle Ages, Middle East, William McNeill, Grew Rich, Adam Smith, Imperial Court, Europe Feudo-manorialism, East Orient, Robert Duplessis, Middle Eastern, progress innovation, entire lives, prosperity europe, middle east, middle ages, eighteenth century, factors influenced, technological progress, middle eastern, capitalism unable,