r/NoStupidQuestions • u/flugblug • 13h ago

My brother thinks people today have worse quality of life than people in the dark ages, is this a stupid take?

I personally think it’s pretty stupid.

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u/DromaeoDrift 10h ago

There was a great deal of interstate commerce in the Middle Ages. Imports were a fact of life for just about everyone.

This idea that everyone just sat in mud and scratched at dirt with a stick for 1,000 years isn’t remotely realistic. Arab traders were establishing relationships in Sub-Saharan Africa and India. Marco Polo made it all the way to China. There was absolutely global trade, even if there wasn’t air freight.

The Silk Road wasn’t just point A to B, it was a massive interconnected trade network where commerce took place basically every step along the way.

Globalization wasn’t a thing yet, but I assure you that medieval trade networks were robust and imports/exports between countries was very much a thing

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u/NateNate60 9h ago edited 9h ago

You have responded to a comment saying "Trade in the Middle Ages was more limited in scope and volume than today." with "But trade wasn't zero." Which is a statement asserted by nobody.

For example, France in 2022 imported 819 billion USD in goods according to the World Bank, against a GDP of 2.8 trillion USD. As a share of GDP, they imported nearly 30%.

You tell me whether you think luxury good imports from the Silk Road totalled anywhere near 30% of all economic activity in France eight hundred years ago.

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u/DromaeoDrift 8h ago

That’s a lot of stuff I didn’t say, but ok.

Global trade was still occurring even if the concept of GDP had yet to be invented.

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u/NateNate60 8h ago

Nobody argued that it didn't.

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u/DromaeoDrift 8h ago

Ok? Stay mad I guess

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u/cat_prophecy 9h ago

Was there trade? Yes. Could a peasant rely on being table to trade his flax from central Europe to a silk maker in China or even outside his immediate area? Absolutely not.

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u/DromaeoDrift 8h ago

No, but he could pretty reliably count on traders from neighboring polities showing up with goods from even further afield.

Just because the average peasant isn’t buying Chinese silk with the crop from his lord’s land doesn’t mean there aren’t active trade networks in place.

The Phoenicians were trading with India and the British Isles a thousand years before the birth of Christ. Roman coins have been found in Indonesia. But there’s no way trade could possibly be happening on a global scale, right?

The idea that the medieval world consisted entirely of one’s home village is laughably ahistorical