>industrialization That already existed. In the late 1700s, Mughal India’s various Nawabates (especially Bengal) had significant industry. They had a large ship building, iron industry, workshops, and small factories. The Ottoman Empire was roughly comparable with Europe at the time, but faced serious economic downturns after the Treaty of Balta Liman flooded the Middle East and Balkans with cheap British imports. Egypt under Muhammad Ali Pasha also imported sophisticated industrial equipment from Europe for state run monopolies and factories.
>Would the Islamic world just be like EuropeIt’s probably unlikely that European style capitalism would have developed anywhere outside of Europe. It’s not like capitalism was some inevitable development either. China or the Islamic empires might have evolved economic systems in an entirely different direction.
Some central features of European legal systems and property regimes just aren’t there in Islamic law. Sharia doesn’t have a concept of cooperate personality. Cooperations didn’t exist. It also lacks the same concept of liberal private property (anything and everything can be owned and ownership means it belongs to an individual or a cooperate individual). It’s possible Islamic law might have adopted these concepts from Euros at some point, but it’s also possible they would have developed along an an entirely different path. Given how private property and cooperate personality are integral to capitalism, it’s difficult imaging how a capitalist system could exist without them.
The ethical thrust of capital, which Weber credited to Calvinism, doesn’t exist either. There was no cult of productivity in Islamic culture pre-colonization.
>>2492489Many bourgeois secularists were Hegelians. They believed that industrial science and technology would allow humanity to realize the Christian heaven on earth, thus eliminating the need for a transcendent Christianity which is now reduced to a private personal choice.
Well, that’s fine if your heaven is basically a happy land of no suffering and abundance. But the Quranic vision of heaven is basically an endless orgy with multiple women and twinks in gardens. Its even more implausible and unrealizable. So the theological structure would have to be completely different.
It’s safe to say that capitalism could only have evolved in Europe and is only global today because of 19th century imperialism integrating the entire planet into a capitalist world market.