The other side of that coin was the European experience: "war is terrible, look at all these dead civilians - our neighbours".
The slow bifurcation of two essentially similarly-based cultures, is the theme of the last 80 years - let alone 30.
And, as you say, it is the impositions of 'victory' upon the winners, as much as the losers, that drive social change. (or maybe I am going too far with that thought?)
Think about that capitalist notion of slavery. A cheap energy resource for WASP expansion in the 18th C onwards. An historical business decision that still echoes loudly in North American culture - and unlikely to quiesce any time soon.
This is what has occupied my thinking in recent months: the asynchronous time cycles of different world-views. The quartal view, the career view, the 'when will I die' view', the 'when will christianity die' view etc etc.
We've never really had to think cosmically before, apart from a few hard to read philosophers. Education has to be that broad imo. You can't be me, I'm taken
Not to mention Latino expansion from the sixteenth century onwards. The Brits actually were the first major imperialist power to abandon slavery. The growth of the European (ex) colonies was primarily driven by poor European settlers be that in English, Spanish, or Porgtugese speaking areas. It turned out that for modern capitalism, the legal and economic strictures of a market economy are far more efficient at generating wealth for the elites than chattel slavery. Those areas that had been particularly dependent on the early modern system of slave labour tended to fall behind (US South, Caribbean, northern Brazil). The same was largely true in Europe as well with a pretty good correlation between the persistence of serfdom and relative poverty and economic underdevelopment.
