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Why Europe? The Rise of the West in World History 1500-1850
Part of McGraw-Hill's Explorations in World History series, this brief and accessible volume explores one of the biggest questions of recent historical how among all of Eurasia’s interconnected centers of power, it was Europe that came to dominate much of the world. Author Jack Goldstone presents the argument as it stands in light of up-to-date research so that readers can come to understand the technological and economic inequalities between Europe and the rest of the world came to be and decide for themselves where the driving forces behind this phenomenon are taking us.
192 pages, Paperback
First published June 17, 2008
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About the author
Jack A. Goldstone
30 books33 followersJack A. Goldstone is an American sociologist and political scientist, specializing in studies of social movements, revolutions, and international politics. He is an author or editor of 13 books and over 140 research articles. He is recognized as one of the leading authorities on the study of revolutions and long-term social change. His work has made foundational contributions to the fields of cliodynamics, economic history and political demography. He was the first scholar to describe in detail and document the long-term cyclical relationship between global population cycles and cycles of political rebellion and revolution. He was also a core member of the “California school” in world history, which replaced the standard view of a dynamic West and stagnant East with a ‘late divergence’ model in which Eastern and Western civilizations underwent similar political and economic cycles until the 18th century, when Europe achieved the technical breakthroughs of industrialization. He is also one of the founding fathers of the emerging field of political demography, studying the impact of local, regional, and global population trends on international security and national politics.
Goldstone is currently the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. He has also worked as a consultant of the US government, for example, serving as chair of the National Research Council's evaluation of USAID Democracy Assistance Programs. He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Director of the Research Laboratory in Political Demography and Macrosocial Dynamics at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow.
His academic awards include the American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award, for 'Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World,' the Arnaldo Momigliano Award of the Historical Society, and seven awards for 'best article' in the fields of Comparative/Historical Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Theory, and Collective Behavior and Social Movements. He has won fellowships from the Council of Learned Societies, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the MacArthur Foundation, the Australian Research School of Social Sciences, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and is an elected member of the Council on Foreign Affairs and the Sociological Research Association. He has been the Richard Holbrooke Visiting Lecturer at the American Academy in Berlin, the Crayborough Lecturer at Leiden University, and a Phi Beta Kappa National Visiting Scholar.
Goldstone is currently the Virginia E. and John T. Hazel, Jr. Professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. He has also worked as a consultant of the US government, for example, serving as chair of the National Research Council's evaluation of USAID Democracy Assistance Programs. He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Director of the Research Laboratory in Political Demography and Macrosocial Dynamics at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow.
His academic awards include the American Sociological Association Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award, for 'Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World,' the Arnaldo Momigliano Award of the Historical Society, and seven awards for 'best article' in the fields of Comparative/Historical Sociology, Political Sociology, Social Theory, and Collective Behavior and Social Movements. He has won fellowships from the Council of Learned Societies, the U.S. Institute of Peace, the MacArthur Foundation, the Australian Research School of Social Sciences, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and is an elected member of the Council on Foreign Affairs and the Sociological Research Association. He has been the Richard Holbrooke Visiting Lecturer at the American Academy in Berlin, the Crayborough Lecturer at Leiden University, and a Phi Beta Kappa National Visiting Scholar.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
June 1, 2014
Part of a textbook series published by McGraw Hill Higher Education and titled "Explorations in World History", and written (presumably) for undergraduates by a 'big picture in history guy' from GMU (who is actually a sociologist by training...), this book identifies with the so-called "California School" that includes people like Kenneth Pomeranz (The Great Divergence), R. Bin Wong, Jack Goody, Robert Marks (and Andre Gunder Frank), all of whom argue that the emergence of the West was a sudden and recent phenomenon (c. 1800). This is intended (in their view) to replace the 'eurocentric' view of World History, seen as a "progressive" development from Greece and Roman, through the European Middle Ages, to the current state of Western (scientific and cultural world dominance).
According to Goldstone, Europe's rise -- which occurred against the backdrop of the preeminence of Asia in 1500-1800 -- was not due to any general European superiority (Europe was not wealthier, or more advanced technically or scientifically). Rather, the 'special factors' involved were a series of new discoveries (the New World) that allowed Europe to break with religious orthodoxy; a novel approach to science that stressed the experimental and mathematical analysis ( -- I happen to agree with this latter point, but believe that it can be shown that this change goes back not to Francis Bacon, as Goldstone thinks, but to the development of induction in the early Middle Ages, which itself derives from the 'regressus', or geometrical analysis, that itself goes back -- as Bacon himself observed -- to the Socratic dialectic -- but I digress...); an instrument-driven approach to experimentation; a new tolerance and pluralism, connected with 18th cen. Anglicanism; and support for entrepreneurship. The book has a blurb by Jared Diamond.
That said, it is boring as hell -- written in a modern textbooks that, personally, defeats me; by a sociologist posing as an historian, etc. Hence, the two-stars. Worth the browse, but not worth the money it cost to do so.
According to Goldstone, Europe's rise -- which occurred against the backdrop of the preeminence of Asia in 1500-1800 -- was not due to any general European superiority (Europe was not wealthier, or more advanced technically or scientifically). Rather, the 'special factors' involved were a series of new discoveries (the New World) that allowed Europe to break with religious orthodoxy; a novel approach to science that stressed the experimental and mathematical analysis ( -- I happen to agree with this latter point, but believe that it can be shown that this change goes back not to Francis Bacon, as Goldstone thinks, but to the development of induction in the early Middle Ages, which itself derives from the 'regressus', or geometrical analysis, that itself goes back -- as Bacon himself observed -- to the Socratic dialectic -- but I digress...); an instrument-driven approach to experimentation; a new tolerance and pluralism, connected with 18th cen. Anglicanism; and support for entrepreneurship. The book has a blurb by Jared Diamond.
That said, it is boring as hell -- written in a modern textbooks that, personally, defeats me; by a sociologist posing as an historian, etc. Hence, the two-stars. Worth the browse, but not worth the money it cost to do so.
May 29, 2015
In a nutshell: if you live in the West, you should thank Lord for that neither Oliver Cromwell's Puritan Taliban, nor Catholic Stuarts afterwards prevailed and that British empiricism emerged.
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May 31, 2020I was recommended this book years ago at a World History Conference, but I never got around to reading it. Now that I finally have, I wish I had done it earlier. It asks a big question: Why did Europe come to dominate the world? It begins on the premise that Europe was far behind India, China and the Ottoman Empire in 1500, so how did it surpass them by so much.
Goldstone looks at possible explanations and systematically dismisses them. It wasn't Protestantism being tolerant, because it wasn't for a long time. In fact, many other societies were much more tolerant of religions. He does say that scientific advances are much more likely in places with religious toleration and pluralism.
He dismisses trade and conquest, saying that Europeans had only a small part of the Indian and Pacific Ocean trade, so this couldn't have been a factor. He allows that exploiting the Americas might have helped, but says that slavery didn't help because no major slave holding country industrialized. This is a problematic part of his argument. The slave trade was enormously profitable for England (and other European countries), but Goldstone ignores those profits entirely. He also says that slave owners in the American south did not invest in the north's industry, which is not how I understand it (although I will need to do more research to verify that). Additionally, he suggests that cotton from the American south didn't help Britain manufacturing by providing inputs, which seems counterfactual (again, more research needed).
He shows that standards of living in Europe were generally lower even in the early 19th century, which doesn't really address the issue of wealth. Poor people were being exploited, so their standard of living initially fell as the country's wealth grew. When he gets to government, he makes some good points about Britain's high taxes and tariffs and shows how those taxes were spent on the military. In addition, Britain (and France and the Netherlands) granted monopolies of trade to single companies, undermining the idea of free trade. I would have liked for him to connect this to the idea of colonies, which did provide substantial trade and wealth within the empire.
His concluding point was that it was innovation at all points of British society that allowed Europe to move ahead. (You may notice that as I write this, I have moved from discussing Europe overall to Britain, which is where Goldstone focuses his final explanation.) He suggests that Britain had several factors that led to its rise, which later took the rest of Europe along with it.
1) The first was more Europe wide. It was that Catholic dogma about the nature of the earth-centered universe (subsequently adopted by most protestants as well), was largely undermine by discoveries of Galileo, Brahe and others. Because this went completely against orthodoxy in ways that it didn't in Asian societies, Europeans had to break substantially with tradition when trying to explain the world.
2) Europe developed a scientific technique based on experimentation, although it was mainly used in Britain until the mid-nineteenth century.
3) Combined with that, Francis Bacon as Lord Chancellor advocated the policy of promulgating new discoveries so that individuals could make practical use of them.
4) Britain also adopted an instrument-driven process of experimentation, which started in mainland Europe, but was undermined by the popularity of Cartesian philosophy of pure reason.
5) Britain allowed religious pluralism (of sorts) after the Glorious Revolution.
6) Entrepreneurs were looking for scientific advances and had easy access to engineers and inventors. An example was that Richard Arkwright was more investor than inventor when he helped created the water frame.
This is a short book with chapter summaries, so it is an easy read. I have some reservations about some points, some of which I have mentioned here, but I enjoyed the book and it provided a lot of food for thought. I think I will assign it to my students for summer reading, not because it is definitive, but because it asks a lot of important questions and gives students a good starting point for investigating it themselves.
Goldstone looks at possible explanations and systematically dismisses them. It wasn't Protestantism being tolerant, because it wasn't for a long time. In fact, many other societies were much more tolerant of religions. He does say that scientific advances are much more likely in places with religious toleration and pluralism.
He dismisses trade and conquest, saying that Europeans had only a small part of the Indian and Pacific Ocean trade, so this couldn't have been a factor. He allows that exploiting the Americas might have helped, but says that slavery didn't help because no major slave holding country industrialized. This is a problematic part of his argument. The slave trade was enormously profitable for England (and other European countries), but Goldstone ignores those profits entirely. He also says that slave owners in the American south did not invest in the north's industry, which is not how I understand it (although I will need to do more research to verify that). Additionally, he suggests that cotton from the American south didn't help Britain manufacturing by providing inputs, which seems counterfactual (again, more research needed).
He shows that standards of living in Europe were generally lower even in the early 19th century, which doesn't really address the issue of wealth. Poor people were being exploited, so their standard of living initially fell as the country's wealth grew. When he gets to government, he makes some good points about Britain's high taxes and tariffs and shows how those taxes were spent on the military. In addition, Britain (and France and the Netherlands) granted monopolies of trade to single companies, undermining the idea of free trade. I would have liked for him to connect this to the idea of colonies, which did provide substantial trade and wealth within the empire.
His concluding point was that it was innovation at all points of British society that allowed Europe to move ahead. (You may notice that as I write this, I have moved from discussing Europe overall to Britain, which is where Goldstone focuses his final explanation.) He suggests that Britain had several factors that led to its rise, which later took the rest of Europe along with it.
1) The first was more Europe wide. It was that Catholic dogma about the nature of the earth-centered universe (subsequently adopted by most protestants as well), was largely undermine by discoveries of Galileo, Brahe and others. Because this went completely against orthodoxy in ways that it didn't in Asian societies, Europeans had to break substantially with tradition when trying to explain the world.
2) Europe developed a scientific technique based on experimentation, although it was mainly used in Britain until the mid-nineteenth century.
3) Combined with that, Francis Bacon as Lord Chancellor advocated the policy of promulgating new discoveries so that individuals could make practical use of them.
4) Britain also adopted an instrument-driven process of experimentation, which started in mainland Europe, but was undermined by the popularity of Cartesian philosophy of pure reason.
5) Britain allowed religious pluralism (of sorts) after the Glorious Revolution.
6) Entrepreneurs were looking for scientific advances and had easy access to engineers and inventors. An example was that Richard Arkwright was more investor than inventor when he helped created the water frame.
This is a short book with chapter summaries, so it is an easy read. I have some reservations about some points, some of which I have mentioned here, but I enjoyed the book and it provided a lot of food for thought. I think I will assign it to my students for summer reading, not because it is definitive, but because it asks a lot of important questions and gives students a good starting point for investigating it themselves.
January 13, 2020
The book is well written and presents interesting dynamics, but the author, in addition to showing clear favoritism towards England, also seems sadly convinced of the uselessness and backwardness of any discipline other than engineering.
The result is a controversial, uncertain and not always enjoyable product.
The result is a controversial, uncertain and not always enjoyable product.
July 7, 2022
L'eccellente studio di Goldstone spiega le ragioni dell'ascesa dell'Occidente nella storia contemporanea. La maggior parte del testo (9 capitoli su 10) si concentra nello smontare pezzo per pezzo le tesi e i luoghi comuni più diffusi: lo storico inglese svela come questi si siano sviluppati a causa di un approccio accademico eurocentrico. E' stata una presunta superiorità degli occidentali a provocare lo splendore del Vecchio Continente? Non si direbbe, visto che fino al XIX secolo la terra delle ricchezze era considerata l'Asia. Vi era una naturale predisposizione alle scienze? Goldstone ci ricorda che il primato europeo anche in quest'ambito è fatto recente e che per secoli fossero stati gli arabi i migliori navigatori e matematici. Saranno state allora le ricette economiciste di un pensiero liberale? Quì lo storico ci ricorda come l'Inghilterra dell'epoca di Smith fosse probabilmente il paese più tassato del mondo. E cosa dire della teoria di Weber, secondo cui l'etica protestante era la base dello spirito imprenditoriale capitalista? Non spiega perchè paesi non protestanti siano stati all'avanguardia nè lo sviluppo nei paesi cattolici.
Alla fine Goldstone conclude che lo sviluppo sia partito con la rivoluzione scientifica del Seicento, grazie alla svolta empirista dei britannici (Boyle e Newton) e quella razionalista dell'Europa continentale (Cartesio); dovuta a una serie di scoperte, come quella dell'America, che avevano compromesso definitivamente un sapere che si fondava su tradizione e religione. E' forse la conclusione la parte meno approfondita del libro, tanto minuzioso a contraddire le tesi classiche, quanto elementare nell'esporre quelle proprie. Ma il testo è lodevole ed è consigliatissimo per chi volesse approfondire le dinamiche della storia moderna che hanno dato origine agli attuali equilibri globali.
Alla fine Goldstone conclude che lo sviluppo sia partito con la rivoluzione scientifica del Seicento, grazie alla svolta empirista dei britannici (Boyle e Newton) e quella razionalista dell'Europa continentale (Cartesio); dovuta a una serie di scoperte, come quella dell'America, che avevano compromesso definitivamente un sapere che si fondava su tradizione e religione. E' forse la conclusione la parte meno approfondita del libro, tanto minuzioso a contraddire le tesi classiche, quanto elementare nell'esporre quelle proprie. Ma il testo è lodevole ed è consigliatissimo per chi volesse approfondire le dinamiche della storia moderna che hanno dato origine agli attuali equilibri globali.
June 5, 2022
Un libro raro che ho avuto la fortuna di trovare in un mercatino online.
Un grande saggio che andrebbe ristampato, perché ricco di intuizioni geniali sulla storia dell'Occidente. Per uno come me che ama le ricostruzioni di lunga durata, quest'opera si presenta all'altezza delle aspettative. Chiaro, conciso ed efficace. La statura intellettuale dell'autore favorisce la fiducia nella sua tesi storiografica sulle ragioni dell'ascesa dell'Occidente. Consigliato a chiunque si interessi di storia globale, ma anche attualità e geopolitica.
Un grande saggio che andrebbe ristampato, perché ricco di intuizioni geniali sulla storia dell'Occidente. Per uno come me che ama le ricostruzioni di lunga durata, quest'opera si presenta all'altezza delle aspettative. Chiaro, conciso ed efficace. La statura intellettuale dell'autore favorisce la fiducia nella sua tesi storiografica sulle ragioni dell'ascesa dell'Occidente. Consigliato a chiunque si interessi di storia globale, ma anche attualità e geopolitica.
September 23, 2023
Good enough if you started reading Occidental History and want to take a deeper dive into why things are the way they are now. I thought the criticism against Eurocentrism was good, but the format and the style are not the best. Sometimes, it was also unnecessarily insistent on repeating facts or events everyone has an idea of.
December 5, 2022
Libro fatto bene, con tesi condivisibili, uno stile piano ma comprensibile, fonti sempre attente, ma con poca verve e voglia di "spingersi".
July 20, 2010
Ok, so the ending (Goldstone's conclusion) surprised me. It was clearly a conservative (read: less taxes, more private business) alignment that I did not expect. It was a reasonable conclusion on the author's part, but the book in whole didn't seem to preach the idea that innovation/private investment was the best solution to national "development" as defined by and for modernism. I feel as there were points throughout the text that argued against Goldstone's conclusion, and for as many inventions/innovations that took place in the private business sector, there are just as many that could be mentioned arising from government controlled funding.
Want to read
May 7, 2016I believe this might have been an outgrowth of this paper:
"Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the "Rise of the West" and the Industrial Revolution"
Goldstone, J. A.."Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the "Rise of the West" and the Industrial Revolution." Journal of World History 13.2 (2002): 323-389. Project MUSE. Web. 2 May. 2016. .
It cites Tainter's paper on Problem Solving, so you know it's legit.
"Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the "Rise of the West" and the Industrial Revolution"
Goldstone, J. A.."Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the "Rise of the West" and the Industrial Revolution." Journal of World History 13.2 (2002): 323-389. Project MUSE. Web. 2 May. 2016. .
It cites Tainter's paper on Problem Solving, so you know it's legit.
September 20, 2011
This book really isn't that helpful for learning world history. It is good if you've read 20 books on world history and want a short detailed argument about Europe and it's rise. Otherwise, don't bother. Furthermore, it should be called Why England? as the author uses England as the focus of Europe and rarely mentions other countries of Europe for his comparative analysis.
December 14, 2015
This book is a short, but complete compilation of the reasons for the industrial revolution. It analyses the most recent historical evidence to unravel some of the myths of western superiority over other peoples that seems to surround the basic historical perspective many of us received from basic school.
July 30, 2011
Summer reading for AP European history. Bored me to tears, but I guess it was necessary.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews