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by
Ian Morris
I am not, of course, the first person to speculate on why the West rules. The question is a good 250 years old. Before the eighteenth century the question rarely came up, because it frankly did not then make much sense. When European intellectuals first started thinking seriously about China, in the seventeenth century, most felt humbled by the East’s antiquity and sophistication; and rightly so, said the few Easterners who paid the West any heed.
This is a first-class effort by Ian Morris - a recommended read.
long-term lock-in OR short-term accident theories
The most popular version was that Europeans were simply culturally superior to everyone else.
Fukuzawa Yukichi
Zheng He
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/11/24/1037697982893.html
Gavin Menzies, a 65-year-old self-confessed "outsider", has sparked heated academic debate by claiming the Chinese beat Europeans to the New World by decades, if not centuries.
If true, his theories would recast the holy trinity of European naval explorers - Captain Cook, Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan - as followers in the great wake of 15th century China's Admiral Zheng He and his fleet of colossal, nine-masted teak junks.
Released earlier this month, Menzies' book, 1421, the Year China Discovered The World, is likely to have a worldwide print run of a million copies. It sits next to Simon Schama's latest on Amazon's best-selling list for history.
versions. For example, in his magnificent book The Wealth and Poverty of
David Landes
Jared Diamond
(Bin Wong
Kenneth Pomeranz)
(Wang...
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Andre Gunder Frank
Jack Goldstone
Britain, alone in all the world, had conveniently located coalfields as well as rapidly mechanizing industries.
Alfred Crosby
I was educated as an archaeologist and ancient historian, specializing in the classical Mediterranean of the first millennium BCE. When I started college at Birmingham University in England in 1978, most classical scholars I met seemed perfectly comfortable with the old long-term theory that the culture of the ancient Greeks, created two and a half thousand years ago, forged a distinctive Western way of life. Some of them (mostly older ones) would even say outright that this Greek tradition made the West better than the rest.
As a result, in the book you are reading now I take an inter- rather than multi disciplinary approach. Instead of riding shotgun over a herd of specialists, I strike off on my own to draw together and interpret the findings of experts in numerous fields.
I argue in this book that asking why the West rules is really a question about what I will call social development. By this I basically mean societies’ abilities to get things done—to shape their physical, economic, social, and intellectual environments to their own ends.
In 1842 the hard truth was that Britain was more developed than China—so developed, in fact, that its reach had become global. There had been empires aplenty in the past, but their reach had always been regional. By 1842, however, British manufacturers could flood China with their products, British industrialists could build iron ships that outgunned any in the world, and British politicians could send an expedition halfway around the globe.
Heinlein Theorem
I will try to show that East and West have gone through the same stages of social development in the last fifteen thousand years, in the same order, because they have been peopled by the same kinds of human beings, who generate the same kinds of history. But I will also try to show that they have not done so at the same times or at the same speed. I will conclude that biology and sociology explain the global similarities while geography explains the regional differences. And in that sense, it is geography that explains why the West rules.
The end of the Ice Age changed the meaning of geography. The poles remained cold and the equator remained hot, of course, but in half a dozen places between these extremes—what, in Chapter 2, I will call the original cores—warmer weather combined with local geography to favor the evolution of plants and/or animals that humans could domesticate (that is, genetically modify to make them more useful, eventually reaching the point that the genetically modified organisms could survive only in symbiosis with humans). Domesticated plants and animals meant more food, which meant more people,
which meant more innovation; but domestication also meant more pressure on the very resources that drove the process. The paradox of development went straight to work.
Hilly Flanks
or Gould’s
Not Gould's explanation of punctuated equilibrium.
Hallam Movius
Since the 1960s most paleoanthropologists have called the new species that evolved in Africa about 1.8 million years ago Homo erectus (“Upright Man”) and have assumed that these creatures wandered through the subtropical latitudes to the shores of the Pacific Ocean. In the 1980s, however, some experts began focusing on subtle differences between Homo erectus skulls found in Africa and those found in East Asia. They suspected that they were in fact looking at two different species of ape-men. They coined a new name, Homo ergaster (“Working Man”), for those who evolved in Africa 1.8 million
...more
Some archaeologists and geneticists in fact estimate that around 100,000 BCE there were barely twenty thousand Homo sapiens left alive.
Rebecca Cann
Our dispersals out of Africa in the last sixty thousand years wiped the slate clean of all the genetic differences that had emerged over the previous half million years.
Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola
around 17,000 BCE the sea level rose forty feet as the glaciers that had blanketed northern America, Europe, and Asia melted. The
Lake Agassiz
Dame Kathleen Kenyon,
Daniel Cohn-Bendit,
Marshall Sahlins,
By 7000 BCE farming completely dominated the Hilly Flanks.
Graeme Barker
Luca Cavalli-Sforza
Bryan Sykes
The Cavalli-Sforza and Sykes teams squared off fiercely in the pages of the American Journal of Human Genetics in 1997, but since then their positions have steadily converged. Cavalli-Sforza now calculates that immigrant farmers from western Asia account for 26–28 percent of European DNA; Sykes puts the figure nearer 20 percent. To say that one of Europe’s first farmers descended from southwest Asian immigrants for every three or four who descended from natives is oversimplifying, but is not far wrong.
Jared Diamond
Of the fifty-six grasses with the biggest, most nutritious seeds,
thirty-two grow wild in southwest Asia and the Mediterranean Basin. East Asia has just six wild species; Central America, five; Africa south of the Sahara, four; North America, also four; Australia and South America, two each; and western Europe, one.
There are 148 species of large (over a hundred pounds) mammals in the world. By 1900 CE just 14 of them had been domesticated. Seven of the 14 were native to southwest Asia; and of the world’s 5 most important domesticates (sheep, goat, cow, pig, and horse), all but the horse had wild ancestors in the Hilly Flanks.
We should not, then, assume that people in the Hilly Flanks invented agriculture because they were racially or culturally superior. Because they lived among more (and more easily) domesticable plants and animals than anyone else, they mastered them first.
Yan Wenming
Richard MacNeish,
