The Retreat of Western Liberalism

by Edward Luce

Among other techniques and inventions, Europe took far-superior iron and steel production; the printing press; navigational tools, including the compass; gunpowder; and paper money from China. From Islam, Europe took binary mathematics (originally from India), astronomy, double-entry bookkeeping and much of its own forgotten knowledge from classical Greece and Rome. ‘[Much] of the European revival was based on the ideas, institutions, and technologies borrowed from the advanced civilizations in the Middle and Far East,’ notes Richard Baldwin, whose book on today’s Great Convergence is rightly acclaimed.9 The shift of power from the Islamic world to the Christian in the late Middle Ages had, in turn, been enabled by the destructive westward sweep of Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes in the thirteenth century.