Few notions have remained so persistent and unexamined as the belief that Europe’s subsequent global rise was due to superiority of one form or another. This is true whether one considers technology, belief systems, or a notion that has become widely but not universally repudiated today: innate racial qualities. Nowadays, the idea that medieval Europeans enjoyed any lead whatsoever in science and technology over Muslims, South Asians, or East Asians doesn’t withstand even passing scrutiny; as we have already seen with navigation, in many areas Europeans, in fact, lagged quite significantly.
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