On Thu, 14 May 1998 Jack Goldstone wrote:(posted 8756 days ago)>There is emerging what I like to call the "California" >school or interpretation of global economic history. This has been >developed in good part by scholars in California, and holds that there >were NO significant long-term advantages enjoyed by Europe over the main >centers of civilization in Asia; that the level of technology, science, >agriculture, and living standards were similar in these regions from 1000 >to 1800 AD, with Europe lagging if anything until nearly the end of this >period; and that even the dynamics of political and social structures and >conflicts in Asia and Europe were essentially similar from 1500 to 1850.
Living standards and agriculture I can buy. And "Technology" is complex: are we talking rice seedlings, porcelain, or printing presses? Yet the slope of European technological progress in the second millennium is very impressive. By 1700 where outside of Europe are the equivalents of the eyeglasses? The astrolabes? The microscopes? The logarithmic tables? The lathes? The slide rules? The high-volume printing presses? The telescopes? The escapement clocks? The grenades? The--advanced--cannon?
It is certainly true that eyeglasses, logarithms, screw-cutting lathes, and printing presses churning out volumes by Erasmus don't mean beans (directly) for sugar or cotton consumption in the Rhine or Thames delta (and that grenades and cannon tend to make life a lot more nasty, brutal, and short). But they mean a lot in terms of laying the groundwork for further developments.
And science? 1800 is more than a century and a quarter past Newton.
And politics? Where is the William the Silent of Asia? Where is Magna Carta? Where are the self-governing cities of Asia? Listen to only a few speeches from Mahathir Muhammed or Lee Kuan Yu and you can't help but be struck by the difference between their belief that rulers command and people obey and the ideas that governments are instituted not to give rulers the style of life to which they want to be accustomed but to secure the people's natural rights,and that they derive their just powers from the consent of the governed.
And as Alan Taylor eloquently pointed out, to reduce the European Miracle from a ten-century to a two-century affair makes understanding and accounting for it much, much harder...