How do they explain western dominance in other world regions?

[debeest]

"As Molly points out, one invention led to another at an ever increasing rate."

Actually, I pointed this out first. It's one of my main points in this thread. If modern Western civilization has contributed a disproportion of advances, it's mainly because the greatest portion of those advances inevitably are recent, and Western civilization has recently dominated economically and militarily.

"Leonardo was employed to "invent." Did such a thing ever happen before?"

It's possible that no one had ever been given that job title before, but certainly it happened. One of Diamond's theses is that advances happen because food production allows population growth. which allows specialization, which leads to invention. And again, you can't invent advanced things before a period in history when simpler things have already been invented.

[Ned]

debeest, one of the problems in non patent societies is that the underlying know how to make an invention is not published, but rather is kept as a trade secret. Only those who know the secret pass it on. If they are all killed, such as what happened when the barbarians overran the Roman Empire, those inventions are lost.

For one invention to be the basis for a quick advance elsewhere, the invention must be published. That is how patents enable rapid progress where one invention quickly leads to another, etc. They publish the underlying know how.

[DAVOUT]

The idea that the industrial know how is included in the patent is a pure joke. The patent makes public a theoretical idea and describes practical means to produce the item subject of the patent, but it does not give any guarantee to succeed. In fact, it cannot since it is requested and delivered before any production effort. Only highly qualified engineers and workers mastering the industrial know how have a chance to produce the item.

[Ned]

Originally posted by DAVOUT
The idea that the industrial know how is included in the patent is a pure joke. The patent makes public a theoretical idea and describes practical means to produce the item subject of the patent, but it does not give any guarantee to succeed. In fact, it cannot since it is requested and delivered before any production effort. Only highly qualified engineers and workers mastering the industrial know how have a chance to produce the item.

Obviously you are from France and understand French patents.

[LDiCesare]

The idea that the industrial know how is included in the patent is a pure joke. The patent makes public a theoretical idea and describes practical means to produce the item subject of the patent, but it does not give any guarantee to succeed.

Currently, yes, because patents are no longer used for their original purpose. In past times, it wasn't so.

Patents have been invented to allow inventors to publish their work and gain royalties from others who would reuse their invention.
Currently, they are used as a weapon to prevent other firms from doing the same thing as you. This is not done to provide knowledge for the future generations, but to prevent competitors from using the same techniques and to keep a tech lead in a given area, which would be lost one year or two later.
Thus today, patents as a way to promote innovation are mostly useless, as they are mostly used to hinder competition. It doesn't mean in past times it was that way.

An example of patent use: Russian researchers looked at all the U.S. patents (at first manually, then electronically) and extracted from that a 'theory of invention' and a software called invention machine (actually invention machine corp is american). They used the patents at a 'meta' level (how to invent an invention). The product they sell has been used to create new patents and technological solutions. Usually from old patents applied to a new domain with adequate modifications. So reuse of patents exists, but it will probably become less and less common as patents are straying more and more from their reusability background to a "let's keep our one year tech advance for 30 years thanks to anticompetitive intellectual property laws".

[LDiCesare]

Obviously you are from France and understand French patents.

Rude and silly. It's much harder to have a patent allowed in France/Europe than in the U.S. (at least in computers) because the patent offices do a better job of checking the patents.

[Ned]

LDiCaesare, you make some valid points about today's patents. But historically, the monopoly grant was in exchange for teaching others how to practice the invention.

Somehow, we have lost sight of the original purpose for patents.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by debeest
molly bloom, thanks for supporting my point. As you say, many of the items on your list were not "Western" discoveries, you "cannot isolate European invention and discovery from Islam, or India, or China," and "Western civilization" was not a particularly more inventive culture than many others of its time.

Actually debeest, I don’t think I do support your argument. As I said before, the reasons for the ascendance of Western influence post-Renaissance are too complex to be reduced to geography, or exploitation of the Americas.

Europe was already wealthy by the time the Americas were discovered- the extensive trading networks not only spanned the Baltic and North seas, but went across land to Iran, down rivers to the Crimea and the Black Sea, through transalpine routes enriching the Dukes of Burgundy and the Holy Roman Emperors, and made wealthy whole areas such as Flanders and the south-east of England and the Rhineland.

In modern day terms, men such as England’s John of Gaunt or Henry de Grosmont, or Florentine bankers such as the Peruzzi, the Bardi and the Acciaiuoli were multi millionaires and billionaires- and this without access to the gold, silver, novelties and foodstuffs of the Americas.

I would say that several things combined to enable the expansion of the states in Western Europe that went on to exploit the Americas-

i. the Black Death, and all its economic, philosophical and social ramifications,

ii. the beginning of the Reconquista, which put Christianity in the Iberian peninsula on an equal footing with Islam after some time, and thus made scholars more ready to learn from the Islamic world,

iii. the new learning which resulted from the rediscovery of the science and philosophy of Classical antiquity (and the advances Islamic science had made on those),

iv. the notion of Western Christianity as a unity of sorts, and its identification with Europe and the legacy of the Graeco-Roman world

v. paper, paper mills and a network of monastic schools and universities

vi. extensive trading routes.

I think it is no coincidence that the Mediterranean Renaissance can reliably be said to have its epicentre in Florence, and this despite the fact (as we read in contemporary accounts and in the works of Boccaccio) that Florence had been particularly hard hit by the Black Death, by the bankruptcy of several of its banking houses, and by civil unrest.
Equally, the northern Renaissance can be said to have its epicentre in Flanders, the Low Countries, southeastern England and the Rhineland. All of these places also saw massive depopulation, civil strife, war and famine, and yet by the fifteenth century Oxford, Paris and Bologna had replaced Baghdad, Cairo, and Constantinople as centres of learning and intellectual ferment. By this time European technology, taken as a whole, had outstripped its Islamic rival, and with the exceptions of specialized fields (such as porcelain) had effectively equalled or surpassed China.
None of the learning and technology would have counted for much, if as in China, there had been no enthusiasm or perceived need for it. The social conditions created by the Black Death- a decline in serfdom, the beginning of the end of the feudal system in Western Europe, greatly enriched merchants, bankers, guilds and churches and monarchs, meant that labour saving devices were sought (thanks to a decline in population), that a significant learned cosmopolitan section of society had a greater disposable income, that the nouveaux riches wanted to emulate the aristocracy, and that thanks to the social and philosophical upheavals of death on a massive scale, old wisdom and authority (be it Ptolemy, Galen, or Aristotle or the Church itself) were growing more likely to be questioned, than blindly accepted.

I think it’s no coincidence that the first European state to travel south to sub-Saharan Africa, was Portugal, which had an Islamo-Iberian intellectual heritage, and a ship that combined Islamic and European shipbuilding and design. It also enjoyed trade links with both the Mediterranean and northern Europe, and Africa.

[debeest]

Ned, I'm not arguing that patents don't enhance innovation (although LDiCesare's argument seems quite reasonable to me). I just don't think that patent law is a significant explanation for why innovation might occur more in one civilization than in another. I don't think you've presented any real basis for believing that. (I'll grant that it would be unreasonable to expect any actual evidence; still, I'd want to see a more reasoned argument.)

[debeest]

molly b, I'll readily grant your greater knowledge of history, but it seems to me that some of what you've just said does, in fact, support my reasoning.

For example, you greatly emphasize the importance of bubonic plague. The plague occurred in Europe, at the time that it did, for some reasonably specific geographic reasons. It wasn't a random occurrence, and it wasn't significantly the result of cultural differences. I base this statement on information in the book Plagues and Peoples, and I haven't heard any counter-argument.

You refer repeatedly to Europeans catching up with and learning from Islamic cultures, and making discoveries in conjunction with them or by using their technologies. That reinforces my belief that there was no great cultural difference in inventiveness. If Western culture had been more prone to innovation, it wouldn't have been behind in the first place. What explains its backwardness? What explains its catching up and surpassing?

Regarding European trade, I think you are not suggesting that Europe was unique in the world. Trade routes passed through the Middle East and the steppes and to China and India, distributing wealth all along the way, I would suppose. Again, this would support my belief that Europe stood among the world leaders (as compared to the populations of Africa, the Americas, and Australia), but not ahead of them.

[JohnT]

What goes around, comes around:

How did the area of Europe advance so quickly?

[MrFun]

I rule the world -- it's just that no one realized it.

[VetLegion]

Re: Re: How do they explain western dominance in other world regions?

Originally posted by lord of the mark


they explain that its all due to the fact that the West got the Croats, and theyre superior nature accounted for the triumph of the West. Isnt that obvious?

[Bereta_Eder]

Croats and eastern Europe is not the "west" as defined by whoemever bothered to describe a loose explanation anytime he fancied. The very lose meaning of "west" is just another reason why it never existed.

[Kuciwalker]