How do they explain western dominance in other world regions?

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Ned
China could not succeed because society was stratefied. Ordinary people could not invest in new businesses and technology and rise above his station in life.

You gotta be kidding. There were rich businessmen in every single dynasty. I reckon there were some of them opened workshops to make paper or print books.

[debeest]

Originally posted by molly bloom Malaria was common in the Netherlands, in south east England, and Italy- hence the name, bad air.

Quite right, I checked that out after I wondered "aloud."

[SIZE=1] I think that you'd be surprised just how common hanta virus is in the United States

I think YOU'd be surprised just how RARE hantavirus is in the U.S. I haven't checked exact numbers, but I think annual U.S. hantavirus deaths number in the double or maybe triple digits. That's pretty small compared to, say, 36,000 for flu.

[SIZE=1]I also seem to recall reading about old North American trading routes, which stretched from Pacific coastal regions to desert areas, and from Atlantic coastal regions to the Ohio and Mississippi.

Sure, there were trading routes. I'm not trying to be absolutist here. Surely you don't think they compared in scale or frequency to the trade routes across Asia to Europe. Also, the American trading routes probably did not extend from North to South America in any significant way, so those populations were isolated from one another in a way that Eurasian populations were not; am I wrong?

[SIZE=1]Why did Europe succeed? Well, for a variety of reasons, as I've outlined- some luck, or chance, some design. Islam in a way defined Latin, Roman Catholic Western Europe through interaction in the Iberian peninsula, through conflict and trade of goods, ideas and services.
Judaism played a great part in that- Jewish doctors were greatly sought after by Frankish kings, the glassmaking trade in Spain was almost wholly carried out by Jews, and Jews could lend at interest to Muslims and Christians, or they could use Jews as intermediaries to loan money to fellow Christians or Muslims.

These are some very proximal features of almost-modern civilization. I'm asking you to look deeper, to see the reasons why Eurasian societies had already advanced much farther than African, American, Australian, or Polynesian cultures. The factors that explain why Eurasia had much larger populations, and thus more opportunity for invention, and better means to exploit invention.

[QUOTE] [SIZE=1Access to a variety of goods (spices, ivory, gold, slaves, cloth, steel, leather) stimulated trade, and after the end of the nomadic invasions, trade in mediaeval Europe grew virtually exponentially.[/QUOTE]

Aren't you stating my point here? The Americas didn't have spices, ivory, much leather, slaves who could survive European germs, etc.

[SIZE=1] The Black Death made a part of European society vastly richer than it had been before the pandemic- and it had already been very wealthy by modern standards. It happened at a time when paper and printing made possible an information revolution the equivalent of the Internet in late mediaeval and Renaissance times.

Again, this is one of my points. At other points in time, other cultures dominated. But the point in history when it was possible for technological and cultural advances to be developed and spread rapidly came at a time when Europe happened to have caught up.

[SIZE=1]

Why the western, Atlantic nations? They no longer had to face Islam- the Ottomans were still a threat to Austria, Russia, and Poland, and sporadic raids by Barbary pirates and Sale rovers were a nuisance rather than a threat to territorial integrity. No Muslims had to be repelled from the gates of London or Paris in the seventeenth century.

Would you not agree that this is a critical geographical explanation for the rise of the West? Not only were Portugal, Spain, England, and the Netherlands geographically closest to the Americas, they were geographically isolated from a huge competitor.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by debeest


I think YOU'd be surprised just how RARE hantavirus is in the U.S. I haven't checked exact numbers, but I think annual U.S. hantavirus deaths number in the double or maybe triple digits. That's pretty small compared to, say, 36,000 for flu.


These are some very proximal features of almost-modern civilization. I'm asking you to look deeper, to see the reasons why Eurasian societies had already advanced much farther than African, American, Australian, or Polynesian cultures. The factors that explain why Eurasia had much larger populations, and thus more opportunity for invention, and better means to exploit invention.

Aren't you stating my point here? The Americas didn't have spices, ivory, much leather, slaves who could survive European germs, etc.


Again, this is one of my points. At other points in time, other cultures dominated. But the point in history when it was possible for technological and cultural advances to be developed and spread rapidly came at a time when Europe happened to have caught up.

Would you not agree that this is a critical geographical explanation for the rise of the West? Not only were Portugal, Spain, England, and the Netherlands geographically closest to the Americas, they were geographically isolated from a huge competitor.

Actually, hanta virus is widespread in the North American rodent population- it's cases of the disease that are less common. Imagine that it becomes more effective at infecting humans- as syphilis did in the West, on the return of Spaniards from the New World.
I suspect that many cases of hanta go unnoticed in the elderly too.

American civilizations did have access to trading goods- not the same as European goods, but as valuable to them as silk or cloves to Europeans. Turquoise, copper, seashells, beaver pelts, seal ivory, buffalo hide/leather. The lack of pack animals accounts for less frequent/smaller trade routes, but trade by canoe on long navigable rivers (as at Cahokia) would replace, say, European transalpine trade routes in that respect.

You have to be more precise about which European cultures had advanced further than which other cultures, and in what respects and when. Spanish accounts of their encounter with the Mixtecan empire in Mexico indicates that Tenochtitlan was by far the largest city any of them had ever seen- larger by far than any Spanish city. Mathematics and astronomy and the calendar were well advanced in Mesoamerican society, and metalworking in Mesoamerican and South American civilizations had reached an extremely high level- unfortunately for them in metals other than iron.

Similarly, iron working, mathematics and astronomy and calendrical skills were advanced in African empires- as late as the 19th century, sub-Saharan Africans were rejecting British metal trade goods because they were inferior to locally produced iron tools.

Intellectually, China did not lag behind either, and as I said in an earlier post, even during the Renaissance, China's accomplishments in some fields were still unmatched by any European state.

There were several reasons for early mediaeval's population boom- wheat, crop rotation, improved ploughs, improved weather, the use of horse drawn ploughs, use of marginal land as arable, clearing of forests and extensive sheep and cattle farming. Undoubtedly Europe profited from being free of tsetse fly infestation, but the murrain which came before and during the Black Death killed a great number of cattle (and humans too, according to Norman Cantor's book on the Black Death).

I think with the printing press and paper, you're putting the cart before the horse- they enabled the information revolution in Europe, but the deep changes in society wrought by the phasing out of serfdom in the West and the challenge to mediaeval thinking as a result of the inroads of the pandemic, meant that scholars had the intellectual armoury or tools (thanks to trade with Islam) to use the paper and books to disseminate new theories and inventions- and in Luther's, Newton's, Galileo's and Copernicus's case to shape the new societies.

The issue of geographical proximity to the Americas doesn't explain the rise of Portugal and Spain- Portugal after all, never dominated Europe, and Spain's preeminence was short-lived, despite the revenue of the taxes from the Low Countries, and the gold and silver of the New World. It was a saying in Spain that what made Spain poor was her greatness. The rise of the Dutch Republic owes more to trade with the Indies than with the Americas- and when Spain ended the Eighty Years' War with the Dutch Republic, a great deal of Spain's shipping (of soldiers, trade goods) was actually done by Dutch ships.

The Dutch and English and French may not have had the Ottoman Empire on their doorstep- but they did have to go through the internecine strife of religious and civil war, as costly in some respects as any Ottoman campaign into Serbia or Hungary.

[Ned]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger


Eh, Ned, I used those examples to show your assertion of "the lack of patents would result in inventions becoming trade secrets" wrong.

The existence of trade secrets do not validate your assertion. In fact, Coca-cola chose not to take out a patent on its formula since they didn't want it to become public property when the patent expired. How is the construction of nuclear weapons a patent or trade secret? Did the US government took one out?

UR, I think you missed my discussion of the origin of patents out of trade secret law. Patents originally were granted on new processes in order that the inventor publish his trade secret process in exchange for a limited monopoly.

Until only recently, this distinction was maintained in some patent systems by granting "utility model" registrations to new mechanical inventions while granting full patents to new processes.

The US somehow made no such distinction in its patent law and began granting patents on mechanical inventions. But this scope of these patents has always been a difficult issue as inventors always want their mechanical patents enforced against wholly different machines and the courts want to limit them to fairly much what they enabled without limiting them to exactly the same machine.

[Pax]

I would have to say that the western dominance can be explained by the European ability to on the one hand not be tied down by concepts like concience, fairness, morality and on the other hand to use the concepts justify wars.

1. Support the subjugation of entire continents.

2. Force other countries to accept the sale of harmful drugs inside their borders.

3. Make unfair trades for land and people.

4. Grant countries independance and maintain control of their resources.

5. the list goes on.

In short, immoral unsavory practices allow western dominace and can be directly related to the problems we have from vietnam to the world trade center.

[Ned]

Pax Africanus, why of course!

[debeest]

Originally posted by molly bloom Actually, hanta virus is widespread in the North American rodent population- it's cases of the disease that are less common. Imagine that it becomes more effective at infecting humans- as syphilis did in the West, on the return of Spaniards from the New World.

molly, once again you're restating my point. Sure, hantavirus is endemic in North American rodents, but that's irrelevant. The CDC says that only about 340 Americans have died of hantivirus infection since 1993 (the citation may be a couple of years old, but that hardly matters). My point, with which I'm sure you must agree, was that no New World disease (except possibly syphilis) had any substantial effect on the Old World that compared with the effects of Old World diseases on the New World. And I say that's fundamentally a function of geography-associated ecology.

The lack of pack animals accounts for less frequent/smaller trade routes, but trade by canoe on long navigable rivers (as at Cahokia) would replace, say, European transalpine trade routes in that respect.

Trading in the New World did not compare, in quantity or greatest distance, to trading in the Old World. Agreed? That was a function of (1) late arrival of humans in the New World, (2) geography of the New World (mountainous isthmus between continents, desert stretching across Mexico, huge jungles of South America, climatic extremes from north to south -- all fundamentally geographical reasons. Do you disagree?

You have to be more precise about which European cultures had advanced further than which other cultures, and in what respects and when.

Oh, come on, it's obvious. When I said, "Eurasian societies had already advanced much farther than African, American, Australian, or Polynesian cultures," obviously I was talking about ships, glass, navigation, steel, guns, cannon, and other advances such as political organization that enabled Eurasians to subjugate those other cultures even when germs didn't do the whole job for them.

Intellectually, China did not lag behind either, and as I said in an earlier post, even during the Renaissance, China's accomplishments in some fields were still unmatched by any European state.

Agreed. Never said otherwise. But China was ill-placed to exploit the New World. Geography.

The issue of geographical proximity to the Americas doesn't explain the rise of Portugal and Spain

Didn't say it did. Portugal had risen far enough to trade with the Indies by sailing around Africa. My point, again, is that Portugal and Spain and the Netherlands and England happened, for reasons fundamentally geographic, to have attained their advanced sailing skills AT A TIME WHEN THE NEW WORLD BECAME AVAILABLE FOR EXPLOITATION, and IN A PLACE FROM WHICH THE NEW WORLD WAS MOST READILY REACHED -- again, fundamentally geographical reasons for their ability to seize and control the New World and incorporate all of it into modern "Western civilization."

The Dutch and English and French may not have had the Ottoman Empire on their doorstep- but they did have to go through the internecine strife of religious and civil war, as costly in some respects as any Ottoman campaign into Serbia or Hungary.

Come on, now, molly b, YOU'RE the one who pointed out that the Atlantic European nations prospered preferentially because they were insulated from the threat of Islam. All I did was point out that that was a geographical argument.

molly bloom, looking back through this thread, I've identified a number of what I said were fundamental points with which I said I thought you would agree. You haven't disagreed with any of them, or provided reasons for disagreeing. Again I ask, do you disagree? And if so, what is your alternative explanation?

[Dracon II]

the plague was a paradoxical catalyst for European power... it thinned the population, raising the opportunity for common people to gain wealth (as resources were far less scarce), shifting the balance of class power further from the noble's grasp and steadily into the hands of the bourgeoisie... this enabled Europe to break from the static and limiting feudal system and into more socially mobile and active wealth creating societies... compare this to Japan, where their medieval system persisted into the 19th Century.

[Dracon II]

hmm... someone's probably already made my point... I didn't realize how long this thread was!!

[Ramo]

Actually, large population densities enabled Europe to break from the feudal system (as was occurring in the 13th century). Small population densities meant that labor could more effectively bargain with landlords, meaning that there were greater incentives among landlords to exact coercive restraints on the bargaining power of peasants (namely, serfdom). The Black Death probably postponed the end of serfdom in Western Europe for another century or so. For instance, in England following the Black Death, laws were created that restricted the wages of peasants and workers (free and villein alike), and prohibited competition among landlords.

In fact, the depopulation from the epidemics in Roman society in the 6th, 3rd, and 2nd centuries (bubonic plague, small pox, measles respectively IIRC) helped to introduce the latifundia system which tied tied peasants to their land - creating feudalism.

[Ramo]

BTW, I also recommend McNeill's Plagues and Peoples.

[Bosh]

Originally posted by Ramo
BTW, I also recommend McNeill's Plagues and Peoples.

So do I