That probably tells you more about who wrote the timeline than anything else.

Not a very fair choice of time frame. We all know that Europe and the "West" in general have been on a roll for the last thousand years, scientifically speaking.

I don't think so. The scientific takeoff of the West predated the Enlightenment by many centuries.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

Thanks for not taking that badly Tofu.

DA has a very valid point. Europe was stagnant for a thousand years during the dark ages. Nobody else was.

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Gimme a minute to read through Jay's latest observations...

Half a thousand.

Not sure about that, either. Pick another area of the globe the size of Europe at random, and trace back its history (if you can). How long did it spend in "stagnation", on average, throughout history?

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

True - but that's what makes it interesting. I find it hard to believe that almost none of the new inventions or discoveries from that period originated outside of the West.

Also, if the trend is reversing - why?

Is it as simple as Captain Kidd suggests? Is it that Western "group think" is being adopted by the East? (I think that would be boring, and less productive - ultimately - if so...)

I think its also interesting what type of inventions or innovations a society implements.

This is kind of what I was getting at with the Needham reference: according to Needham's research, a lot of what the west invented during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment had already been invented in Asia. If that is correct, it was a communication problem (and perhaps the routine assumption of superiority in the West) rather than a true assymetry.

Grant Hutchison

I haven't read it myself, but I think "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond is something you might want to read, if you're interested in the topic of this thread.

Well, I think maybe the word "invented" should be replaced with something more accurate. Utilized, applied, exploited, maybe. While the East invented a lot of things, it was the West that took the idea and ran with it.

I guess that's what they call globalization.

Look, the people outside the West are not stupid. Once they realised how well the West was doing materially, it was just a matter of time before they tried to do the same for themselves. I, for one, think that's great.

But even this paragraph I've just written is an oversimplification. The world today is just not made up of isolated countries anymore. The West itself sometimes encourages other parts of the world to westernize, so that it can recruit the best professionals for itself (like doctors or computer scientists from India). Everyone benefits. Europe and then the U.S. have had their time in the spotlight, but the world of science nowadays is increasingly global.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

If you were a visitor to earth 500 years ago I don't think you'd pick England as being in anyway likely to be the birthplace of earth's industrial revolution. China, the Middle-East or India would probably look much more likely. Even three hundred years ago it wouldn't have been clear and the Holland would look more likely to industrialize than England. There have been plenty of suggestions as to why England was the first to industrialize, personally I find it interesting that the first European and Asian nation to industrilize were both poverty stricken Islands with inferiority complexes about the larger nations on the continent next to them. It has been suggested that because of their poverty the upper classes in both England and Japan were more likely to get their hands dirty and take an interest in the practical aspects of production. How much water this idea holds I can't really say.

If you ask your question in this forum, I'm pretty sure you'll get plenty of highly pertinent references to research papers, weighty tomes, and so on that will contain as good a coverage of the topic as is presently known, collectively, by professionals in this field.

I've seen Needham criticized by a reviewer who suggested something which is almost the reverse of this. The reviewer (I'm talking from memory of a long-ago article that piqued my interest) suggested that many of what Needham calls Chinese "inventions" were simply the results of trial and error, being sporadically utilized without understanding any sort of underlying principle.
If that's the case, and if that's what we mean by "invention", then maybe the first thing the West invented was invention itself.

I don't know enough to comment further, but it's a diverting thought.

Grant Hutchison

I'm not sure that's true. As you write below, the process is not a simple one. I think if we look critically at the origin of Western success we see that the process started out by adopting, applying and innovating upon prior Oriental* discoveries (a process reflective of that Doodler complains of, above), but then Western people used that base of Eastern knowledge as the platform to build upon and make ever deeper and wider penetration into science and mechanics; resulting in leaps and bounds, while the rest of the world ambled along.

I don't think its a matter of a society realizing that benefits are to be obtained, then deciding to think and act a certain way - the process has to be more involved, otherwise why would the world still have people living in mud huts, practicing witchcraft and using "poison trials" to determine a person's guilt.

It appears that to go from being a retail end-user (which any society can do - c.f. Apache warriors using repeating rifles, and the numerous modern analogies) to being an innovator, inventor, discoverer society, some type of fundamental group-think change is required - if nothing else to create the circumstances in which the wild-haired are allowed to tinker without risk of execution.


But the methods I think (and hope) we're seeing arise are not merely the result of "Westernization of the Oriental Mind" but rather represent a new approach - perhaps a unique "Enlightenment." The key factor to my comments above was that as the West bootstrapped itself out of its dark age, it applied knowledge originating elsewhere, but the process also incorporated skills, purposes and methods characteristically Western. If there is a new Enlightenment underway (as opposed to a Westernization) it should incorporate thought processes quite different than what we're used to - which will hopefully be to the betterment of us all.

I'm questioning whether we're really seeing globalization, or something different and far more interesting.



*Term is inclusive - incorporating Islamic, Indian and East Asian societies.



P.S. Stuart van Onselen and Nereid - thanks for the links!

If you were a visitor to earth 500 years ago I don't think you'd pick England as being in anyway likely to be the birthplace of earth's industrial revolution. China, the Middle-East or India would probably look much more likely. Even three hundred years ago it wouldn't have been clear and the Holland would look more likely to industrialize than England. There have been plenty of suggestions as to why England was the first to industrialize, personally I find it interesting that the first European and Asian nation to industrilize were both poverty stricken Islands with inferiority complexes about the larger nations on the continent next to them. It has been suggested that because of their poverty the upper classes in both England and Japan were more likely to get their hands dirty and take an interest in the practical aspects of production. How much water this idea holds I can't really say.

I wonder how much the idea of economic freedom weighs on how fast a country adopted industrialization. While both England and Japan were very class oriented, to one extent or other they allowed individuals with talent to grow beyond their class (not so much in fuedal Japan but later). In countries where individuals weren't allowed to grow, inventiveness wasn't rewarded.

Mostly agreed. I'm not completely sure that the rest of the world just "ambled along". More likely, we just don't get to hear much about the more modest advances that did take place in other parts of the globe.

Oh, I don't see it as anything centrally planned, either! I just think that more and more individuals around the globe began to look at the success of the West and tell themselves "See, that's what we've been doing wrong". Eventually, the number of "Eurekas" reached a critical mass. It was inevitable.

Changing one's way of thinking is the easiest part. I think the biggest obstacles are economic; sometimes political. If your neighbours profit from your retail end-user status, they aren't going to make it easy for you to change. And reconverting a whole society is not simple, anyway. Not when they're not used to rapid change.

I agree, to the extent that I do not believe that what led the West to success were specifically western qualities in any way. Anyone can do science, or be a capitalist. You just have to convince yourself that it's worthwhile, and get your political system to support it. The latter two conditions are the hard parts; the rest is easy by comparison.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

One of they key shifts that I think gave the West an edge was the downfall of aristocracy and the elevation of meritocracy. Who you were became less vital than what you brought to the table.

One of the downsides of that revolution was the onset of post-modernism, but by and large, its put the innovators, free thinkers and the guys (and gals) who make intuitive leaps to apply innovative inventions in practical form on a fast track to do their own thing without needing inside connections or a rabbi in the ruling class.

I don't think that is accurate.

People have mentioned England as a prime example of an industrialised nation. Well, one way in which England was different from the other nations of the European continent in the crucial period of the late Middle Ages was precisely that the English aristocracy decided to get actively and greedily involved in trade, whereas in the mainland commerce was usually regarded as an inferior profession, and left for the bourgoisie.

And guess what: England still has an aristocracy today!

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

But in England, as in many other countries, many of the best inventions and discoveries came from people of humble origins who went on to become quite wealthy. The willingness of a country to allow such movement between classes is reflected in the wealth of the nation.

Another factor might be the amount of institutional corruption in the country. While corruption exists to one degree or another everywhere, in some countries it's a way of life. My wife grew up in the Philippines and lived there many years under the Marcos dictatorship. As she tells it, corruption was rampant all the way from the presidency down to the lowest government official. Under those conditions, unless you're part of the "in crowd" with the dictator or are very corrupt yourself, you aren't going to get very far in life.

"Corruption" is an interesting concept. Unfortunately, I don't have a reference, but I remember once reading that supposedly "advanced" countries are no freer from corruption than supposedly "backward" ones. It's just a different kind of corruption. Of course, our kind of corruption never counts as "real corruption" for us.

__________________
"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire