Sarah Gibbard Cook
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Why Europe Pulled Ahead

4/3/2023

2 Comments

 
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Ages ago, most people subsisted on farming, herding, or fishing. Here and there, empires arose and fell. Europe didn't particularly stand out. So why did Europeans by the 1800s dominate much of the world?

Proposed explanations intrigue me. Among those I've read:
  • Calvinist work ethic (Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 1926)
  • Agricultural surplus (Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 1997)
  • Catholic kinship taboos (Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World, 2020)
  • Trade with coastal Africa (French, Born in Blackness, 2021)
​I might add Europe's extensive coastline and navigable rivers. I would not add any notion that Europeans and their descendants have some innate quality that entitles them to supremacy over everyone else.
2 Comments
Dennis Doren
4/3/2023 08:11:07 am

I do not pretend to know the answer to your question, but it seems to me there is a context to the question of importance. What are the reasons any civilization dominated during its time? For example, why did the Chinese dominate 2200 years ago?
Why did the Mongols dominate 800 years ago? Etc. It could be the reasons differ each time, but I would look for similarities in factors.

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Sarah Cook link
4/3/2023 12:11:49 pm

I tend to be skeptical of single-factor answers, and certainly don't have one for Europe. A DVD course on Barbarian Empire of the Steppe (Mongols et al) that I recently re-watched put a lot of emphasis on the 5000-mile-long "highway" of grassland and the domestication of horses. Looking for similar factors, my bias is to turn to physical geography (which predates all the other differences). Chinese silk was a big factor in its long-distance trade: I don't know enough about silkworms.to know why they started there. Mesopotamia had fertile soil from river floods. Places with mountains or deserts, river valleys isolated from each other, and few natural resources as trade goods, were at a disadvantage for small communities to connect into something larger. Yet the Vikings did quite well for all that, until the medieval "little ice age" . . .

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    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 


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