I think (pardon the non-sequitor) that the key to all of this is theft. The British elite, for almost a thousand years after the Norman conquest still had their children learn French and acculturate to French norms of the elite. The Romans did much the same stealing copiously from the Greeks. So for that matter, did the Arabic civilizations. And America stole copiously from all of them. Rather, you might call it learning and extending the achievements of the past, often the achievements of those who conquered you, often of those you have conquered.
The Norman period ended up transferring the best technology/skills from Europe to Britain.
http://www.vaguelyinteresting.co.uk/statements-in-stone-engl...
Europe also faced the Umayyad invasion starting in the 8th century.
> This helped Europe develop unnoticed, at a much faster pace than other countries.
Many of the most important trading ports at the time were in Europe. How would they be “unnoticed”?
That was Genghis Khan's son and the Mongols conquered Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary and held control of Russia and Ukraine (interestingly, Genghis Khan conquered Russia in winter, something that neither Napolean nor Hitler could do). Compared to the wealth and culture of the developed kingdoms of that period, Europe didn't fascinate even his descendants. While some of them did plan to conquer Italy, Austria and Germany (after reaching up to Hungary), they abandoned the plan after the then "Great Khan" died, and they had to withdraw to decide on the next successor. Kublai Khan (grandson of Genghis Khan), for example, was more fascinated by China's wealth (said to be the richest empire of its time) and population, and spent his focus on conquering it.
While Mongolian conquests were brutal, the peace in their empire allowed the silk road trade routes to be opened between aAsia and Europe. This allowed cultural exchanges and trade between them that led to Europe's progress. Land routes in Central Asia was instrumental in connecting Europe to Asia, and the peace in the Mongolian empire was instrumental in allowing trade to flourish. The sharing of knowledge and information was encouraged in the Mongolian empire and this also helped Europe get access to some fundamental technologies like paper making, printing, gunpowder manufacturing etc. that would have have a tremendous impact on humanity.
> How would they be “unnoticed”?
Their lack of wealth and development during that period didn't make them an attractive target for conquest.
Still, European powers were at a constant war of conquests with Islamic kingdoms from Northern Africa and Middle East.
Bottom line, your idea contradicts centuries of war in Europe.
How many ethnic groups do you reckon that to be?
> Islam is the largest religion in Indonesia, with 86.7% of the Indonesian population identifying themselves as Muslim in a 2018 survey.[1][2] Indonesia is the most populous Muslim-majority country, with approximately 231 million adherents.[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_Indonesia
> A majority of the Javanese people identify themselves as Sunni Muslims - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javanese_people
> Today, most Sundanese are Sunni Muslims. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundanese_people
> The majority of Madurese practice Sunni Islam. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madurese_people
How often is Indonesia mentioned in the Koran?
I'm just saying, don't run too far down that line of thought.
Development economics studies this question, and the general answer is still the one Adam Smith came up with in the late 18th century: good institutions matter the most, even more than geography. There's a few easy case studies, like comparing North Korea with South Korea. Same geography, same historical heritage, same ancestry... Why do they achieve so differently? "Different institutions" is the sensible answer to that question.
I’m not personally familiar with Bangladesh, but one phrase rings in my mind: the consent of the governed
Secular social democracy only really works if people mostly believe in the institutions.
The expand on your point about institutions, removing corruption (rent seeking by public servants) is a key part of strong institutions because corruption decreases their effectiveness.
The other institution that is extremely necessary for a prosperous country is free press. Free press is critical to removing corruption and strengthening institutions by criticizing when things aren't going right.
I can't comment about then innovation aspect that much, but Bengal (particularly East Bengal, present day Bangladesh) absolutely had/has a huge culture of sharing. People would share meals and socialize even when they themselves were barely able feed themselves (and this was mostly reciprocated). This may be more of generosity than strictly cooperation, but I would say they're quite related.
Source: The stories I've heard from my grandparents (I'm Bengali)
For example, in many non-individualistic societies, if one is to come upon some extra wealth, in manner of for example successful hunt, bountiful harvests, or good government job, one is duty-bound to share that extra wealth with others in their clan or tribe. This disincentives trying hard and increasing productivity: if, through increased labor and investment in fertilizer you can double your yield, but then only get a small fraction of that gain for yourself, why bother trying in the first place? In fact, it might be better investment to obtain higher status in your clan or tribe, so that others will be bound to share more of their wealth with you.
Maybe we shouldn't even try to explain such an overwhelmingly complex topic like "development of civilization" in grade 4? A charged topic where reasonable sounding yet deeply flawed ideas are known to dupe entire generations of adults.
Alas, our education culture still prefers a feeding tube of narratives over an actual education that equips children with a robust understanding of basics (history, economics, ...) and the ability to question content in front of them. The same sadly applies to science education I think, but with less dramatic effect.
However I dont understand why civilisation thus started and grew in Egypt / Babylon and not in say Norway.
If someone has any any ideas as to why specifically do let me know, I havent hard time to read the rest of the comments so please take this with a pinch of salt.
The early civilizations appeared in locations/times when there was an abundance of food, allowing people the time to specialize, creating the first professions. Tradesmen seems to have gathered around various religious sites, creating the first permanent settlements. The need to defend those settlements resulted in fortifications. Fortifications, and the safety they provided, attracted more people and the first cities slowly took form.
There's a lot of nice things to say about Norway, but 9k years ago life there was harsh, and it was -- like the rest of the Arctic -- inhabited by hunter/gatherers, if at all.
Civilization is mostly defined by the presence of urban-like settlements, and the ancient Norse were not urbanized for a long time. This is not to say that they lacked complex skills, however. But we have to judge that via complex circumstantial evidence, whereas the case for the Levant is much easier to make.
I think a lot of what makes the difference is cultural. Places like Singapore have a culture of hard work, rule of law, free trade and so on, mostly brought in by its founder who got a lot of that stuff from books and learning. There is hope to replicate those sort of things gradually. It's not so much about race - Singapore is quite the mix - the founder was Chinese but studied in England and the people are a mix of Chinese, Malay, Indian, Westerners and other.
An axiom of liberal thought these days is that culture is coextensive with race. Hence the dichotomy asserted in the curriculum materials I linked: disparities must be geographic in nature; any other theory is “racist.” (Likewise, most of what’s attributed to “whiteness” is really Western European culture. They don’t seem to distinguish the two concepts at all.) There is no room for the possibility that different societies developed different cultures for various reasons, and certain cultural traits may be better adapted to economic development than others.
Fun fact: Lee Kuan Yew’s (the founder of modern Singapore) birth name was Harry and his first language was English.
Sowell used to write very well on race and culture stuff eg https://www.amazon.co.uk/Race-Culture-Sowell/dp/0465067972
He could get away with saying things that would otherwise be regarded as politically incorrect as he is black himself. It's a shame there doesn't seem to be much of that quality any more.
What you state as a contradiction could instead be seen as the explanation.
When food "jumps into your basket", you don't need to focus as much on efficiency and on driving towards automation, which arguably was the ultimate drive of the industrial revolution, upon which most of the modern wealth of Europe was built.
The lower effort to food ratio in warm humid places also allows you to support more population, which in turn reduces the need for automation because of the plentiful labor. The spectacular populations of China and India despite their less developed past is basically due to the incredible caloric productivity of rice agriculture.
Also, there is the general stability of most of Europe with respect to weather. It is a northern climate but tempered by the gulf stream.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel
Which tries to answer the question:
> Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...
Edit: See a more specific critique here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6meq1k/a_det...
He just says “actually it didn’t happen” in 5 different ways.
But, like, they speak Spanish in Lima and Mexico City and they don’t speak Aztec or Quechua in Madrid. The Europeans did in fact colonize portions of the entire world. There were German armies in Namibia and Dutch in Malaysia and Spanish in Patagonia.
That seems... notable?
I literally have no unique insight at all into why that happened. But it does seem like an interesting question.
I guess the answer could be “no reason” or “it was the result of a non-determinative complex adaptive system and the concept of why isn’t really relevant or repeatable” which are fine responses. But that comment you posted seems to just be refusing to engage with the question.
The comment isn't trying to explain "X is the reason why they speak Spanish in Patagonia". But I don't think that's necessary to rebut a poorly justified Grand Theory of History (tm).
The problem is that any moron can see the main observation that set off the discussion. There’s not an equal distribution of wealth and power across cultures at all.
I read guns germs and steel and it’s interesting and I didn’t remember it as being polemical or sure of its conclusions. My memory if it was basically a recounting of history that said this is all complicated and cause and effect is pretty murky but here is a grab bag of some broad ideas that could comprise a thesis for why things look the way they do.
I would expect any reasonable critique to either say actually no I think these reasons are overstated and these other ones are more important. Or they could say look human history isn’t deterministic the best way to think about this is mostly a series of butterfly effects. Or as complexity theorists would say, it’s just path dependence, aka a stochastic walk with absorbing barriers.
Those seem like reasonable alternate points of view. The critique I’m talking about here though is just like “nah didn’t happen” when confronted with a plainly observable chronology of global power and cultural expansion.
If you think that GGS is making factual claims about the world, and if the supporting evidence provided for them isn't factual, then the claims aren't facts, they're just speculation. This is the point that the critique makes; the assumptions that GGS makes in its theories aren't true, and so the conclusions are just random ideas as opposed to truths.
But let’s start with the beginning of the critique. He sets up the GGS hypothesis #1 as saying “Europeans decisively conquered the Americas”
His rebuttal is basically no they didn’t.
Then he links to a bunch of evidence and his thesis seems to be well actually there was a lot more fighting and it lasted much longer so it wasn’t decisive.
I mean, I guess? I thought we were talking about the obvious fact that the entirety of the Americas was conquered by the Europeans and not the other way around.
Of course there’s some subtlety to that. There always is. But, again, they’re speaking Spanish at the highest reaches of the Andes and not Quechua in Spain. And the mass quantities of resources went in one direction. The Incan gold went to Spain and the British Crown Jewels didn’t go to Benin.
So like something notable happened here that’s academically interesting to explore. The critique I’m seeing here is just saying “no it didn’t” as far as I can tell.
I like a “well actually” as much as the next guy but come on.
If you’re questioning the very premise when someone is asking why European military and economic power became dominant things have gotten pretty confused.
The critique is: there's a difference between taking decades to colonize it (hence "decisive") and centuries to colonize it.
If your argument is: "well, the Spanish eventually succeeded", great, but that's not what GGS is saying. Otherwise it'd be a pretty boring book.
Cool. Now tell me what the difference is.
This argument just seems silly to me. Is the argument really that it could have gone the other way?
Is there a reasonable counterfactual where the Aztec civilization successfully repelled European colonization efforts and eventually attacked and held European home countries?
Like from a vantage point of the mid 1400s when none of this had happened yet was that an equally likely outcome?
I mean that’s superficially plausible to me. Maybe it was just historical luck of the draw. If that’s what critics think then the critique should say that without hedging.
If not, the next question has to be why.
I read the book and found it quite good.
It seems at least the conquest part is wrong, but that part didn't interest me that much.
What I found most interesting was a thesis at the beginning of the book. That real innovation (revolution instead of evolutio ) is mostly accident and not facilitated by personal virtue of the innovator.
I can understand the critique it received while still thinking it a good introduction for the question.
Beyond that, Europeans, beginning with the Dutch and the English, incorporated the emerging financial and merchant classes into the governing/elite class. This both enabled scaling effective reach of central governments, and also affected the inclusion of a larger (though still minority) subset of the populations (families) to be stakeholders in the governing system. Finally, from a Marxist point of view, the transition from feudalism (which remained the norm in Asia) to capitalism was an advancement that (as we can see) hugely contributed to production power of Europe. This historic progression, in conjunction with the greater class mobility that it afforded, provided meaningful social utility to creative, productive, competent people.
[And p.s. so this couple of hundred years head start which resulted in industrialization in Europe, placed the rest of the planet behind a very steep curve. As we can see with the experiment in China, Asians/whoever can only catch up on that curve when the capitalist class in Europe (West) decides, for whatever reason, to massively transfer capital, technology, and know how (which is how China went from Maoist basket case to Superpower status in 30 years, and of course the Chinese Communist Party deserves credit for taking full and effective advantage of this completely historic opportunity).]
What your're proposing is just a form of the Just World Hypothesis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
The nations that found themselves on top of oil or coal or the fertile crescent at just the right time in history did not plan that.
It might make people feel more in control of their lives to think that bad things only happen to bad people but it's clearly not true.
> The nations that found themselves on top of oil or coal or the fertile crescent at just the right time in history did not plan that.
Doesn’t that undermine your point? Because Bangladesh doesn’t exactly look to Iraq, West Virginia, or Libya as the symbols of affluence and development. Conversely, the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, etc., aren’t replete with oil and minerals.
So all the countries with plenty of sun are going to get lots of cheap energy independence soon. I guess we should cargo cult from whatever they did to achieve this amazing success? I know the liberals want to claim it's geography and 'hours of sunshine' or some other politically correct nonsense but really I think it's all about the wide brimmed hats they wear and avoidance of the corrupting influence of ice hockey. But they won't teach that in schools!
And close to home examples like Google should make this more obvious to HN readers. You can't separate them from the early dot com era and what their competitors at the time we're doing, notably monopolist Microsoft trying to kill the internet rather than embrace it, yet accidentally inventing AJAX.
There's the whole conversation about the 'Good to Great' book and how the business lessons from these success stories were obviously bullshit with just a tiny amount of hindsight.
There's something really strange about that curriculum, it seems to have a racial agenda rather than a factual one.
> there is no politically correct answer to this question
I would love to hear your opinions on the true answer to this question. I hope HN is a place where we can engage in this type of discourse sensibly with open minds and hearts. Thanks again for your well-articulated thoughts.
It's no mystery. You need a politically united elite. You need political stability/authoritarianism. You need a nationalistic elite that take a nation's wealth and develop it rather than fly to europe and waste it there. And you need to become rich before you become a democracy. Democracy is a luxury for the wealthy. It's not something you want as a poor or developing country. The british celebrate democracy in india/etc not because they love india. But because they hate/fear them. The relationship between britain and india has always been that of a master and a slave. Ask yourself, why do the british malign china, which has developed immensely, but praise india which has 300 million without electricity? They praise india because india is undeveloped and weak and they malign china because they are developing and getting stronger. The master never wants their slaves to usurp them. The easiest way to tell if india is on the right path is if britain and the west start denouncing india. Like we did after india developed nuclears.
> It chalks up the differences in development between countries to “geography” giving some countries a “head start.”
It's true. Geography is destiny. It's why britain was of no importance until the americas was "discovered". When mediterranean trade was dominant, it was mediterranean countries ( rome/greece/egypt/etc ) that was wealthy. When the new world became the focus, spain/britain/france/etc became the wealthiest empires for a reason compared to italy/greece/poland/etc. There are other factors involved for sure, but geography is absolutely significant.
> Yet by the time the British East India company came to India, Britain was more than twice as rich per capita as India
That's because britain had the colonies to offload most of their people. Also the british was the largest atlantic slave traders for 100 years before they arrived in south asia.
> The British will never write a $42 trillion check for what they allegedly siphoned off from India.
Not unless india conquers britain and takes it back. If you look at opportunity cost, then they siphoned far more than $42 trillion. If india was free to develop/industrialize like say japan did in the late 1800s, India today would be a $60+ trillion economy. It's mindboggling that india still hasn't gone full-throttle with their industrialization like America or Europe did in the early 1800s, japan did in the late 1800s or china did in the 80s. What is india waiting for? It seems like the indian elite prefers pat on their heads for being a democracy by the west rather than industrializing their country.
> But understanding how the British (themselves the victims of repeated invasions) came to have the economic and military advantage that allowed them to do that would be valuable.
It's not rocket science. Imagine if bangladesh finds a piece of land that is 100000000X the size of bangladesh and has infinite more resources. Imagine if bangladesh was able to send 80% of its population to that land and transport the resources of that land to bangladesh. How do you think that would affects its per capita GDP?
Geography made britain ( aka its proximity to north america ). I don't think bangladesh is going to find such luck. They should look at how japan, south korea, singapore, etc developed. Bangladesh needs a united nationalistic elite because a nation is developed by the elite.
The rise of china lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and represents the greatest humanitarian achievement to date. If south asia ( which has nearly 2 billion people, far more than china ) can get its act together, it would be the greatest humanitarian achievement for all time. No region could surpass it because no region has that many people.
Unfortunately, I think we will see no progress in this area for political reasons. I was browsing the “racial literacy” curriculum used by my daughter’s school. Most of it is fluff, but the fourth grade unit is a doozy: https://secureservercdn.net/50.62.198.70/b51.f3f.myftpupload.... It chalks up the differences in development between countries to “geography” giving some countries a “head start.” This is absurd to anyone who has studied a little history. Countries like Bangladesh had a huge head start. In Bangladesh, food just jumps into your basket. Meanwhile Europeans were hacking away at soil that freezes for large parts of the year. And that doesn’t explain why certain countries became rich in the 20th century. How about a unit on how Singapore went from poor to rich in a single generation? The effect of colonialism, etc., can’t be ignored. But Bangladesh had been rich relative to Britain in the past. Yet by the time the British East India company came to India, Britain was more than twice as rich per capita as India, and the Netherlands more than four times as rich. I want to know how that happened. The British will never write a $42 trillion check for what they allegedly siphoned off from India. But understanding how the British (themselves the victims of repeated invasions) came to have the economic and military advantage that allowed them to do that would be valuable.
Unfortunately, there is no politically correct answer to this question that allows study of what Bangladeshis could have done or could do differently. We’re raising an entire generation of kids who will be socialized to believe that the challenges facing the third world are due to factors outside the control of those people, and that the only route to development is paternalistic aid from the first world.