I’m surprised that none of the books on the list of books explaining why the IR happened in the West and not China said “Because colonialism.” Look at the world in 1700, just prior to the IR: maybe China was economically and technologically advanced, but they didn’t control the world’s oceans, plantations, and mines. Surely there are books out there arguing for this theory. Have you read any of them? What do you think about this theory? Do the books you mention consider it and rebut it?
(I’ve heard people say that GDP per capita was higher in the West before colonialism even began, and use this as a rebuttal of the idea that colonialism was the cause of the IR. Is this it? To be really convincing, I’d like to see some sort of analysis of how the IR started in Britain but Britain hadn’t begun to benefit much from colonialism by the time the IR started. Or something like that.)
(Or is the idea that colonialism did cause the IR, but colonialism was in turn caused by technological advantages that were the result of WEIRDness?)
Pomeranz describes New World resources as one of the main causes of the IR, maybe second to convenient coal in Britain.
Henrich would likely reply that the correlation between colonialism and the IR was mostly causal in the other direction.
Institutional / cultural explanations seem to have a better track record than natural resources at explaining other divergences, although I don’t know of rigorous comparisons. Think South Korea versus North Korea, and think of Russia’s natural resources.
I (and likely Henrich) suggest that colonialism helped the IR slightly, by expanding the population that was accumulating knowledge.
Henrich argues that pervasive attitudes are more important than the whims of a single ruler, and would undoubtedly claim that cultural differences explain why it was the West that colonized. The Vries book claims there was a clear difference between globalist attitudes in Britain versus China denying that anything outside its borders mattered; that sort of follows from the universalist features of WEIRD culture.
Western culture established a practice of couples moving away from parents upon marriage, whereas kin ties discourage moving. I’d expect that to have an important effect on who moves to another continent.
I think GDP differences were small before 1800, and I haven’t seen a good argument that they’re important.
Joel Mokyr does argue convincingly in his Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Princeton UP, 2017)that the contribution of an intellectual elite was crucial for the IR. He dates this as important from about 1660. (Mokyr has chapters on Newton and Francis Bacon.) But Henrich seems to assume that WEIRD psychology developed much earlier than this and for the population as a whole.
Whatever, as E.P. Thompson showed in his classic THE Making of the English Working Class, the regimentation of work in the cotton mills and and the dangers of working in the coal mines destroyed the independence and variety of tasks some had experienced as labourers in the open air of the fields. Western individualism (and I would argue that it was partly dependent on the rediscovery of the rich and various texts of the classical authors) certainly was only possible for a small elite. This is so obvious for anyone who knows something of European history and culture which is why I astonished when I began reading my copy of the Weirdest People.
You are probably at least half right about the elite versus general population difference. Henrich is often vague about whether he’s describing upper class phenomena or more pervasive changes, and I see hints that changes usually spread to the general population more slowly than Henrich implies.
He goes overboard in arguing against the great man theory of history. I mostly agree with Henrich that we should pay more attention to models of decentralized sources of beliefs. But Henrich seems to contribute to polarization between extremes on this axis, when I want something closer to a middle ground.
Henrich mostly uses the term individualism to refer to beliefs. You appear to be using it in a less standard way.
New working conditions around 1800 presumably created some pressure for workers to be less individualistic. Maybe that even led to mass schooling designed to beat some conformity into the average worker. Yet that doesn’t mean those pressures had much effect on culture. It sure looks like the West continues to value individualism more highly than do most cultures.
I agree, Peter, that in many ways the western nations have been more individualistic than others. I have explored this in my recent book The Awakening, A History of the Western Mind AD500-1700, published in the UK with a US edition coming from Knopf under the title The Reopening of the Western Mind. This is precisely why i bought Henrich’s book when it came out in the UK! As my title suggests I am concerned with the rise of the individual mind. I would argue that it lies in the relationship between an intellectual elite and the classical sources- so from 1400 onwards. This is why I like Mokyr’s approach (see another of my comments) which links a cultural elite to influencing the Industrial Revolution.
I was immensely disappointed by The Weirdest People. The first time i read it I was mildly interested and kept on going, the second time I got very irritated by the poor editing, the imprecise terminology and above all, his complete ignorance of European history (which was obvious from the first reading). Because it is so poorly organised (did he not have an editor?) it is hard to see the weaknesses, but I now realise that he did not know that the Roman empire existed and that many of the changes he attributes to the Church (the break-up of cousin marriages and communal landholdings) had already been in effect during the long centuries of Roman rule. There is very little evidence that anyone took much notice of the consanguinity rules anyway. ( I have searched for this but can only find one article on the nobles of the tenth to eleventh century where there was some acquiescence but unlike the mass of the population they were mobile and so could marry out.) While one can see a transmission of culture across the European elite (using Latin as a common language) over time, there is no evidence that it extended beyond this elite. It is true that the Protestant areas of Europe ( I wonder whether Henrich knew of the persistence of Catholicism over much of Europe- France, Spain, Italy, Bavaria,etc. as he seems to attribute much of WEIRDness to Protestantism but this would only have affected part of Europe) encouraged the reading of the Bible but this hardly compares with those who had access to the rich resources of the classical world.
We shall see whether the whole argument on which this book depends unravels as better historians than I come in contact with it. It certainly does not deserve to be seen as a major academic work.
He is aware of some relevant Roman norms. From page 176:
Early Roman law, for example, prohibited close cousin marriage, though the law of the Roman Empire—where Christianity was born—permitted it without social stigma.
Brent Shaw, the classical historian, has done an in-depth survey of this and analysed 33 Roman marriages none of which were between cousins, He makes the good point that rising aristocratic families who needed to secure their position deliberately married into established aristocratic families so that there was a good reason for avoiding cousin marriages. Of course, as with medieval Europe, we don’t know what went on with the mass of sexual relationships. Henrich seems to have assumed that there was some sort of formal marriage under the auspices of the Church. This was not the case as marriages by mutual consent without even a priest in attendance were valid.
The fact that around me in rural East Anglia, there were marriages within the villages, most of whose inhabitants were born and died in the same village, up to the Second World War shows that Henrich’s argument that rural life was split up in the Middle Ages is erroneous. My late father-in-law ,a GP in Norfolk in the 50s had to sort out the medical consequences of inbreeding! Luckily we have extensive evidence of marriage patters from the rich Florentine archives and an analysis of 700 dowry documents from the fifteenth century showed that rural men married rural wives and urban men urban wives and seldom was there a crossover.
As I have already said that as a historian who has been researching these things over the years,I am exasperated by Henrich’s imaginary narrative !
OK, thanks. I find it hard to take seriously the idea that the IR caused colonialism, since colonialism happened first (just look at the world in 1750!). Maybe the idea is that there was some underlying advantage Europe had which caused both colonialism and the IR?
I agree that maybe western culture is part of the explanation for why colonialism happened in the West more than it did elsewhere. But I think having good ships and navigation tech is a bigger part of the explanation.
I like the point that resources in general don’t seem to cause technological growth. Russia, North Korea, etc. Vaniver mentions China below, maybe a better example would be Mongolia, which suddenly ruled almost the entire world after Ghenghis Khan but didn’t spark an IR. (Though maybe it did spark a bunch of new tech developments? Idk, would be interested to hear.)
FWIW, my current view is something like “WEIRD culture helped there be science and market institutions to a mildly strong extent, though not dramatically more than other places like China; then the Europeans lucked into some really good ships & navigation tech (and kings eager to use them, unlike some emperors I could mention) and started sailing around a lot, and then this spurred more market institutions and more science, creating a feedback loop / snowball effect. In this story, WEIRD culture is important, but it’s the ships+navigation+kings that’s the most important thing. I’m no historian though and would love to hear criticisms of this take.
If we’re comparing europe to china, did ships+navigation tech really have anything to do with it? We certainly don’t need to invoke them, since certain emperors’ whims are sufficient to explain why china didn’t colonise. And some chinese ships were going to east africa already by the 9th century (afaict from wikipedia), which seems like it could be sufficient to start colonising? I suspect it was farther than europeans was going at the time.
Or did you only mean to cite ships as something that europeans was disproportionally good at compared to other advanced societies? (maybe middle eastern ones?)
Yeah, good point, maybe it was something like “Will to explore and colonize” that was the most important variable, even more important than the ships+navigation tech. Or maybe it was a more generic tech advantage, that made it cheaper and more profitable for Europeans to do it than for the Chinese or Arabs to do it.
I think the ships+navigation tech are definitely worth mentioning at least, because they were necessary, and not easy to acquire. And Europeans were certainly disproportionately good at it at the time, as far as I can tell. I know their ships were (in the relevant ways) slightly superior to the ships in the Indian Ocean in 1500, and while I haven’t looked this up, I’d be willing to bet that their navigation tech (and therefore, their ability to cross the Pacific and Atlantic) was superior to the Chinese. The Polynesians had excellent navigation tech, but tiny ships and insufficient military or economic tech to exploit this advantage. No one else comes close to those groups as far as I know.
Yeah, good point, maybe it was something like “Will to explore and colonize” that was the most important variable, even more important than the ships+navigation tech.
Interestingly, this feels connected to the ‘centralization’ variable again. In both the Chinese and Muslim empires, there’s a sense of everything flowing towards the center, whereas in the European empires, there’s much more of a sense of growing out toward the edges. In a book about the history of trade (I think?) I came across a claim that the Muslim explorers / merchants seemed pretty uncurious about the local language or culture; they already spoke the best language and had the best religion, and so while they could trade in goods there wasn’t as much value in trading in ideas (or the standard way for them to trade in ideas was for the Other to learn Arabic).
European exploration and colonization looks somewhat different. European explorers and conquerors were much more likely to learn the local languages, I think, and be interested in the ways that locals did things. A lot of European settlement of the world looks like sending farmers from the highly populated places to the less populated places, in a way that I have many fewer examples of in non-European history. [There’s the “cultivation of waste lands” in the Book of Lord Shang, for example, but this wasn’t about distant colonies.] One might imagine Europeans being excited about settling in South Africa as an opportunity to strike it out on their own, whereas Muslims might view it as a punishing exile.
Yes, this is further support for the “Because colonialism” theory. Maybe there’s a nearby possible world where the Emperor got really excited about exploration and colonization, and sent the fleet out again and again instead of burning it, and then historians in the 2000′s write big books about why the Industrial Revolution happened first in the East because of Confucian values.
Look at the world in 1700, just prior to the IR: maybe China was economically and technologically advanced, but they didn’t control the world’s oceans, plantations, and mines.
But what need had they for oceans? China itself was full of plantations and mines; the only good they reliably imported from the rest of the world at that point in time was silver. Opium later became a foreign policy issue in part because the government wanted to protect users from addiction, and in part because it wasn’t grown in China and yet was demanded in China, so allowing the import of opium would break the advantageous balance of trade position that China was in.
The question is whether the IR would have happened in China if they, and not the Europeans, controlled the world’s oceans, plantations, and mines. (And by that I mean, imagine if in the 1700s the Americas were all Chinese colonies, if the Indian and Pacific and Atlantic oceans were controlled by Chinese fleets and port-forts, if kingdoms all along the coast of India and Arabia and Africa and Europe swore fealty to China instead of Europe… In this scenario, would the IR still have happened in Britain?)
Yeah, china was rich, but plenty of rich places failed to generate IRs. The unique thing about Europe prior to the IR may have been its WEIRDness… but it also may have been the fact that it controlled so much of the world at the time. Why would this help? Well, maybe having a glut of resources for a relatively fixed labor pool raised GDP per capita a bunch and incentivised labor-saving devices like windmills and watermills and eventually steam engines. Maybe all the oceanic trade made for a robust free-ish market and spurred the development of good financial instruments and institutions (in other words, maybe what makes capitalism work so well was particularly present due to all the oceanic trade).
I have something for this: Asia in general and China in particular was doomed by the signing of the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689. The argument is essentially that China locked themselves into stagnation by disrupting trade over land.
Land-bound trade in Asia took place primarily over the Silk Road. This is something of a misnomer, as it isn’t a trade route between Rome and China but rather trade with and through Inner Asian economies. The success of the Silk Road is defined by these economies, and these economies in turn are defined by the nomads who populate the steppe and Central Asia.
However, agrarian empires are traditionally hostile to trade. The reason is that the volume of trade is higher the closer two trading partners are. This in turn means most of the gains from trade are realized by the recently-conquered frontier, and that trade is happening with their not-conquered-yet neighbors, which runs the perpetual risk of drawing the frontier away from the imperial core.
The Treaty of Nerchinsk fixed trade at a certain volume and to go through specific locations between the Russian and Chinese empires. This suited the interests of Peter the Great and the Kangxi Emperor, but severely constricted the flow of goods going through the interior in both directions.
This was the period that ocean going trade exceeded overland trade in volume. Along with the decline in total wealth generated, they also cut themselves off from the flow of information that comes with trade. I suggest this pitched the Qing Empire into stagnation, radically reducing the likelihood they would experience an industrial revolution internally.
Thanks, I hadn’t heard of that. First the burning & banning of ships, next the reduction of overland trade—that’s two massive unforced errors on the part of Chinese emperors, during the same couple of centuries that European power was waxing.
But wait, the wiki article doesn’t say this restricted trade, it seems to say it promoted trade? Do you have a source for your claim that it reduced trade?
It promoted trade between Russia and China but all of that came at the expense of trade through the rest of inner Asia. The treaty was negotiated shortly after the Qing defeated the Dzungars, and was the first time they could trade directly because they shared a fixed border.
Further, this trade was imperially backed, so the actual imperial families and their patronage networks were the prime beneficiaries. This is a very different situation to one where trade is unrestricted, because patronage from the court is the deciding factor rather than, say productivity. By analogy to the English case, why would a Qing textile mill care about producing more if the demand is satisfied locally and the amount they can send to Russia is fixed by imperial writ? Or more broadly, suppose England swore off trade with Europe and signed a large trade treaty with Russia instead; would that have helped or harmed the industrial revolution?
The strongest argument is located in the book Empires of the Silk Road by Christopher Beckwith. He goes further than the consensus position about the influence of trade on China, but the consensus has been updating rapidly for years and his picture agrees better with my understanding of economics. The position that Beckwith is arguing against is articulated by Thomas Barfield in The Perilous Frontier. The most detailed description of the period of history is Peter Perdue, China Marches West. The latter two are on my reading list, so I might wind back my estimation; consider it a strong opinion lightly held.
And by that I mean, imagine if in the 1700s the Americas were all Chinese colonies, if the Indian and Pacific and Atlantic oceans were controlled by Chinese fleets and port-forts, if kingdoms all along the coast of India and Arabia and Africa and Europe swore fealty to China instead of Europe...
I think we had a trial run of that, and it didn’t result in an IR for China. That is, the tributary system was a lot like “everyone aware of China swore fealty to China.”
In this scenario, would the IR still have happened in Britain?
I think this is less obvious, but that the answer is still “yes.” Like, Britain would still be developing an engineering culture; steam engines would still be useful for pumping water out of coal mines; the people that made textile mills didn’t themselves own cotton plantations, instead buying their inputs as commodities on the open market, and selling their outputs as commodities on the open market. Would there have been brain drain from Britain to China, so that the prime inventors are missing from Britain? Maybe, but it seems somewhat unlikely to me.
Like, when you look at industrialization efforts in other countries, it always involves the importation of cultural practices and technological knowhow, and only sometimes involves colonialism or acquisition of territory.
The “tribute” entailed a foreign court sending envoys and exotic products to the Chinese emperor. The emperor then gave the envoys gifts in return and permitted them to trade in China. Presenting tribute involved theatrical subordination but usually not political subordination. The political sacrifice of participating actors was simply “symbolic obeisance”.[8] Actors within the “tribute system” were virtually autonomous and carried out their own agendas despite sending tribute; as was the case with Japan, Korea, Ryukyu, and Vietnam.[9] Chinese influence on tributary states was almost always non-interventionist in nature and tributary states “normally could expect no military assistance from Chinese armies should they be invaded”. [...]
The gifts doled out by the Ming emperor and the trade permits granted were of greater value than the tribute itself, so tribute states sent as many tribute missions as they could. In 1372, the Hongwu Emperor restricted tribute missions from Joseon and six other countries to just one every three years. The Ryukyu Kingdom was not included in this list, and sent 57 tribute missions from 1372 to 1398, an average of two tribute missions per year. Since geographical density and proximity was not an issue, regions with multiple kings such as the Sultanate of Sulu benefited immensely from this exchange.[7] This also caused odd situations such as the Turpan Khanate simultaneously raiding Ming territory and offering tribute at the same time because they were eager to obtain the emperor’s gifts, which were given in the hope that it might stop the raiding.
OK, thanks—this is the sort of argument I was looking for, and it is updating me.
Do you think there’s a common cause between colonialism and the IR? Say, science + capitalism? Or maybe simply engineering culture (producing steam engines, but before that ships + navigation?)
Do you think there’s a common cause between colonialism and the IR? Say, science + capitalism? Or maybe simply engineering culture (producing steam engines, but before that ships + navigation?)
Possible but unclear. China had its own engineering culture, for example, as did the Muslim world, and both had proto-capitalism, in that they had large mercantile networks with significant wealth.
My models of this have shifted a lot over the last decade or so. One factor that’s seemed the most variable in importance over that time has been political centralization. It looks to me like the old world has spawned three or four major civilization groups, depending on how you count things; Europe, the Middle East, India, and China. Europe was the only one that ‘never really unified’; Rome only barely touched the bits of Europe that ended up leading the IR. When you have books like a Farewell to Alms, they point to Britain becoming a ‘nation of shopkeepers’ through downwards social mobility, and this being a sort of domesticating and improving force. But those forces were even stronger in China (according to Sinologists who have reviewed his book; he touches on the comparison only briefly).
Was it relevant that lots of different countries in Europe were trying different things, with different focuses, and a handful of them led to industrial growth, that then ended up seeming like “what all of Europe” was like? Or, if it had happened in China instead, would we be pointing at features of Fujian that turned out to be the ideal birthplace, and ignore its position as an imperial province in much the same way my analysis here is ignoring Britain’s position as part of Christendom?
See, if they both had engineering cultures and proto-capitalism, that seems like evidence for the “Because colonialism” hypothesis.
But I do think the “never really unified” hypothesis is intriguing. After all, the Chinese not only destroyed their own treasure fleet but basically banned maritime trade and sent the army to depopulate their own coastline for 20km or so inland, IIRC, because of the misguided policy decisions of the central government. No central government, no misguided policy decisions applied to entire civilizations.
that seems like evidence for the “Because colonialism” hypothesis.
Another thing to think about: according to my way of looking at things, Muslim Arabs colonized the middle east, southern side of the Mediterranean, and India; this includes massive transfers of resources from the periphery to the heartland. (Mansa Musa going on the Hajj seems similar to Spain discovering Cerro Rico, for example.) And yet we don’t see an IR in the Muslim world; is this just because barbarians on the frontiers caused collapse too soon, or was it just not going to happen there?
if they both had engineering cultures and proto-capitalism
I think there’s a difference between ‘proto-capitalism’ and ‘capitalism’, and a difference between ‘proto-science’ and ‘science’. Like, I can point to several Islamic figures who are the equivalent of Bacon, but I can’t point to many institutions that are the equivalent of the Royal Society or Republic of Letters. (I’m only moderately informed about this period of history, tho, so absence of evidence is only mild evidence of absence.)
Like, one of the things that was relevant to James Watt commercializing his steam engine was an engineer who knew how to bore iron cylinders in the right way, which he knew because it was useful for making cannons. I think Europe had much higher demand per capita for cannons than China (but am not sure about this, and maybe absolute demand is what matters?), which maybe led to tech transfer in a way that the high points of Chinese engineering didn’t.
Good point about the colonization. One thing I was surprised to learn when I researched the conquistadors stuff is that Muslim merchants, fleets, armies, and rulers had penetrated into India, Indonesia, all around the indian ocean, and even into China I think by the time the Portuguese showed up. Malacca was ruled by a Muslim for example. And yeah, no doubt this led to a lot of resources flowing back towards the middle east.
How much damage did the Mongols do to Muslim science? My vague guess would be, quite a lot? Perhaps this is also relevant.
How much damage did the Mongols do to Muslim science? My vague guess would be, quite a lot? Perhaps this is also relevant.
Both the capture of Cordoba in 1236 and the capture of Baghdad in 1258 seem relevant to me; both were home to some of the aforementioned Muslim paragons of science, and we don’t see any further paragons after that period (until the Timurid Renaissance, which I view as mostly having regional paragons instead of global ones, and so was more akin to the Carolingian Renaissance in terms of broader historical impact than the European one).
This is perhaps more evidence for the “centralization decreases robustness to disruption” theory; the House of Wisdom in particular was an attempt to gather all of the intellectual wealth of the empire into one place, which then meant that if it’s burned down and the scholars murdered, there’s not much to start over from.
I’m surprised that none of the books on the list of books explaining why the IR happened in the West and not China said “Because colonialism.” Look at the world in 1700, just prior to the IR: maybe China was economically and technologically advanced, but they didn’t control the world’s oceans, plantations, and mines. Surely there are books out there arguing for this theory. Have you read any of them? What do you think about this theory? Do the books you mention consider it and rebut it?
(I’ve heard people say that GDP per capita was higher in the West before colonialism even began, and use this as a rebuttal of the idea that colonialism was the cause of the IR. Is this it? To be really convincing, I’d like to see some sort of analysis of how the IR started in Britain but Britain hadn’t begun to benefit much from colonialism by the time the IR started. Or something like that.)
(Or is the idea that colonialism did cause the IR, but colonialism was in turn caused by technological advantages that were the result of WEIRDness?)
Pomeranz describes New World resources as one of the main causes of the IR, maybe second to convenient coal in Britain.
Henrich would likely reply that the correlation between colonialism and the IR was mostly causal in the other direction.
Institutional / cultural explanations seem to have a better track record than natural resources at explaining other divergences, although I don’t know of rigorous comparisons. Think South Korea versus North Korea, and think of Russia’s natural resources.
I (and likely Henrich) suggest that colonialism helped the IR slightly, by expanding the population that was accumulating knowledge.
Henrich argues that pervasive attitudes are more important than the whims of a single ruler, and would undoubtedly claim that cultural differences explain why it was the West that colonized. The Vries book claims there was a clear difference between globalist attitudes in Britain versus China denying that anything outside its borders mattered; that sort of follows from the universalist features of WEIRD culture.
Western culture established a practice of couples moving away from parents upon marriage, whereas kin ties discourage moving. I’d expect that to have an important effect on who moves to another continent.
I think GDP differences were small before 1800, and I haven’t seen a good argument that they’re important.
Joel Mokyr does argue convincingly in his Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy, Princeton UP, 2017)that the contribution of an intellectual elite was crucial for the IR. He dates this as important from about 1660. (Mokyr has chapters on Newton and Francis Bacon.) But Henrich seems to assume that WEIRD psychology developed much earlier than this and for the population as a whole.
Whatever, as E.P. Thompson showed in his classic THE Making of the English Working Class, the regimentation of work in the cotton mills and and the dangers of working in the coal mines destroyed the independence and variety of tasks some had experienced as labourers in the open air of the fields. Western individualism (and I would argue that it was partly dependent on the rediscovery of the rich and various texts of the classical authors) certainly was only possible for a small elite. This is so obvious for anyone who knows something of European history and culture which is why I astonished when I began reading my copy of the Weirdest People.
You are probably at least half right about the elite versus general population difference. Henrich is often vague about whether he’s describing upper class phenomena or more pervasive changes, and I see hints that changes usually spread to the general population more slowly than Henrich implies.
He goes overboard in arguing against the great man theory of history. I mostly agree with Henrich that we should pay more attention to models of decentralized sources of beliefs. But Henrich seems to contribute to polarization between extremes on this axis, when I want something closer to a middle ground.
Henrich mostly uses the term individualism to refer to beliefs. You appear to be using it in a less standard way.
New working conditions around 1800 presumably created some pressure for workers to be less individualistic. Maybe that even led to mass schooling designed to beat some conformity into the average worker. Yet that doesn’t mean those pressures had much effect on culture. It sure looks like the West continues to value individualism more highly than do most cultures.
I agree, Peter, that in many ways the western nations have been more individualistic than others. I have explored this in my recent book The Awakening, A History of the Western Mind AD500-1700, published in the UK with a US edition coming from Knopf under the title The Reopening of the Western Mind. This is precisely why i bought Henrich’s book when it came out in the UK! As my title suggests I am concerned with the rise of the individual mind. I would argue that it lies in the relationship between an intellectual elite and the classical sources- so from 1400 onwards. This is why I like Mokyr’s approach (see another of my comments) which links a cultural elite to influencing the Industrial Revolution.
I was immensely disappointed by The Weirdest People. The first time i read it I was mildly interested and kept on going, the second time I got very irritated by the poor editing, the imprecise terminology and above all, his complete ignorance of European history (which was obvious from the first reading). Because it is so poorly organised (did he not have an editor?) it is hard to see the weaknesses, but I now realise that he did not know that the Roman empire existed and that many of the changes he attributes to the Church (the break-up of cousin marriages and communal landholdings) had already been in effect during the long centuries of Roman rule. There is very little evidence that anyone took much notice of the consanguinity rules anyway. ( I have searched for this but can only find one article on the nobles of the tenth to eleventh century where there was some acquiescence but unlike the mass of the population they were mobile and so could marry out.) While one can see a transmission of culture across the European elite (using Latin as a common language) over time, there is no evidence that it extended beyond this elite. It is true that the Protestant areas of Europe ( I wonder whether Henrich knew of the persistence of Catholicism over much of Europe- France, Spain, Italy, Bavaria,etc. as he seems to attribute much of WEIRDness to Protestantism but this would only have affected part of Europe) encouraged the reading of the Bible but this hardly compares with those who had access to the rich resources of the classical world.
We shall see whether the whole argument on which this book depends unravels as better historians than I come in contact with it. It certainly does not deserve to be seen as a major academic work.
He is aware of some relevant Roman norms. From page 176:
Brent Shaw, the classical historian, has done an in-depth survey of this and analysed 33 Roman marriages none of which were between cousins, He makes the good point that rising aristocratic families who needed to secure their position deliberately married into established aristocratic families so that there was a good reason for avoiding cousin marriages. Of course, as with medieval Europe, we don’t know what went on with the mass of sexual relationships. Henrich seems to have assumed that there was some sort of formal marriage under the auspices of the Church. This was not the case as marriages by mutual consent without even a priest in attendance were valid.
The fact that around me in rural East Anglia, there were marriages within the villages, most of whose inhabitants were born and died in the same village, up to the Second World War shows that Henrich’s argument that rural life was split up in the Middle Ages is erroneous. My late father-in-law ,a GP in Norfolk in the 50s had to sort out the medical consequences of inbreeding! Luckily we have extensive evidence of marriage patters from the rich Florentine archives and an analysis of 700 dowry documents from the fifteenth century showed that rural men married rural wives and urban men urban wives and seldom was there a crossover.
As I have already said that as a historian who has been researching these things over the years,I am exasperated by Henrich’s imaginary narrative !
OK, thanks. I find it hard to take seriously the idea that the IR caused colonialism, since colonialism happened first (just look at the world in 1750!). Maybe the idea is that there was some underlying advantage Europe had which caused both colonialism and the IR?
I agree that maybe western culture is part of the explanation for why colonialism happened in the West more than it did elsewhere. But I think having good ships and navigation tech is a bigger part of the explanation.
I like the point that resources in general don’t seem to cause technological growth. Russia, North Korea, etc. Vaniver mentions China below, maybe a better example would be Mongolia, which suddenly ruled almost the entire world after Ghenghis Khan but didn’t spark an IR. (Though maybe it did spark a bunch of new tech developments? Idk, would be interested to hear.)
FWIW, my current view is something like “WEIRD culture helped there be science and market institutions to a mildly strong extent, though not dramatically more than other places like China; then the Europeans lucked into some really good ships & navigation tech (and kings eager to use them, unlike some emperors I could mention) and started sailing around a lot, and then this spurred more market institutions and more science, creating a feedback loop / snowball effect. In this story, WEIRD culture is important, but it’s the ships+navigation+kings that’s the most important thing. I’m no historian though and would love to hear criticisms of this take.
If we’re comparing europe to china, did ships+navigation tech really have anything to do with it? We certainly don’t need to invoke them, since certain emperors’ whims are sufficient to explain why china didn’t colonise. And some chinese ships were going to east africa already by the 9th century (afaict from wikipedia), which seems like it could be sufficient to start colonising? I suspect it was farther than europeans was going at the time.
Or did you only mean to cite ships as something that europeans was disproportionally good at compared to other advanced societies? (maybe middle eastern ones?)
Yeah, good point, maybe it was something like “Will to explore and colonize” that was the most important variable, even more important than the ships+navigation tech. Or maybe it was a more generic tech advantage, that made it cheaper and more profitable for Europeans to do it than for the Chinese or Arabs to do it.
I think the ships+navigation tech are definitely worth mentioning at least, because they were necessary, and not easy to acquire. And Europeans were certainly disproportionately good at it at the time, as far as I can tell. I know their ships were (in the relevant ways) slightly superior to the ships in the Indian Ocean in 1500, and while I haven’t looked this up, I’d be willing to bet that their navigation tech (and therefore, their ability to cross the Pacific and Atlantic) was superior to the Chinese. The Polynesians had excellent navigation tech, but tiny ships and insufficient military or economic tech to exploit this advantage. No one else comes close to those groups as far as I know.
Interestingly, this feels connected to the ‘centralization’ variable again. In both the Chinese and Muslim empires, there’s a sense of everything flowing towards the center, whereas in the European empires, there’s much more of a sense of growing out toward the edges. In a book about the history of trade (I think?) I came across a claim that the Muslim explorers / merchants seemed pretty uncurious about the local language or culture; they already spoke the best language and had the best religion, and so while they could trade in goods there wasn’t as much value in trading in ideas (or the standard way for them to trade in ideas was for the Other to learn Arabic).
European exploration and colonization looks somewhat different. European explorers and conquerors were much more likely to learn the local languages, I think, and be interested in the ways that locals did things. A lot of European settlement of the world looks like sending farmers from the highly populated places to the less populated places, in a way that I have many fewer examples of in non-European history. [There’s the “cultivation of waste lands” in the Book of Lord Shang, for example, but this wasn’t about distant colonies.] One might imagine Europeans being excited about settling in South Africa as an opportunity to strike it out on their own, whereas Muslims might view it as a punishing exile.
The Ming treasure voyages do suggest that the technical capability for colonialism exist in China. It was just not persued after 1433.
Yes, this is further support for the “Because colonialism” theory. Maybe there’s a nearby possible world where the Emperor got really excited about exploration and colonization, and sent the fleet out again and again instead of burning it, and then historians in the 2000′s write big books about why the Industrial Revolution happened first in the East because of Confucian values.
But what need had they for oceans? China itself was full of plantations and mines; the only good they reliably imported from the rest of the world at that point in time was silver. Opium later became a foreign policy issue in part because the government wanted to protect users from addiction, and in part because it wasn’t grown in China and yet was demanded in China, so allowing the import of opium would break the advantageous balance of trade position that China was in.
The question is whether the IR would have happened in China if they, and not the Europeans, controlled the world’s oceans, plantations, and mines. (And by that I mean, imagine if in the 1700s the Americas were all Chinese colonies, if the Indian and Pacific and Atlantic oceans were controlled by Chinese fleets and port-forts, if kingdoms all along the coast of India and Arabia and Africa and Europe swore fealty to China instead of Europe… In this scenario, would the IR still have happened in Britain?)
Yeah, china was rich, but plenty of rich places failed to generate IRs. The unique thing about Europe prior to the IR may have been its WEIRDness… but it also may have been the fact that it controlled so much of the world at the time. Why would this help? Well, maybe having a glut of resources for a relatively fixed labor pool raised GDP per capita a bunch and incentivised labor-saving devices like windmills and watermills and eventually steam engines. Maybe all the oceanic trade made for a robust free-ish market and spurred the development of good financial instruments and institutions (in other words, maybe what makes capitalism work so well was particularly present due to all the oceanic trade).
I have something for this: Asia in general and China in particular was doomed by the signing of the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689. The argument is essentially that China locked themselves into stagnation by disrupting trade over land.
Land-bound trade in Asia took place primarily over the Silk Road. This is something of a misnomer, as it isn’t a trade route between Rome and China but rather trade with and through Inner Asian economies.
The success of the Silk Road is defined by these economies, and these economies in turn are defined by the nomads who populate the steppe and Central Asia.
However, agrarian empires are traditionally hostile to trade. The reason is that the volume of trade is higher the closer two trading partners are. This in turn means most of the gains from trade are realized by the recently-conquered frontier, and that trade is happening with their not-conquered-yet neighbors, which runs the perpetual risk of drawing the frontier away from the imperial core.
The Treaty of Nerchinsk fixed trade at a certain volume and to go through specific locations between the Russian and Chinese empires. This suited the interests of Peter the Great and the Kangxi Emperor, but severely constricted the flow of goods going through the interior in both directions.
This was the period that ocean going trade exceeded overland trade in volume. Along with the decline in total wealth generated, they also cut themselves off from the flow of information that comes with trade. I suggest this pitched the Qing Empire into stagnation, radically reducing the likelihood they would experience an industrial revolution internally.
Thanks, I hadn’t heard of that. First the burning & banning of ships, next the reduction of overland trade—that’s two massive unforced errors on the part of Chinese emperors, during the same couple of centuries that European power was waxing.
But wait, the wiki article doesn’t say this restricted trade, it seems to say it promoted trade? Do you have a source for your claim that it reduced trade?
It promoted trade between Russia and China but all of that came at the expense of trade through the rest of inner Asia. The treaty was negotiated shortly after the Qing defeated the Dzungars, and was the first time they could trade directly because they shared a fixed border.
Further, this trade was imperially backed, so the actual imperial families and their patronage networks were the prime beneficiaries. This is a very different situation to one where trade is unrestricted, because patronage from the court is the deciding factor rather than, say productivity. By analogy to the English case, why would a Qing textile mill care about producing more if the demand is satisfied locally and the amount they can send to Russia is fixed by imperial writ? Or more broadly, suppose England swore off trade with Europe and signed a large trade treaty with Russia instead; would that have helped or harmed the industrial revolution?
The strongest argument is located in the book Empires of the Silk Road by Christopher Beckwith. He goes further than the consensus position about the influence of trade on China, but the consensus has been updating rapidly for years and his picture agrees better with my understanding of economics. The position that Beckwith is arguing against is articulated by Thomas Barfield in The Perilous Frontier. The most detailed description of the period of history is Peter Perdue, China Marches West. The latter two are on my reading list, so I might wind back my estimation; consider it a strong opinion lightly held.
I think we had a trial run of that, and it didn’t result in an IR for China. That is, the tributary system was a lot like “everyone aware of China swore fealty to China.”
I think this is less obvious, but that the answer is still “yes.” Like, Britain would still be developing an engineering culture; steam engines would still be useful for pumping water out of coal mines; the people that made textile mills didn’t themselves own cotton plantations, instead buying their inputs as commodities on the open market, and selling their outputs as commodities on the open market. Would there have been brain drain from Britain to China, so that the prime inventors are missing from Britain? Maybe, but it seems somewhat unlikely to me.
Like, when you look at industrialization efforts in other countries, it always involves the importation of cultural practices and technological knowhow, and only sometimes involves colonialism or acquisition of territory.
It sounds like in practice they didn’t?
OK, thanks—this is the sort of argument I was looking for, and it is updating me.
Do you think there’s a common cause between colonialism and the IR? Say, science + capitalism? Or maybe simply engineering culture (producing steam engines, but before that ships + navigation?)
Possible but unclear. China had its own engineering culture, for example, as did the Muslim world, and both had proto-capitalism, in that they had large mercantile networks with significant wealth.
My models of this have shifted a lot over the last decade or so. One factor that’s seemed the most variable in importance over that time has been political centralization. It looks to me like the old world has spawned three or four major civilization groups, depending on how you count things; Europe, the Middle East, India, and China. Europe was the only one that ‘never really unified’; Rome only barely touched the bits of Europe that ended up leading the IR. When you have books like a Farewell to Alms, they point to Britain becoming a ‘nation of shopkeepers’ through downwards social mobility, and this being a sort of domesticating and improving force. But those forces were even stronger in China (according to Sinologists who have reviewed his book; he touches on the comparison only briefly).
Was it relevant that lots of different countries in Europe were trying different things, with different focuses, and a handful of them led to industrial growth, that then ended up seeming like “what all of Europe” was like? Or, if it had happened in China instead, would we be pointing at features of Fujian that turned out to be the ideal birthplace, and ignore its position as an imperial province in much the same way my analysis here is ignoring Britain’s position as part of Christendom?
See, if they both had engineering cultures and proto-capitalism, that seems like evidence for the “Because colonialism” hypothesis.
But I do think the “never really unified” hypothesis is intriguing. After all, the Chinese not only destroyed their own treasure fleet but basically banned maritime trade and sent the army to depopulate their own coastline for 20km or so inland, IIRC, because of the misguided policy decisions of the central government. No central government, no misguided policy decisions applied to entire civilizations.
Another thing to think about: according to my way of looking at things, Muslim Arabs colonized the middle east, southern side of the Mediterranean, and India; this includes massive transfers of resources from the periphery to the heartland. (Mansa Musa going on the Hajj seems similar to Spain discovering Cerro Rico, for example.) And yet we don’t see an IR in the Muslim world; is this just because barbarians on the frontiers caused collapse too soon, or was it just not going to happen there?
I think there’s a difference between ‘proto-capitalism’ and ‘capitalism’, and a difference between ‘proto-science’ and ‘science’. Like, I can point to several Islamic figures who are the equivalent of Bacon, but I can’t point to many institutions that are the equivalent of the Royal Society or Republic of Letters. (I’m only moderately informed about this period of history, tho, so absence of evidence is only mild evidence of absence.)
Like, one of the things that was relevant to James Watt commercializing his steam engine was an engineer who knew how to bore iron cylinders in the right way, which he knew because it was useful for making cannons. I think Europe had much higher demand per capita for cannons than China (but am not sure about this, and maybe absolute demand is what matters?), which maybe led to tech transfer in a way that the high points of Chinese engineering didn’t.
Good point about the colonization. One thing I was surprised to learn when I researched the conquistadors stuff is that Muslim merchants, fleets, armies, and rulers had penetrated into India, Indonesia, all around the indian ocean, and even into China I think by the time the Portuguese showed up. Malacca was ruled by a Muslim for example. And yeah, no doubt this led to a lot of resources flowing back towards the middle east.
How much damage did the Mongols do to Muslim science? My vague guess would be, quite a lot? Perhaps this is also relevant.
Both the capture of Cordoba in 1236 and the capture of Baghdad in 1258 seem relevant to me; both were home to some of the aforementioned Muslim paragons of science, and we don’t see any further paragons after that period (until the Timurid Renaissance, which I view as mostly having regional paragons instead of global ones, and so was more akin to the Carolingian Renaissance in terms of broader historical impact than the European one).
This is perhaps more evidence for the “centralization decreases robustness to disruption” theory; the House of Wisdom in particular was an attempt to gather all of the intellectual wealth of the empire into one place, which then meant that if it’s burned down and the scholars murdered, there’s not much to start over from.