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.
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.