Apolyton Archive  |  Preserved copy of the Apolyton Civilization Site and its forums as they stood in September 2005. Read-only; nothing here can be posted to or replied to.  |  Forum index |  About this archive |  The 1998–2001 UBB forums
Today on Apolyton WARDELL INTERVIEW PROMO A.C.S. HISTORY CHAPTER 4 GET CIV4 /w FREE PLUS! A.C.S. PHOTO GALLERY GET A.O.M. V1.1
Apolyton Civilization Forums
main| civ2| civ3| civ4| smac| ctp2| ron| moo3| galciv| galciv2| alt| about|
ApolytonPLUS | register | search | faq | new posts | pm (-/-) | upload | members
hall of fame new! | civgroups | civgroups news | interviews | the column | radio | chat | directory | news | store | PLUS
Apolyton Civilization Forums : Powered by vBulletin version 2.0.3 Apolyton Civilization Forums > Miscellaneous > Archive > Off-Topic-Archive > How do they explain western dominance in other world regions?
Show a Printable Version | Email This Page to Someone! | Receive updates to this thread | Report this to Apolyton news!

bottom of page
  
Author
Thread   
Pages (14): [ <<   11   12   13   14   ]
< Last Thread     Next Thread > Post New Thread     Post A Reply
Urban Ranger is offline Urban Ranger
Apolyton Duke of Off-Topic

Donate to the Red Cross
The City State of Noosphere, CPA special envoy
May 1999
time: 13:32
  Old Post 11-01-2004 09:13
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#391 Report this post to a moderator
Support Apolyton buy from Amazon

quote:
Originally posted by Ned
debeest, one of the problems in non patent societies is that the underlying know how to make an invention is not published, but rather is kept as a trade secret. Only those who know the secret pass it on.


What are you talking about? Lets just consider writing. Or printing, or paper, or gunpowder, or the compass, or the wheel, or a billion other things that were invented before the idea of "patent" ever came across the mind of somebody.

debeest is offline debeest
Prince

May 2000
time: 21:32
  Old Post 11-01-2004 12:21
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#392 Report this post to a moderator
Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations

quote:
Originally posted by Urban Ranger


But there was no large scale outbreaks of the bubonic plague in China. This has been further substantiated by the lack of the Delta-32 gene in Chinese population, as opposed to Westen Europe.


This is completely contrary to what McNeill says in "Plagues and Peoples." I'm no expert on plague history, but I would be very surprised if his well referenced discussion of bubonic plague in China was entirely wrong. In fact, he makes specific reference to bubonic plague outbreaks in China in the 1800s or 1900s.

molly bloom is offline molly bloom
Prince
Lundenwic
Oct 2001
time: 15:32
  Old Post 12-01-2004 08:23
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#393 Report this post to a moderator
Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

quote:
Originally posted by debeest


For example, Old World germs destroyed New World populations because humans occupied the Old World far sooner. Germs and populations there had many millennia to adapt to one another so that people could maintain endemic infections without catastrophe. The New World, sparsely inhabited until shortly before the Europeans arrived, and divided by deserts, jungles, the mountainous Central American isthmus, and a very long north-south-north climate axis that all made migration difficult, and with not a single domesticable herd animal, had very little opportunity to develop endemic diseases of its own.

Of course in a way it's futile to discuss whether a culture's success or failure stems from its place in the world or from its own characteristics, just as it's futile to discuss whether we are defined more by our DNA or by our environments -- or which came first, the chicken or the egg. But in some sense, the natural world came first, and produced humans; and long before human culture became important, the natural world had determined where humans would be able to farm successfully, where domesticable flora and fauna would occur most, where humans wouldn't be able to go until millennia later than they went elsewhere, where large populations could grow, and thus where people could specialize in invention and develop endemic diseases deadly to other people.

I guess what I'm saying is, whatever cultural differences there are between modern "Western civilization" and the rest of the world, I think the broad brush of the natural world painted the picture; human culture really just filled in the details.


Regarding what Western Civilization gained by conquering the New World: 16th-century taxes, bullion, potatoes, and all of that are of negligible consequence compared to the simple fact that the entire American continents are part of "Western Civilization." Imagine that the Chinese had skipped across a narrow little ocean and colonized the Americas, and think about what the balance of Western and non-Western civilizations would look like now.


If you think the Americas didn't have endemic diseases, then you are very wrong- they simply had different diseases from the Old World- some of them very unpleasant indeed-

espundia

http://www.hyperdictionary.com/dictionary/espundia

chagas

http://www.who.int/tdr/diseases/chagas/default.htm

and hanta virus, to name but three.

It's thought that chagas may ultimately have been responsible for the death of Charles Darwin.

As for domesticable herd animals- what exactly are llamas and alpacas?

The Old World- including both North and sub-saharan Africa, Arabia, India, China and Central Asia also has desert and semi-desert areas, the highest mountain range in the world, tropical and sub-tropical zones, savannah, steppe, river valleys, swamps and salt flats. Yet somehow, Buddhism reached Tibet, China and Japan and south east Asia from India, not all via sea routes.

The refinements possible in horse breeding allowed Europeans to use the faster, stronger farm horse for ploughing, rather than oxen or buffalo (still used in Asia).

Horse collars helped too. As did crop rotation, letting fields lie fallow, and more efficient ploughs.

The fact that mediaeval Europeans could feed a population not equalled until the industrialized nineteenth century says a great deal for their ingenuity and industry- all this in cultures without maize or the potato.

The recovery of Europe's classical heritage and the ability to utilise algebra and a diverse range of other new mathematical tools, contributed much more to Renaissance ingenuity and invention than the New World.

Yes, Spain had bullion, which went to funding armies, and drained into Chinese and Japanese markets. The King of Spain bankrupted several times, despite his New World wealth, and the epidemics in the New World (not simply amongst the native population but also introduced diseases such as yellow fever, which killed African slaves, Spanish masters and Indian subjects alike) meant that taxation from the New World would never amount to the revenue from the Low Countries.

The rise of the Dutch Republic (from a very low population base in the Middle Ages, in an area where malaria was rife) owed very little to the New World, and Dutch ingenuity and industry flourished despite the opposition of Spian and Louis XIV'S France.

Yes, North and South America and the Caribbean are now part of Western Civilization, but even after the Renaissance, Europeans were still more interested in India, the Safavid Empire, China and Japan, than they were the Americas. The reason China didn't 'discover' or colonize the Americas has more to do with human idiosyncrasy than geography. Had it been an expansionist Manchu emperor directing Zheng He/Cheng Ho's voyages, it's entirely possible the Wild West might have been under the mandate of heaven- and equally possible it would have been subjugated by Western European powers.

debeest is offline debeest
Prince

May 2000
time: 21:32
  Old Post 12-01-2004 13:04
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#394 Report this post to a moderator
Support Apolyton, pre-order Civilization IV

Of course the Americas had some endemic diseases. Yes, leishmaniasis, chagas disease, and hantavirus are quite deadly. My point is that Old World diseases devastated New World populations, while the New World had no diseases that devastated the Old World in return (syphilis being the only possible exception that I know of). Hantavirus is quite rare and so of little concern. Leishmaniasis occurs in both the Old World and the New World; I don't know where it originated, but it had no selective impact on one versus the other. Chagas disease is a New World disease, and widespread, but did not enter the Old World at all, I think. Yes, there were local diseases that took very large tolls of the invaders, but it was the New World populations that were reduced by as much as 90% in a century, not the Old World populations. That's the point I'm trying to make about the geographic impact of disease, and I don't think you will disagree.

Yes, my mistake, llamas and alpacas are domesticable herd animals. They're relatively hard to get along with, and they only lived in South America, and only in fairly limited areas of South America, and they're not all that big, and I think they don't tend to live in the large herds which makes it easy for a herd animal to develop its own endemic diseases to spread to humans. Compare that to horses, all manner of cows and buffalo, pigs, goats, sheep, elephants.... Old Worlders had a far greater supply of meat animals, milk animals, labor animals, and large-herd disease-breeding animals. The basis for that difference lay, not in human differences, but in "geographical" natural-world differences. I don't think you'll disagree with that.

Of course, there are geographical barriers in the Old World too. But there was no way around the difficult barriers of the Sonoran desert and the mountain jungles of the narrow Central American isthmus. New Worlders did manage to cross those barriers, but it remained extremely difficult to cross them and thus they remained more effective barriers to the spread of diseases and innovations. Perhaps you'll quibble with this point, but it's not fundamental to my geographical natural world argument.

"The rise of the Dutch Republic (from a very low population base in the Middle Ages, in an area where malaria was rife)"

Malaria was rife in the Netherlands?

molly bloom, you're just about the only person I think has had much useful to say in this thread. But even you haven't answered the question I posed a while ago: aside from differences that can be attributed to geography and ecology, what explains modern Western dominance? Is it that Westerners are somehow superior? Is it that Western culture is somehow superior? If so, then take one further step: how did Westerners or Western culture come to be superior?

Ned is offline Ned
Prince
of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:32
  Old Post 12-01-2004 14:23
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#395 Report this post to a moderator
Support Apolyton, buy Civilization: The Boardgame

quote:
Originally posted by Urban Ranger


What are you talking about? Lets just consider writing. Or printing, or paper, or gunpowder, or the compass, or the wheel, or a billion other things that were invented before the idea of "patent" ever came across the mind of somebody.


Alright, know it all.

Tell me the formula for coke.

Tell me how to make a nuclear weapon.

Do you even know what a trade secret is?

Ned is offline Ned
Prince
of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:32
  Old Post 12-01-2004 14:29
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#396 Report this post to a moderator
Support Apolyton, buy Call to Power 2

debeest, you simply do not accept the development of law as a contributing factor, do you.

molly bloom is offline molly bloom
Prince
Lundenwic
Oct 2001
time: 15:32
  Old Post 12-01-2004 18:08
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#397 Report this post to a moderator
Help yourself to an AD-FREE life

quote:
Originally posted by debeest




"The rise of the Dutch Republic (from a very low population base in the Middle Ages, in an area where malaria was rife)"

Malaria was rife in the Netherlands?

molly bloom, you're just about the only person I think has had much useful to say in this thread. But even you haven't answered the question I posed a while ago: aside from differences that can be attributed to geography and ecology, what explains modern Western dominance? Is it that Westerners are somehow superior? Is it that Western culture is somehow superior? If so, then take one further step: how did Westerners or Western culture come to be superior?


Malaria was common in the Netherlands, in south east England, and Italy- hence the name, bad air. As late as the Napoleonic Wars, malaria and typhoid carried off a great number of troops in a British expeditionary force to the Walcheren. Durer is also meant to have been killed by a malarial disease contracted whilst sketching the corpse of a whale in the swampy region of the Netherlands. Diseases currently thought of as being tropical were actually much more widespread- cholera in London, and New York, yellow fever and malaria wrought havoc with the armies in the American War of Independence, places such as Seville could lose 60 000 of their population thanks to recurrent outbreaks of such diseases.

I think that you'd be surprised just how common hanta virus is in the United States- if the documentary I watched a few years' ago is any guide, don't stay in any cheap motels in Baltimore- rats and mice act as zoonotic reservoirs for the disease, and inhaling aerosolized rodent urine is one way of getting it.

I also seem to recall reading about old North American trading routes, which stretched from Pacific coastal regions to desert areas, and from Atlantic coastal regions to the Ohio and Mississippi. If memory serves, before the European foundation and settlement of Philadelphia, the largest concentration of buildings in North America was Cahokia, an estimated 100 000 people living in and around the site. I suspect lack of draught or herd animals in North America may have something to do with the smaller sized cities, and also with the lack of diseases such as smallpox, measles, and so on. Constant human interaction with farm and domesticated animals means susceptibility to diseases such as foot and mouth, anthrax, smallpox, and even leprosy. Oddly, measles also kills the guinea pig, and armadilloes can contract leprosy. It has even been surmised that the epidemic of gonorrhoea that struck the Roman Empire may have been to a disease that crossed the species barrier, thanks to decadent Roman sexual practices.

Why did Europe succeed? Well, for a variety of reasons, as I've outlined- some luck, or chance, some design. Islam in a way defined Latin, Roman Catholic Western Europe through interaction in the Iberian peninsula, through conflict and trade of goods, ideas and services.
Judaism played a great part in that- Jewish doctors were greatly sought after by Frankish kings, the glassmaking trade in Spain was almost wholly carried out by Jews, and Jews could lend at interest to Muslims and Christians, or they could use Jews as intermediaries to loan money to fellow Christians or Muslims.

Access to a variety of goods (spices, ivory, gold, slaves, cloth, steel, leather) stimulated trade, and after the end of the nomadic invasions, trade in mediaeval Europe grew virtually exponentially.

The Black Death made a part of European society vastly richer than it had been before the pandemic- and it had already been very wealthy by modern standards. It happened at a time when paper and printing made possible an information revolution the equivalent of the Internet in late mediaeval and Renaissance times. The expansion of the university system happened along with this, meaning that hotbeds of dissent flourished under the care of more independent minded princes (such as Luther's aristocratic protector), keen to preserve intellectual independence.

Modern accounting and banking practices began in northern Italy and southern Germany and the Low Countries, areas that profited immensely from the trade with the Islamic world and beyond- dividends of over 1000 per cent on a shipment of spice, silk and pepper to Venice, with the canny Venetians raking in a further 100 per cent in customs dues.

The intellectual ferment, the questioning of long accepted Aristotelian and Galenic and Ptolemaic orthodoxies meant that along with the new mathematics, the growth of vernacular literature and the explosion in printing and printed artefacts, that scientists and inventors were free to explore to the limits of their abilities, in societies awash with money, patrons and opportunities for experimentation.

With support from monarchs such as Charles II in Great Britain, the Royal Society could feature an array of minds that any modern university would be proud to have, and the French academy played a similar role. The scientific revolution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries placed Europe technologically well ahead of any other culture, and at a time when relatively small nations with low populations (such as the Netherlands, and Great Britain) could establish lucrative trade empires in Indonesia, the Indian sub-continent and the Caribbean.

Why the western, Atlantic nations? They no longer had to face Islam- the Ottomans were still a threat to Austria, Russia, and Poland, and sporadic raids by Barbary pirates and Sale rovers were a nuisance rather than a threat to territorial integrity. No Muslims had to be repelled from the gates of London or Paris in the seventeenth century.

Patroklos is offline Patroklos
Warlord
Back home in good ole Norfolk VA
Dec 2001
time: 05:32
  Old Post 12-01-2004 19:12
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#398 Report this post to a moderator
Suffering from ads?

I would not simply blame it on the luck of the Europeans, but also some very bad luck in other areas. China had so many chances to end their downward spiral that it is ludacris that they didn't suceed. The fall of China is every bit as interesting as the rise of Europe.

Same thing with the Islamic world. Some very preventable civil wars and the like could have been avoided, and if anyone was in a perfect position to benefit from the spice trade it was them.

But the flutter of a butterflies wings.....

Ned is offline Ned
Prince
of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:32
  Old Post 13-01-2004 02:55
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#399 Report this post to a moderator
Inflate your Upload Space

quote:
Originally posted by Patroklos
I would not simply blame it on the luck of the Europeans, but also some very bad luck in other areas. China had so many chances to end their downward spiral that it is ludacris that they didn't suceed. The fall of China is every bit as interesting as the rise of Europe.

Same thing with the Islamic world. Some very preventable civil wars and the like could have been avoided, and if anyone was in a perfect position to benefit from the spice trade it was them.

But the flutter of a butterflies wings.....


Islam, like Christianity at one time, held/holds that interest on loans is a sin. Such a doctrine has to hurt the development of private businesses, which is the foundation of Western wealth.

China could not succeed because society was stratefied. Ordinary people could not invest in new businesses and technology and rise above his station in life.

chegitz guevara is offline chegitz guevara
King
Ft. Lauderdale, FL Communist Party of Apolyton
Jun 2000
time: 00:32
  Old Post 13-01-2004 03:01 Visit chegitz guevara's homepage!
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#400 Report this post to a moderator
Support Apolyton, buy GURPS/ Alpha Centauri

quote:
Originally posted by Ned
Islam, like Christianity at one time, held/holds that interest on loans is a sin. Such a doctrine has to hurt the development of private businesses, which is the foundation of Western wealth.


Which only became possible with the breakup of Chrisitanity into warring factions. Jews could charge interest, but it hardly helped them.

quote:
China could not succeed because society was stratefied. Ordinary people could not invest in new businesses and technology and rise above his station in life.


Ordinary people couldn't rise above their station in Europe either, until very recently. Not without the permission of their lord and priest.

Ned is offline Ned
Prince
of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:32
  Old Post 13-01-2004 03:29
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#401 Report this post to a moderator
Support Apolyton, buy Alpha Centauri

quote:
Originally posted by chegitz guevara
quote:
Originally posted by Ned
[q]China could not succeed because society was stratefied. Ordinary people could not invest in new businesses and technology and rise above his station in life.


Ordinary people couldn't rise above their station in Europe either, until very recently. Not without the permission of their lord and priest.


I don't think this is true, Che. There were some very rich Jews in Europe prior to modern times who got that way through banking and trade.

molly bloom is offline molly bloom
Prince
Lundenwic
Oct 2001
time: 15:32
  Old Post 13-01-2004 05:42
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#402 Report this post to a moderator
Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations

quote:
Originally posted by chegitz guevara
[Q] Originally posted by Ned


Ordinary people couldn't rise above their station in Europe either, until very recently. Not without the permission of their lord and priest.


Err, that is, if you consider the late Middle Ages recent.

The Queen Mother of France during one of the Huguenot-Catholic wars was a Medici- a 'nouveau riche' commercial family from Italy- not even a French woman, mon dieu, nom d'un chien, ma foi!!!!!.

One of the popes was a 'nouveau riche' Spaniard, the Borgia pope who did so much to bring the Vatican and the Church into disrepute.

Then as now, some members of the aristocracy were prestige rich, and money poor, so advantageous marriages to commoners or the lower gentry were a necessity.

At various times, sumptuary laws relating to clothes or food were enacted so as to preserve the outward distinctions of class, but were frequently observed only in the breach. The decline of serfdom in the Western Latin states meant an acceleration in social mobility that had already begun in places such as northern Italy and the Low Countries. The Black Death was the petrol on the flames of social struggle- the various peasant uprisings in its wake (the English Peasants' Revolt, the Jacquerie in France, the Flemish weavers' revolt) were manifestations not of abject poverty, but of newly well off peasants (the mediaeval kulaks, if you like) rejecting yet another poll tax, or gabelle, or princely imposition.

What Ned says about European jewry is quite true- one of the bankers for William the Silent was a Jewish converso refugee from the Spanish regime. As I mentioned, the glass manufacturing industry in Spain was almost wholly within the hands of Jews, until forcible conversions and expulsions meant that Spain had to import Venetian and Islamic glassware. Also, the special position of Jews with regard to the lending of money at interest gave them a special relationship to both Muslim leaders in the Islamic world and Christians in the West and Eastern Europe.

Urban Ranger is offline Urban Ranger
Apolyton Duke of Off-Topic

Donate to the Red Cross
The City State of Noosphere, CPA special envoy
May 1999
time: 13:32
  Old Post 13-01-2004 07:57
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#403 Report this post to a moderator
Enter the AD-FREE zone

quote:
Originally posted by Ned
Alright, know it all.

Tell me the formula for coke.

Tell me how to make a nuclear weapon.

Do you even know what a trade secret is?


Eh, Ned, I used those examples to show your assertion of "the lack of patents would result in inventions becoming trade secrets" wrong.

The existence of trade secrets do not validate your assertion. In fact, Coca-cola chose not to take out a patent on its formula since they didn't want it to become public property when the patent expired. How is the construction of nuclear weapons a patent or trade secret? Did the US government took one out?

Urban Ranger is offline Urban Ranger
Apolyton Duke of Off-Topic

Donate to the Red Cross
The City State of Noosphere, CPA special envoy
May 1999
time: 13:32
  Old Post 13-01-2004 07:58
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#404 Report this post to a moderator
Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

quote:
Originally posted by debeest
This is completely contrary to what McNeill says in "Plagues and Peoples." I'm no expert on plague history, but I would be very surprised if his well referenced discussion of bubonic plague in China was entirely wrong. In fact, he makes specific reference to bubonic plague outbreaks in China in the 1800s or 1900s.


I never disputed the presence of outbreaks -- I merely disputed the scale of them.

Tingkai is offline Tingkai
Warlord
To find the Northwest Passage
Aug 2001
time: 13:32
  Old Post 13-01-2004 08:21
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#405 Report this post to a moderator
Got spare money?

quote:
Originally posted by Ned
China could not succeed because society was stratefied. Ordinary people could not invest in new businesses and technology and rise above his station in life.


Uhm, no. China's civil service exams allowed people to move up to high ranks.

Urban Ranger is offline Urban Ranger
Apolyton Duke of Off-Topic

Donate to the Red Cross
The City State of Noosphere, CPA special envoy
May 1999
time: 13:32
  Old Post 13-01-2004 08:33
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#406 Report this post to a moderator
Put an end to popups!

quote:
Originally posted by Ned
China could not succeed because society was stratefied. Ordinary people could not invest in new businesses and technology and rise above his station in life.


You gotta be kidding. There were rich businessmen in every single dynasty. I reckon there were some of them opened workshops to make paper or print books.

debeest is offline debeest
Prince

May 2000
time: 21:32
  Old Post 13-01-2004 12:36
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#407 Report this post to a moderator
Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

quote:
Originally posted by molly bloom Malaria was common in the Netherlands, in south east England, and Italy- hence the name, bad air.


Quite right, I checked that out after I wondered "aloud."

quote:
[SIZE=1] I think that you'd be surprised just how common hanta virus is in the United States


I think YOU'd be surprised just how RARE hantavirus is in the U.S. I haven't checked exact numbers, but I think annual U.S. hantavirus deaths number in the double or maybe triple digits. That's pretty small compared to, say, 36,000 for flu.

quote:
[SIZE=1]I also seem to recall reading about old North American trading routes, which stretched from Pacific coastal regions to desert areas, and from Atlantic coastal regions to the Ohio and Mississippi.


Sure, there were trading routes. I'm not trying to be absolutist here. Surely you don't think they compared in scale or frequency to the trade routes across Asia to Europe. Also, the American trading routes probably did not extend from North to South America in any significant way, so those populations were isolated from one another in a way that Eurasian populations were not; am I wrong?

quote:
[SIZE=1]Why did Europe succeed? Well, for a variety of reasons, as I've outlined- some luck, or chance, some design. Islam in a way defined Latin, Roman Catholic Western Europe through interaction in the Iberian peninsula, through conflict and trade of goods, ideas and services.
Judaism played a great part in that- Jewish doctors were greatly sought after by Frankish kings, the glassmaking trade in Spain was almost wholly carried out by Jews, and Jews could lend at interest to Muslims and Christians, or they could use Jews as intermediaries to loan money to fellow Christians or Muslims.


These are some very proximal features of almost-modern civilization. I'm asking you to look deeper, to see the reasons why Eurasian societies had already advanced much farther than African, American, Australian, or Polynesian cultures. The factors that explain why Eurasia had much larger populations, and thus more opportunity for invention, and better means to exploit invention.

quote:
[SIZE=1Access to a variety of goods (spices, ivory, gold, slaves, cloth, steel, leather) stimulated trade, and after the end of the nomadic invasions, trade in mediaeval Europe grew virtually exponentially.


Aren't you stating my point here? The Americas didn't have spices, ivory, much leather, slaves who could survive European germs, etc.

quote:
[SIZE=1] The Black Death made a part of European society vastly richer than it had been before the pandemic- and it had already been very wealthy by modern standards. It happened at a time when paper and printing made possible an information revolution the equivalent of the Internet in late mediaeval and Renaissance times.


Again, this is one of my points. At other points in time, other cultures dominated. But the point in history when it was possible for technological and cultural advances to be developed and spread rapidly came at a time when Europe happened to have caught up.

quote:
[SIZE=1]

Why the western, Atlantic nations? They no longer had to face Islam- the Ottomans were still a threat to Austria, Russia, and Poland, and sporadic raids by Barbary pirates and Sale rovers were a nuisance rather than a threat to territorial integrity. No Muslims had to be repelled from the gates of London or Paris in the seventeenth century.


Would you not agree that this is a critical geographical explanation for the rise of the West? Not only were Portugal, Spain, England, and the Netherlands geographically closest to the Americas, they were geographically isolated from a huge competitor.

molly bloom is offline molly bloom
Prince
Lundenwic
Oct 2001
time: 15:32
  Old Post 13-01-2004 18:45
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#408 Report this post to a moderator
Support Apolyton, buy Galactic Civilizations: Deluxe Edition

quote:
Originally posted by debeest


I think YOU'd be surprised just how RARE hantavirus is in the U.S. I haven't checked exact numbers, but I think annual U.S. hantavirus deaths number in the double or maybe triple digits. That's pretty small compared to, say, 36,000 for flu.


These are some very proximal features of almost-modern civilization. I'm asking you to look deeper, to see the reasons why Eurasian societies had already advanced much farther than African, American, Australian, or Polynesian cultures. The factors that explain why Eurasia had much larger populations, and thus more opportunity for invention, and better means to exploit invention.

Aren't you stating my point here? The Americas didn't have spices, ivory, much leather, slaves who could survive European germs, etc.


Again, this is one of my points. At other points in time, other cultures dominated. But the point in history when it was possible for technological and cultural advances to be developed and spread rapidly came at a time when Europe happened to have caught up.

Would you not agree that this is a critical geographical explanation for the rise of the West? Not only were Portugal, Spain, England, and the Netherlands geographically closest to the Americas, they were geographically isolated from a huge competitor.



Actually, hanta virus is widespread in the North American rodent population- it's cases of the disease that are less common. Imagine that it becomes more effective at infecting humans- as syphilis did in the West, on the return of Spaniards from the New World.
I suspect that many cases of hanta go unnoticed in the elderly too.

American civilizations did have access to trading goods- not the same as European goods, but as valuable to them as silk or cloves to Europeans. Turquoise, copper, seashells, beaver pelts, seal ivory, buffalo hide/leather. The lack of pack animals accounts for less frequent/smaller trade routes, but trade by canoe on long navigable rivers (as at Cahokia) would replace, say, European transalpine trade routes in that respect.

You have to be more precise about which European cultures had advanced further than which other cultures, and in what respects and when. Spanish accounts of their encounter with the Mixtecan empire in Mexico indicates that Tenochtitlan was by far the largest city any of them had ever seen- larger by far than any Spanish city. Mathematics and astronomy and the calendar were well advanced in Mesoamerican society, and metalworking in Mesoamerican and South American civilizations had reached an extremely high level- unfortunately for them in metals other than iron.

Similarly, iron working, mathematics and astronomy and calendrical skills were advanced in African empires- as late as the 19th century, sub-Saharan Africans were rejecting British metal trade goods because they were inferior to locally produced iron tools.

Intellectually, China did not lag behind either, and as I said in an earlier post, even during the Renaissance, China's accomplishments in some fields were still unmatched by any European state.

There were several reasons for early mediaeval's population boom- wheat, crop rotation, improved ploughs, improved weather, the use of horse drawn ploughs, use of marginal land as arable, clearing of forests and extensive sheep and cattle farming. Undoubtedly Europe profited from being free of tsetse fly infestation, but the murrain which came before and during the Black Death killed a great number of cattle (and humans too, according to Norman Cantor's book on the Black Death).

I think with the printing press and paper, you're putting the cart before the horse- they enabled the information revolution in Europe, but the deep changes in society wrought by the phasing out of serfdom in the West and the challenge to mediaeval thinking as a result of the inroads of the pandemic, meant that scholars had the intellectual armoury or tools (thanks to trade with Islam) to use the paper and books to disseminate new theories and inventions- and in Luther's, Newton's, Galileo's and Copernicus's case to shape the new societies.

The issue of geographical proximity to the Americas doesn't explain the rise of Portugal and Spain- Portugal after all, never dominated Europe, and Spain's preeminence was short-lived, despite the revenue of the taxes from the Low Countries, and the gold and silver of the New World. It was a saying in Spain that what made Spain poor was her greatness. The rise of the Dutch Republic owes more to trade with the Indies than with the Americas- and when Spain ended the Eighty Years' War with the Dutch Republic, a great deal of Spain's shipping (of soldiers, trade goods) was actually done by Dutch ships.

The Dutch and English and French may not have had the Ottoman Empire on their doorstep- but they did have to go through the internecine strife of religious and civil war, as costly in some respects as any Ottoman campaign into Serbia or Hungary.

Ned is offline Ned
Prince
of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:32
  Old Post 13-01-2004 19:44
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#409 Report this post to a moderator
Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

quote:
Originally posted by Urban Ranger


Eh, Ned, I used those examples to show your assertion of "the lack of patents would result in inventions becoming trade secrets" wrong.

The existence of trade secrets do not validate your assertion. In fact, Coca-cola chose not to take out a patent on its formula since they didn't want it to become public property when the patent expired. How is the construction of nuclear weapons a patent or trade secret? Did the US government took one out?


UR, I think you missed my discussion of the origin of patents out of trade secret law. Patents originally were granted on new processes in order that the inventor publish his trade secret process in exchange for a limited monopoly.

Until only recently, this distinction was maintained in some patent systems by granting "utility model" registrations to new mechanical inventions while granting full patents to new processes.

The US somehow made no such distinction in its patent law and began granting patents on mechanical inventions. But this scope of these patents has always been a difficult issue as inventors always want their mechanical patents enforced against wholly different machines and the courts want to limit them to fairly much what they enabled without limiting them to exactly the same machine.

Pax is offline Pax
Chieftain

Feb 2003
time: 05:32
  Old Post 17-01-2004 21:23
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#410 Report this post to a moderator
Support Apolyton or Terrorists Win

I would have to say that the western dominance can be explained by the European ability to on the one hand not be tied down by concepts like concience, fairness, morality and on the other hand to use the concepts justify wars.

1. Support the subjugation of entire continents.

2. Force other countries to accept the sale of harmful drugs inside their borders.

3. Make unfair trades for land and people.

4. Grant countries independance and maintain control of their resources.

5. the list goes on.

In short, immoral unsavory practices allow western dominace and can be directly related to the problems we have from vietnam to the world trade center.

Ned is offline Ned
Prince
of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:32
  Old Post 18-01-2004 01:59
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#411 Report this post to a moderator
Support Apolyton, buy Civilization: The Boardgame

Pax Africanus, why of course!

debeest is offline debeest
Prince

May 2000
time: 21:32
  Old Post 18-01-2004 06:41
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#412 Report this post to a moderator
Lose 30 kilos (of popups)

quote:
Originally posted by molly bloom Actually, hanta virus is widespread in the North American rodent population- it's cases of the disease that are less common. Imagine that it becomes more effective at infecting humans- as syphilis did in the West, on the return of Spaniards from the New World.


molly, once again you're restating my point. Sure, hantavirus is endemic in North American rodents, but that's irrelevant. The CDC says that only about 340 Americans have died of hantivirus infection since 1993 (the citation may be a couple of years old, but that hardly matters). My point, with which I'm sure you must agree, was that no New World disease (except possibly syphilis) had any substantial effect on the Old World that compared with the effects of Old World diseases on the New World. And I say that's fundamentally a function of geography-associated ecology.

quote:
The lack of pack animals accounts for less frequent/smaller trade routes, but trade by canoe on long navigable rivers (as at Cahokia) would replace, say, European transalpine trade routes in that respect.


Trading in the New World did not compare, in quantity or greatest distance, to trading in the Old World. Agreed? That was a function of (1) late arrival of humans in the New World, (2) geography of the New World (mountainous isthmus between continents, desert stretching across Mexico, huge jungles of South America, climatic extremes from north to south -- all fundamentally geographical reasons. Do you disagree?

quote:
You have to be more precise about which European cultures had advanced further than which other cultures, and in what respects and when.


Oh, come on, it's obvious. When I said, "Eurasian societies had already advanced much farther than African, American, Australian, or Polynesian cultures," obviously I was talking about ships, glass, navigation, steel, guns, cannon, and other advances such as political organization that enabled Eurasians to subjugate those other cultures even when germs didn't do the whole job for them.

quote:
Intellectually, China did not lag behind either, and as I said in an earlier post, even during the Renaissance, China's accomplishments in some fields were still unmatched by any European state.


Agreed. Never said otherwise. But China was ill-placed to exploit the New World. Geography.

quote:
The issue of geographical proximity to the Americas doesn't explain the rise of Portugal and Spain


Didn't say it did. Portugal had risen far enough to trade with the Indies by sailing around Africa. My point, again, is that Portugal and Spain and the Netherlands and England happened, for reasons fundamentally geographic, to have attained their advanced sailing skills AT A TIME WHEN THE NEW WORLD BECAME AVAILABLE FOR EXPLOITATION, and IN A PLACE FROM WHICH THE NEW WORLD WAS MOST READILY REACHED -- again, fundamentally geographical reasons for their ability to seize and control the New World and incorporate all of it into modern "Western civilization."

quote:
The Dutch and English and French may not have had the Ottoman Empire on their doorstep- but they did have to go through the internecine strife of religious and civil war, as costly in some respects as any Ottoman campaign into Serbia or Hungary.


Come on, now, molly b, YOU'RE the one who pointed out that the Atlantic European nations prospered preferentially because they were insulated from the threat of Islam. All I did was point out that that was a geographical argument.

molly bloom, looking back through this thread, I've identified a number of what I said were fundamental points with which I said I thought you would agree. You haven't disagreed with any of them, or provided reasons for disagreeing. Again I ask, do you disagree? And if so, what is your alternative explanation?

Dracon II is offline Dracon II
King
Communist Party of Apolyton
Jan 1970
time: 15:32
  Old Post 18-01-2004 08:48
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#413 Report this post to a moderator
Remove this text

the plague was a paradoxical catalyst for European power... it thinned the population, raising the opportunity for common people to gain wealth (as resources were far less scarce), shifting the balance of class power further from the noble's grasp and steadily into the hands of the bourgeoisie... this enabled Europe to break from the static and limiting feudal system and into more socially mobile and active wealth creating societies... compare this to Japan, where their medieval system persisted into the 19th Century.

Dracon II is offline Dracon II
King
Communist Party of Apolyton
Jan 1970
time: 15:32
  Old Post 18-01-2004 08:50
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#414 Report this post to a moderator
Support Apolyton, buy Civilization III: Complete

hmm... someone's probably already made my point... I didn't realize how long this thread was!!

Ramo is offline Ramo
King
Austin, Texas, USA
Oct 1999
time: 23:32
  Old Post 18-01-2004 09:13 Visit Ramo's homepage!
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#415 Report this post to a moderator
Remove this text

Actually, large population densities enabled Europe to break from the feudal system (as was occurring in the 13th century). Small population densities meant that labor could more effectively bargain with landlords, meaning that there were greater incentives among landlords to exact coercive restraints on the bargaining power of peasants (namely, serfdom). The Black Death probably postponed the end of serfdom in Western Europe for another century or so. For instance, in England following the Black Death, laws were created that restricted the wages of peasants and workers (free and villein alike), and prohibited competition among landlords.

In fact, the depopulation from the epidemics in Roman society in the 6th, 3rd, and 2nd centuries (bubonic plague, small pox, measles respectively IIRC) helped to introduce the latifundia system which tied tied peasants to their land - creating feudalism.

Ramo is offline Ramo
King
Austin, Texas, USA
Oct 1999
time: 23:32
  Old Post 18-01-2004 09:14 Visit Ramo's homepage!
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#416 Report this post to a moderator
Support Apolyton, buy Civilization: The Boardgame

BTW, I also recommend McNeill's Plagues and Peoples.

Bosh is offline Bosh
Emperor
Taehan Mingook
Jan 1970
time: 00:32
  Old Post 18-01-2004 10:34
Edit/Delete Message Reply w/Quote
#417 Report this post to a moderator
Support Apolyton, buy Civilization 2

quote:
Originally posted by Ramo
BTW, I also recommend McNeill's Plagues and Peoples.

So do I

 
Pages (14): [ <<   11   12   13   14   ]
< Last Thread     Next Thread > Post New Thread     Post A Reply
All times are GMT. The time now is 05:32.
Apolyton Time is 00:32.
    top of page
Rate This Thread:
archivepost
Forum Jump:
Forum Rules:
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts
HTML code is ON
vB code is ON
Smilies are ON
[IMG] code is ON
 




Contact Us - Apolyton Civilization Site - Support Us!

Building a better Apolyton through better information. Click here and take our poll!
Non-US visitors, click here!

Powered by: vBulletin Version 2.0.3
Copyright ©2000, 2001, Jelsoft Enterprises Limited.

Page generated in 0.0867 seconds (91.98% PHP - 8.02% MySQL) with 31 queries
Page Loading Time:

Support Apolyton: Amazon USA | Amazon UK | Amazon DE | Amazon FR |
Support Apolyton and get FREE PLUS, Buy from Chips&Bits: Galactic Civilizations | Galactic Civilizations: Deluxe Edition | Call to Power 2 | Civilization: The Boardgame | GURPS/ Alpha Centauri | Alpha Centauri | Civilization IV | Civilization III: Complete |


Front Page | Civilization IV | Civilization III | Civilization II | Call to Power II | Alpha Centauri | Master of Orion III
Rise of Nations | Galactic Civilizations | Galactic Civilizations II | Misc
Alt.Civs | Civ I | C:CtP I | About | News | Directory | Apolyton Store | Forums | Chat | Columns | Interviews | Newsletter
Scenario League | CSC | Clash of Civs | Spanish Site | CtP Maps | Cradle of Civ | WesW's Ctp1/2 Site | Civ3 Haven

apolyton.net | apolyton.com | civilization2.net | civilization3.net | civilization4.net | civilizationiv.info | calltopower.net | galciv.net | galciv2.net | moo3.net