Why the West?

[Robert Pirani]

Dave -

I found one of the best approaches to this issue in Jared Diamond's Guns,
Germs, and Steel. The title indicates a small part of the answer to why
Europe and it's direct offspring have came to dominate the modern world.
The required raw materials for creating advanced weaponry when the "Age of
Exploration" began and the enormous effect that the introduction of
virulent diseases had on societies with no immunity werre the crucial
factors. 

The book does an excellent job of analyzing the competing racial and
climatological theories too.

All that and a great read too.

Regards,
Robert



At 09:20 AM 11/2/01 -0600, Dave Monroe wrote:
>Just one of those things that seems that it might be of interest to some
>to several here, is all.  From Gail Stokes, "Why the West? The Unsettled
>Question of Europe's Ascendancy," Lingua Franca, Vol. 8, No. 11
>(November 2001) ...
>
>   "The issue that has occupied macrohistorians over the past generation
>can be stated quite succinctly: Why Europe? Why did a relatively small
>and backward periphery on the western fringes of the Eurasian continent
>burst onto the world scene in the sixteenth century and by the
>nineteenth century become a dominant force in almost all corners of the
>earth? Until recently, two responses have dominated. The first is that
>something unique in the European past lay behind its eventual economic
>development and power. This something unique is often seen as a
>universal good—such as reason, freedom, or individualism—that first
>developed in Europe but ultimately relates, or should relate, to all
>human beings....
>   "The second response is that there was nothing particularly special
>about Europe until at least 1500, and probably not until 1800. In this
>view, Europe's rise to dominance was due not to any exceptional
>qualities but to its ability to seize vast amounts of gold and silver in
>the New World and create other forms of wealth through colonial trade.
>Proponents of this idea tend to see the last thousand years as dominated
>primarily by the cultures and economies of Asia, especially China, with
>a relatively brief and probably transient burst of European power in the
>last quarter of the millennium....
>
>[...]
>
>"In discussing these and other issues, historians engage in
>conversations initiated more than a generation ago. Arguments for
>European uniqueness grow out of the practice of teaching Western
>Civilization courses at universities, which dates to at least the 1920s;
>the arguments of their opponents grow out of a Marxist style of
>criticism that became particularly salient in the 1960s. Both sides are
>concerned with questions related to origins and hegemony. Why did Europe
>break out as it did? Why didn't China (or India)? When did Europe become
>hegemonic in the world system of capitalism? Was China hegemonic for
>most of the last millennium? Questions of this sort were part and parcel
>of a way of thinking that identified East and West as somehow opposed.
>But practitioners of the new field of world history have begun to
>sidestep or ignore questions such as these in favor of what Kenneth
>Pomeranz calls 'reciprocal comparisons.' This approach—less polemical
>and less focused on origins—is on the verge of entering the mainstream
>of the American historical profession...."
>
>http://www.linguafranca.com/print/0111/cover.html
>
>Well worth reading, not to mention following up on ...
>
>
>
>