7 ms·

The rise of technology was not so much the birth of new capacities, but the removal of old constraints. China, despite a much larger and more educated populati

The rise of technology was not so much the birth of new capacities, but the removal of old constraints. China, despite a much larger and more educated population, did not spark the industrial revolution. Their feedback loops were too stable, their elites too competent. From the perspective of the old power hierarchy, the industrial revolution was a disaster. The nobility floated on that great cruel ocean first charted by Malthus, an ocean which began to boil.

toasterlovin 7y ago
How much of the Chinese/Japanese vs Western Europe dichotomy in term of technological development do you think is due to geography (Europe has been fractured, politically, for all of history, mostly due to geography, I think, whereas China and Japan have both been comparatively unified and stable for thousands of years). My thinking is that this has a lot to do with how European elites were not able to prevent accumulation of new technology and ideas, whereas Chinese and Japanese elites were (and did). And then I guess a follow up question would be: do you have an opinion on why the scientific revolution happened in Western Europe and not in the Mediterranean, which is similarly fractured, but also better situated for exchange of technology and ideas (being connected to Asia and Western Europe).
- fiblye 7y ago
  How did geography have an effect here? I don't see what you mean. And China hasn't really had too much stability. It's always been full of revolutions, competing empires, dynastic changes, warring states, shifts in power, changes in ethnic ruling class, and so on. Go through a list of deadliest wars and revolutions and a good chunk of them are in what is today China.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    China has been a largely continuous political entity for about 8,000 years. It's been invaded at least in part a few times (Mongols, 13th c., English, 18th c., and Japanese, 20th c., most especially), but retained its overall identity and either assimilated (Mongols) or repelled (English, Japanese) the invaders, eventually. Contrast Europe which has seen vast shifts in control, and utter replacements or eradication of local culture or tribes multiple times, going to prehistoric times, to the present (past century certainly, past few decades quite arguably). There have been very few constant borders or identities, certainly not on the scale of China. Even written language in China is still largely intelligible to moderns, from a thousand years ago or more. English, more than about 400 years ago is almost wholly foreign: Hwæt,ic swefna cyst secgan wylle, hwæt me gemætte to midre nihte siþþan reordberend reste wunedon. ("Behold, I wish to tell the best of dreams which I dreamt at the middle of the night, after speakers remained in rest." https://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/stella/readings/OE/ROOD.HTM https://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/stella/readings/OE/ROOD.HTM)
    - chrisco255 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_China#/media/File:Territories_of_Dynasties_in_China.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_China#/media/File:T... Watch that graphic to see the evolution of the extent of "China" since the Zhou Dynasty in 1000 BC. It occupies a fraction of the current extent of China. So there were lots of wars, and lots of revolutions before modern Chinese borders were established. I get that Chinese have had more cultural and language cohesion, but that's at least partially because certain dynasties and regions won over these other regions in large swaths and history is written by the winners.
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        And a nearly comparable (and orchestrated!) time-lapse evolutionary map of Europe, though extending back to only 400 BCE: https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=UY9P0QSxlnI https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=UY9P0QSxlnI Note that China was under a largely single and unified set of linguistic, cultural, and political organisation throughout the entire 3,000 year period you depict. The "modern" map of Europe has changed dramatically just in the past 30 years, let alone the past 100 - 200. Entire linguistic and cultural tribes have completely vanished, save for a few pitiful relic remains. Political continuity has been nil (Greece, Macedonia, Byzantine Empire, Rome, Moorish Spain, the Gauls, Britons, Celts, and Germanic tribes, the Rus? (Swedish invaders, BTW), Holy Roman and Austro-Hungarian Empires? Soviet Bloc? Independent Baltic and Balkan states? Ireland, under English subjugation since 1601, the north to this day. Poland as the pinball kid of Prussia, Russia, and Germany. That's Europe. Addenda: The extreme extents of the Chinese empire varied greatly. The bulk of the population, then as now, was in the eastern coastal region, largely the Yellow and Yangze river floodplains.
        chrisco255 7y ago
        Oh, sure, I'm not arguing that Europe was less tumultuous than China. There were many, many schisms, and wars however. Had some of these civil wars or invasions from Mongolia, Japan, etc within China had gone a different way, they could have ended up as fractured as ancient Rome. Here's a few hundred wars that occurred during the past couple millennia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_wars_and_battles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_wars_and_battl...
- m_mueller 7y ago
  Your reasoning is actually an argument for why Japan developed like Europe, and that's indeed largely what happened. Have a read on sengoku- and meiji period. Japan's trajectory was very different from China's. What you probably mean is the 250ish year stable edo period under the Tokugawa warlord control when the emperor was stripped of power.
  - Keysh 7y ago
    The Emperors were stripped of power back in the 12th Century, after the Genpei War and the formation of the Kamakura Shogunate. They remained stripped of power for almost the next seven hundred years; the power struggles were about who would get to be Shogun. (The logic of the Meiji "Restoration" was essentially "Let's get rid of the archaic Shogunate system that has dominated Japan in one way or another for the last seven hundred years, and pretend we're handing power back to the Emperor where it really belongs.")
    - m_mueller 7y ago
      yes. what I wanted to say is that the emperor in Japan had a minor role for the longest time, i.e. it had a middle age that was not unlike Europe, with a steady development of warfare techniques and other parts of culture, as well as a constant trickle of foreign influences. Until edo period, where Tokugawa Shogunate was able to grab all power and basically freeze development and shut down borders. In Meiji, Japan industrialized rapidly under a US-backed emperor and with Germany as an ideal. There's a deeper reason why Japan wanted to become a European-style colonial power - because it was already on that path before the 250y stasis anyways, almost taking on Imperial China during Sengoku-jidai.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  The general form of this question, or at least one version of it ("why did the Industrial Revolution occur in England and not in China, which had developed a vastly larger set of technologies far earlier") is known as the Needham Question, after sinologist Joseph Needham, author of Science and Civilisation in China, an epic 30+ volume work covering Chinese invention and technology, begun in 1954 and still in process. (Needham himself died in the 1990s.) There's a fascinating Wikipedia article on the topic, and if you can find a copy of the completed volumes (many college/university libraries have it), it's a treat. The general question of the how, why, and when of the Industrial Revolution has fascinated historians, technologists, and economists for ages. Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms,[1] and numerous other works address this. Geographic determinism has become tremendously unpopular among historians, though elements of it carry weight with me. Of China and Japan vs. Europe and Britain, there are several factors: - Political unity vs. disunity, as you note. - Crops. Wheat is suitable to individual, independent farming. Rice requires community coordination. - Hydrology. The Chinese empire effectively started as a large civil water works management bureaucracy. Outside Egypt and Rome's aqueducts, there was no similarly-scoped coordination in the West. - Watersheds. Europe's rivers diverge from the interior, China's flow in parallel to relatively proximate mouths. Political boundaries in Europe have typically conformed reasonably well to watersheds, though allied / opposed alignments have changed with time. Even today, many county-level jurisdictions correspond to local watersheds. And in both China and Europe, virtually all heavy transport until modern times was along rivers or canals, if not sea or lakes. - While Britain and Japan are both large islands near continental empires, the geology is utterly different: sedimentary with vast coal deposits, and volcanic with virtually no fossil fuels. While each island was tremendously politically stable, resistant to invasions, England could fuel growth of iron, glass, and steam industries, Japan could not. England was generally relatively wealthy, Japan was one of the poorest countries prior to industrialisation. - China has long been politically unified (if subject to occasional invasions), Europe has long been politically fractured. China could shut down innovation and foreign trade. No such global policies were possible in Europe. Within Europe, the distribution of coal is almost wholly in the north: Wales, England, a tiny patch in northern Spain, some in France, and heavy deposits in Germany and Poland. Southern Germany is very fuel-poor, excepting petroleum (not very handy in pre-industrial times) in Silesia, Romania, and Baku (Russia). Coal fueled metalurgy, glassmaking, and eventually steam power in England. England's flat terrain and ready access to the sea (no part of Great Britain is more than 60 miles from the coast) made transport of the bulky fuel by ship viable. Overland transport wasn't an option -- firewood fuel locally gathered was far more attractive. A similar situation existed in the US where coal didn't overtake wood as a fuel until the 1880s. Rail transport finally made hauling coal from mountain-based mines in Apallachia possible, but benefited greatly from advances in steelmaking (Bessemer process, 1860s), allowing stronger, less fracture-prone rails, and stronger, more powerful locomotives. Rail is effectively canals-on-land, the first truly viable overland freight tansport mode. There are many other factors, there's tremendous dispute over all of this, and as I've hinted, there's a large literature. I obviously find the geological argument at least plausible in many regards. Given the lack of testability, final adjudication of the question is unlikely. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Clark teaches a course at UC Davis on economic history before the Industrial Revolution, which touches somewhat on this (the principle focus is Europe). A corrected playlist for the YouTube lectures, in proper order, is here: https://pastebin.com/raw/bgKkGyjt https://pastebin.com/raw/bgKkGyjt
- wavefunction 7y ago
  Were China and Japan really as peaceful as is sometimes stated? Just looking at a timeline of Chinese historical events (and probably by no means exhaustive) I see rebellions and invasions and peasant army uprisings for thousands of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Chinese_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Chinese_history
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    Not peaceful, but stable and unified. Relatively. Consider that there has been something resembling a Chinese identity for several thousand years. Whereas Europe hasn’t been unified since the fall of the Roman Empire ~1600 years ago. And even then, the parts of Europe that played host to the scientific revolution were barely part of the Roman Empire. Or consider the fact that, relatively recently, the Japanese decided to cut off all contact with the outside world and forgo technological development. The idea of a European power trying to do similar is basically unthinkable due to the fact that they would have had half a dozen other nearby polities where no such restrictions were in place and change would have simply leaked in.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  > do you have an opinion on why the scientific revolution happened in Western Europe and not in the Mediterranean, which is similarly fractured, but also better situated for exchange of technology and ideas Not the GP, but I think this one was very clearly caused by the English Revolution protecting people with weird ideas. A large part of the early English intelligentsia was composed of people fleeing from persecution in Italy.

toasterlovin 7y ago

How much of the Chinese/Japanese vs Western Europe dichotomy in term of technological development do you think is due to geography (Europe has been fractured, politically, for all of history, mostly due to geography, I think, whereas China and Japan have both been comparatively unified and stable for thousands of years). My thinking is that this has a lot to do with how European elites were not able to prevent accumulation of new technology and ideas, whereas Chinese and Japanese elites were (and did). And then I guess a follow up question would be: do you have an opinion on why the scientific revolution happened in Western Europe and not in the Mediterranean, which is similarly fractured, but also better situated for exchange of technology and ideas (being connected to Asia and Western Europe).

fiblye 7y ago
How did geography have an effect here? I don't see what you mean. And China hasn't really had too much stability. It's always been full of revolutions, competing empires, dynastic changes, warring states, shifts in power, changes in ethnic ruling class, and so on. Go through a list of deadliest wars and revolutions and a good chunk of them are in what is today China.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  China has been a largely continuous political entity for about 8,000 years. It's been invaded at least in part a few times (Mongols, 13th c., English, 18th c., and Japanese, 20th c., most especially), but retained its overall identity and either assimilated (Mongols) or repelled (English, Japanese) the invaders, eventually. Contrast Europe which has seen vast shifts in control, and utter replacements or eradication of local culture or tribes multiple times, going to prehistoric times, to the present (past century certainly, past few decades quite arguably). There have been very few constant borders or identities, certainly not on the scale of China. Even written language in China is still largely intelligible to moderns, from a thousand years ago or more. English, more than about 400 years ago is almost wholly foreign: Hwæt,ic swefna cyst secgan wylle, hwæt me gemætte to midre nihte siþþan reordberend reste wunedon. ("Behold, I wish to tell the best of dreams which I dreamt at the middle of the night, after speakers remained in rest." https://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/stella/readings/OE/ROOD.HTM https://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/stella/readings/OE/ROOD.HTM)
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_China#/media/File:Territories_of_Dynasties_in_China.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_China#/media/File:T... Watch that graphic to see the evolution of the extent of "China" since the Zhou Dynasty in 1000 BC. It occupies a fraction of the current extent of China. So there were lots of wars, and lots of revolutions before modern Chinese borders were established. I get that Chinese have had more cultural and language cohesion, but that's at least partially because certain dynasties and regions won over these other regions in large swaths and history is written by the winners.
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      And a nearly comparable (and orchestrated!) time-lapse evolutionary map of Europe, though extending back to only 400 BCE: https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=UY9P0QSxlnI https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=UY9P0QSxlnI Note that China was under a largely single and unified set of linguistic, cultural, and political organisation throughout the entire 3,000 year period you depict. The "modern" map of Europe has changed dramatically just in the past 30 years, let alone the past 100 - 200. Entire linguistic and cultural tribes have completely vanished, save for a few pitiful relic remains. Political continuity has been nil (Greece, Macedonia, Byzantine Empire, Rome, Moorish Spain, the Gauls, Britons, Celts, and Germanic tribes, the Rus? (Swedish invaders, BTW), Holy Roman and Austro-Hungarian Empires? Soviet Bloc? Independent Baltic and Balkan states? Ireland, under English subjugation since 1601, the north to this day. Poland as the pinball kid of Prussia, Russia, and Germany. That's Europe. Addenda: The extreme extents of the Chinese empire varied greatly. The bulk of the population, then as now, was in the eastern coastal region, largely the Yellow and Yangze river floodplains.
      - chrisco255 7y ago
        Oh, sure, I'm not arguing that Europe was less tumultuous than China. There were many, many schisms, and wars however. Had some of these civil wars or invasions from Mongolia, Japan, etc within China had gone a different way, they could have ended up as fractured as ancient Rome. Here's a few hundred wars that occurred during the past couple millennia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_wars_and_battles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_wars_and_battl...
m_mueller 7y ago
Your reasoning is actually an argument for why Japan developed like Europe, and that's indeed largely what happened. Have a read on sengoku- and meiji period. Japan's trajectory was very different from China's. What you probably mean is the 250ish year stable edo period under the Tokugawa warlord control when the emperor was stripped of power.
- Keysh 7y ago
  The Emperors were stripped of power back in the 12th Century, after the Genpei War and the formation of the Kamakura Shogunate. They remained stripped of power for almost the next seven hundred years; the power struggles were about who would get to be Shogun. (The logic of the Meiji "Restoration" was essentially "Let's get rid of the archaic Shogunate system that has dominated Japan in one way or another for the last seven hundred years, and pretend we're handing power back to the Emperor where it really belongs.")
  - m_mueller 7y ago
    yes. what I wanted to say is that the emperor in Japan had a minor role for the longest time, i.e. it had a middle age that was not unlike Europe, with a steady development of warfare techniques and other parts of culture, as well as a constant trickle of foreign influences. Until edo period, where Tokugawa Shogunate was able to grab all power and basically freeze development and shut down borders. In Meiji, Japan industrialized rapidly under a US-backed emperor and with Germany as an ideal. There's a deeper reason why Japan wanted to become a European-style colonial power - because it was already on that path before the 250y stasis anyways, almost taking on Imperial China during Sengoku-jidai.
dredmorbius 7y ago
The general form of this question, or at least one version of it ("why did the Industrial Revolution occur in England and not in China, which had developed a vastly larger set of technologies far earlier") is known as the Needham Question, after sinologist Joseph Needham, author of Science and Civilisation in China, an epic 30+ volume work covering Chinese invention and technology, begun in 1954 and still in process. (Needham himself died in the 1990s.) There's a fascinating Wikipedia article on the topic, and if you can find a copy of the completed volumes (many college/university libraries have it), it's a treat. The general question of the how, why, and when of the Industrial Revolution has fascinated historians, technologists, and economists for ages. Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms,[1] and numerous other works address this. Geographic determinism has become tremendously unpopular among historians, though elements of it carry weight with me. Of China and Japan vs. Europe and Britain, there are several factors: - Political unity vs. disunity, as you note. - Crops. Wheat is suitable to individual, independent farming. Rice requires community coordination. - Hydrology. The Chinese empire effectively started as a large civil water works management bureaucracy. Outside Egypt and Rome's aqueducts, there was no similarly-scoped coordination in the West. - Watersheds. Europe's rivers diverge from the interior, China's flow in parallel to relatively proximate mouths. Political boundaries in Europe have typically conformed reasonably well to watersheds, though allied / opposed alignments have changed with time. Even today, many county-level jurisdictions correspond to local watersheds. And in both China and Europe, virtually all heavy transport until modern times was along rivers or canals, if not sea or lakes. - While Britain and Japan are both large islands near continental empires, the geology is utterly different: sedimentary with vast coal deposits, and volcanic with virtually no fossil fuels. While each island was tremendously politically stable, resistant to invasions, England could fuel growth of iron, glass, and steam industries, Japan could not. England was generally relatively wealthy, Japan was one of the poorest countries prior to industrialisation. - China has long been politically unified (if subject to occasional invasions), Europe has long been politically fractured. China could shut down innovation and foreign trade. No such global policies were possible in Europe. Within Europe, the distribution of coal is almost wholly in the north: Wales, England, a tiny patch in northern Spain, some in France, and heavy deposits in Germany and Poland. Southern Germany is very fuel-poor, excepting petroleum (not very handy in pre-industrial times) in Silesia, Romania, and Baku (Russia). Coal fueled metalurgy, glassmaking, and eventually steam power in England. England's flat terrain and ready access to the sea (no part of Great Britain is more than 60 miles from the coast) made transport of the bulky fuel by ship viable. Overland transport wasn't an option -- firewood fuel locally gathered was far more attractive. A similar situation existed in the US where coal didn't overtake wood as a fuel until the 1880s. Rail transport finally made hauling coal from mountain-based mines in Apallachia possible, but benefited greatly from advances in steelmaking (Bessemer process, 1860s), allowing stronger, less fracture-prone rails, and stronger, more powerful locomotives. Rail is effectively canals-on-land, the first truly viable overland freight tansport mode. There are many other factors, there's tremendous dispute over all of this, and as I've hinted, there's a large literature. I obviously find the geological argument at least plausible in many regards. Given the lack of testability, final adjudication of the question is unlikely. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Clark teaches a course at UC Davis on economic history before the Industrial Revolution, which touches somewhat on this (the principle focus is Europe). A corrected playlist for the YouTube lectures, in proper order, is here: https://pastebin.com/raw/bgKkGyjt https://pastebin.com/raw/bgKkGyjt
wavefunction 7y ago
Were China and Japan really as peaceful as is sometimes stated? Just looking at a timeline of Chinese historical events (and probably by no means exhaustive) I see rebellions and invasions and peasant army uprisings for thousands of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Chinese_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Chinese_history
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  Not peaceful, but stable and unified. Relatively. Consider that there has been something resembling a Chinese identity for several thousand years. Whereas Europe hasn’t been unified since the fall of the Roman Empire ~1600 years ago. And even then, the parts of Europe that played host to the scientific revolution were barely part of the Roman Empire. Or consider the fact that, relatively recently, the Japanese decided to cut off all contact with the outside world and forgo technological development. The idea of a European power trying to do similar is basically unthinkable due to the fact that they would have had half a dozen other nearby polities where no such restrictions were in place and change would have simply leaked in.
marcosdumay 7y ago
> do you have an opinion on why the scientific revolution happened in Western Europe and not in the Mediterranean, which is similarly fractured, but also better situated for exchange of technology and ideas Not the GP, but I think this one was very clearly caused by the English Revolution protecting people with weird ideas. A large part of the early English intelligentsia was composed of people fleeing from persecution in Italy.