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One question that I am interested in (and one that probably doesn’t have a definitive answer) is why Europe retained a relatively high degree of diversity compa

One question that I am interested in (and one that probably doesn’t have a definitive answer) is why Europe retained a relatively high degree of diversity compared to China over the last 4000 years. Further reading for anyone also curious: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_East_Asians https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_East_Asia...

colordrops 4y ago
What's your definition of "diversity" here?
- AbrahamParangi 4y ago
  Fairly equivalently, why is Europe comprised of 44 countries but China is one country? 4000 years ago China and Europe did not look so different from each other! They both contained a mix of early centralized kingdoms, pastoralists, nomads, etc. and they both had a great diversity of people living in the region. However their evolution is very different.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - bayesian_horse 4y ago
    I'd say this is more of an accident than the result of any root cause. Also you are already picking China as a single state, instead of the entire East or Southeast of Asia.
  - peterfirefly 4y ago
    A large part of Europe was a single "country", namely the Roman Empire. What is currently China is arguably China + Tibet + Xinjiang + parts of Mongolia + parts of Korea + parts of whatever Heilongjiang/Jilin/Manchuria should be called. China (including China proper) has occasionally broken up into multiple polities. One could also argue that the European Union kinda, sorta constitutes a single "country". One that would become an instant superpower if we who live there wanted it to be... But, on the whole, Europe tends to be more fragmented than China. I'd say the geography has a lot to do with it. China has a couple of big rivers that are well-suited for long-distance travel. Europe doesn't. Europe is also a peninsula of peninsulas, often with mountains (Pyrenees, Alps) going across where one peninsula is attached to the next.
  - throw_pm23 4y ago
    What centralized kingdoms were there in Europe 4000 years ago?
    - talideon 4y ago
      Around the Mediterranean, plenty. However those polities collapsed during the Bronze Age Collapse. Less so in more northern climes where the weather is harsher and where we don't have much in the way of records, though we do have evidence of highly-developed cultures such as evidenced by structures such as Newgrange in Ireland, and evidence of trade corridors from Britain and Ireland down though the straits of Gibraltar to those Mediterranean kingdoms.
  - Keysh 4y ago
    The Roman historian Walter Scheidel has a whole book (Escape from Rome) on this question -- basically, exploring the idea that Europe never really reformed a large-scale empire after the Roman Empire started to fall apart in the 5th C, whereas other parts of Eurasia (esp. China) did go through periods of reforming large-scale empires, sometimes larger than past empires in the same region. Unfortunately, I'm only about halfway through it, so I haven't gotten to the part where he tries to explain why this happened. But so far, it's quite good.
  - bacchus123 4y ago
    Not sure but Confuzius propagated a "sense of community". An individualistic China, where the individual is more important than the unity of the state, would have probably looked more like medieval Europe, splitted into various states competing with each other. China may have never formed an united country. The "removal" of confuzianism happend within the last 100-150 years. Before that it was the backbone of chinese thinking for ~2500 years.
  - danans 4y ago
    > Fairly equivalently, why is Europe comprised of 44 countries but China is one country? Europe being composed of 44 sovereign countries is a relatively recent phenomenon - like mostly post WWI. For most of history these countries were under the dominion of larger empires. China did have much earlier centralization of government than other parts of the world, resulting in highly unified systems of administration, and most prominently, the shared logographic writing system. The administrative centralization of the past and present masks a lot of underlying diversity which persists to this day. However this centralization was also contrasted by periods of fragmentation, like the Sixteen Kingdoms period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Kingdoms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Kingdoms
bayesian_horse 4y ago
Not sure the amount of diversity is so different. There are lots of Sino-Tibetan languages, extant and extinct, and even lots of dialects of the extant ones. In the current nation of China there are a lot of different ethnic groups. And Europe is bigger and more structured geographically than China.

colordrops 4y ago

What's your definition of "diversity" here?

AbrahamParangi 4y ago
Fairly equivalently, why is Europe comprised of 44 countries but China is one country? 4000 years ago China and Europe did not look so different from each other! They both contained a mix of early centralized kingdoms, pastoralists, nomads, etc. and they both had a great diversity of people living in the region. However their evolution is very different.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  I'd say this is more of an accident than the result of any root cause. Also you are already picking China as a single state, instead of the entire East or Southeast of Asia.
- peterfirefly 4y ago
  A large part of Europe was a single "country", namely the Roman Empire. What is currently China is arguably China + Tibet + Xinjiang + parts of Mongolia + parts of Korea + parts of whatever Heilongjiang/Jilin/Manchuria should be called. China (including China proper) has occasionally broken up into multiple polities. One could also argue that the European Union kinda, sorta constitutes a single "country". One that would become an instant superpower if we who live there wanted it to be... But, on the whole, Europe tends to be more fragmented than China. I'd say the geography has a lot to do with it. China has a couple of big rivers that are well-suited for long-distance travel. Europe doesn't. Europe is also a peninsula of peninsulas, often with mountains (Pyrenees, Alps) going across where one peninsula is attached to the next.
- throw_pm23 4y ago
  What centralized kingdoms were there in Europe 4000 years ago?
  - talideon 4y ago
    Around the Mediterranean, plenty. However those polities collapsed during the Bronze Age Collapse. Less so in more northern climes where the weather is harsher and where we don't have much in the way of records, though we do have evidence of highly-developed cultures such as evidenced by structures such as Newgrange in Ireland, and evidence of trade corridors from Britain and Ireland down though the straits of Gibraltar to those Mediterranean kingdoms.
- Keysh 4y ago
  The Roman historian Walter Scheidel has a whole book (Escape from Rome) on this question -- basically, exploring the idea that Europe never really reformed a large-scale empire after the Roman Empire started to fall apart in the 5th C, whereas other parts of Eurasia (esp. China) did go through periods of reforming large-scale empires, sometimes larger than past empires in the same region. Unfortunately, I'm only about halfway through it, so I haven't gotten to the part where he tries to explain why this happened. But so far, it's quite good.
- bacchus123 4y ago
  Not sure but Confuzius propagated a "sense of community". An individualistic China, where the individual is more important than the unity of the state, would have probably looked more like medieval Europe, splitted into various states competing with each other. China may have never formed an united country. The "removal" of confuzianism happend within the last 100-150 years. Before that it was the backbone of chinese thinking for ~2500 years.
- danans 4y ago
  > Fairly equivalently, why is Europe comprised of 44 countries but China is one country? Europe being composed of 44 sovereign countries is a relatively recent phenomenon - like mostly post WWI. For most of history these countries were under the dominion of larger empires. China did have much earlier centralization of government than other parts of the world, resulting in highly unified systems of administration, and most prominently, the shared logographic writing system. The administrative centralization of the past and present masks a lot of underlying diversity which persists to this day. However this centralization was also contrasted by periods of fragmentation, like the Sixteen Kingdoms period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Kingdoms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Kingdoms

bayesian_horse 4y ago

Not sure the amount of diversity is so different. There are lots of Sino-Tibetan languages, extant and extinct, and even lots of dialects of the extant ones. In the current nation of China there are a lot of different ethnic groups. And Europe is bigger and more structured geographically than China.