[badminton1]

You have a very eurocentric view of technological advancement.

The technologies that bootstraped the European civilization come from the fertile crescent, aka middle east. Not only that, but what is eaten in Europe are mostly plants and animals that are not endemic to Europe. Take that away and you would have a continent full of people spending all their time trying to feed themselves, without time to innovate and with a lower population.

The European Reinassance is 99% of the time misattributed. The real causes were:

- the introduction of paper to Europe (as an alternative to parchments, made from animal skin)

- the introduction of a new numeral system

- the acceptance of secular thought

- the Latin translations of the 12th century

- the scientific method

None of those fundamental prerequisites are European merit. And yet it is hardly ever mentioned because it does not justify a messed up perspective of the world where one group of people "civilized" the rest of the world.

Before St Thomas Aquinas reformed the church through philosophy, scientific research would be considered heresy and could get you killed. St Thomas Aquinas studied from St Albert Magnus, from Latin translations made in Spain after the fall of the Al-Andalus (Islamic Spain).

Copernicus developed his theories by studying the Alphonsine tables, compilation of observations made by ancient astronomers. The Alphonsine tables were also Latin translations made in Spain.

Take away the Alphonsine tables and modern numerals and you've got no Copernicus, no Galileo, no Newton. Take away paper or secularism and you get nothing at all.

Europe continued the work of fallen civilizations, did not figure it out everything from scratch.

[asianthrowaway]

This line of reasoning is silly. I suppose all technology comes from Homo Australopithecus since they were the first to bang two rocks together, and they were the true origin of the Renaissance?

I'm all for acknowledging eurocentrism, but this euro-bashing is ridiculous. If these "prerequisites" were all that were needed to kickstart the Renaissance, why did it not occur in the middle east, for instance, where all of these elements were also present?

[badminton1]

Because the Mongols destroyed them after they refused to pay tribute.

Knowledge is passed generation to generation, and if you interrupt that, it's hard to recover from. Mongols destroyed everything, including libraries and killed most scholars.

That void was filled with tribes that were not secular.

[asianthrowaway]

I think that's wholly simplistic. What about regions who beat off the Mongols, such as the Mameluks? Or people who weren't that affected, like the Ottomans.

For that matter, I'd be interested in your theory as to why the Ottoman empire failed to develop any intellectual tradition of note, while Europe was soaring.

Russians greatly suffered under the mongols but eventually became a superpower. China lost half its population but rebounded pretty quickly.

Edit: "Mongols destroyed libraries" afaik, they destroyed the library of Baghdad but that's about it.

Also, the Mongols were not the only ones to destroy libraries. Iirc the library of Cordoba, the biggest and most advanced of its time, was burned down by the Caliph because it was deemed too un-islamic.

[badminton1]

I am talking about the Siege of Baghdad (1258). You are talking about a period of time after the death of Kublai Khan (1294) where the Mongols were already divided into smaller regions.

Anyways, if you want to be a eurocentric revisionist, continue doing so. I don't care.

If you study the Latin translations of the 12th century you will see how significant part of the Reinassance could be attributed to previous civilizations.

[asianthrowaway]

Yeah, I understood you were talking about the Siege of Baghdad. If you think that the destruction of a single city is the reason for the middle east lagging behind the west over several centuries, then I reiterate what I said before, you have an extremely simplistic view of history. I don't consider myself particularly eurocentric, but you seem to be a middle eastern chauvinist. Projection, maybe?

Where did I deny that Europeans built on previous advances by other people? It's obvious they didn't exist in a vacuum. But europeans were the first to systematize the production and diffusion of knowledge. In a sense they invented what you could call the mass intellectual tradition.

[jernfrost]

I think you are reading things between the lines which are not there.

It was never my intention to suggest that Europeans are inherently superior to others and that we have some unique ability of innovations.

Of course European advancements were built on advancements of those who came before us. Just as Chinese advancement today is built on advancements made by the west earlier.

I am merely stating a fact: European civilization was significantly ahead of the competition. And those innovations could not easily have been made elsewhere for cultural and geographic reasons:

1) Europe went through major paradigm shifts with1 the renaissance and enlightenment which was in large part possible in Europe because it was a divided continent. Many great thinkers lived on the borders between countries so they could flee to another one as soon as their ideas got unpopular with the rulers. Such a mechanism was not possible in other advance civilizations such as China, which was a big monolith. New ideas in such societies could easily be squashed.

Single rulers could easily retard progress for decades. Consider e.g. how one of the Chinese emperors forbid all sea travel and burned the fleet. The whole of Europe could never suffer such a profound setback because it had no single ruler. Any European nation engaging in such stupid policies would quickly learn of the stupidity of that as competing nations would race past them.

Europe represented a sort of semi-free market of ideas, which did not exist elsewhere to the same degree.

2) Europe had a clear advantage in geography. Using water wheels for power generation and rivers and canals for goods transport was significantly easier in Europe than China, India, Egypt etc where the waterflow varies too much through the year.

The first factories relied on inanimate power from waterwheels which was not easily constructed elsewhere in the world.

Later steam engines relied on cheap transport of large bulks of coal and ore. Britain e.g. had a geology that allowed building canals to mines to transport large bulk loads of coal cheaply. Outside of Europe there was limited possibility to do this.

I could go on, but there were simply a large number of factors that favored Europe. Hence European supremacy was not merely a fluke, and the other nations could not by random occurrence have leapfrogged Europe. The modern world relied on being brought to the rest of the world from Europe, unless it was going to happen much much later.

It does not mean what European did was morally right. It just means one should not delude oneself into thinking that without Europe all the other nations would be prosperous today.

[adrianN]

I don't think your parent claimed that all good things were originally made in Europe. It seems pretty clear to me that Europe was technologically more advanced than the rest of the world during colonial times. Without superior (military) technology they wouldn't have been able to oppress half the world.

[badminton1]

I don't think being invaded by Europeans is a prerequisite for progress.

[jernfrost]

No, but most nations have progressed faster technologically by being invaded or influenced by other more advance nations. Without the roman empire, Britain, France, Spain, Germany etc would have taken far longer to modernize.

I not saying this as a moral statement, merely as an observation of how the world works. We don't need to like something to be true.

Of course we can strive for a better less violent way of doing things, which I think we are doing in the world we live in today. We are spreading ideas and technology through trade primarily rather than war. It is not always fair trade, but it beats colonization.

[adrianN]

I don't think that either, but you're not making a very good argument. To counter that European influence was important for the development of former colonies you say that foreign influence was crucial to the development of Europe. To me that sounds like you support the idea that outside influence can be of critical importance.