Journal of Economic Perspectives
Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 20, Number 2—Spring 2006 —Pages 3–22
Why Europe and the West? Why Not China?
David S. Landes
T
he world history of technology is the story of a long, protracted inversion. As late as the end of the first millennium of our era, the civilizations of Asia were well ahead of Europe in wealth and knowledge. The Europe of what we call the Middle Ages (say, tenth century) had regressed from the power and pomp of Greece and Rome, had lost much of the science it had once possessed, had seen its economy retreat into generalized autarky. It traded little with other societies, for it had little surplus to sell, and insofar as it wanted goods from outside, it paid for them largely with human beings. Nothing testifies better to deep poverty than the export of slaves or the persistent exodus of job-hungry migrants. Five hundred years later, the tables had turned. I like to summarize the change in one tell-tale event: the Portuguese penetration into the Indian Ocean led by Vasco da Gama in 1498. This was an extraordinary achievement. Some scholars will tell you that it was some kind of accident; that it could just as easily have been Muslim sailors, or Indian, or Chinese to make the connection from the other direction. Did not the Chinese send a series of large fleets sailing west as far as the east African coast in the early fifteenth century— bigger, better and earlier than anything the Portuguese had to show? Don’t you believe it. These affirmations of Asian priority are especially prominent and urgent nowadays because a new inversion is bringing Asia to the fore. A “multicultural” world history finds it hard to live with a eurocentric story of achievement and transformation. So a new would-be (politically correct) orthodoxy would have us believe that a sequence of contingent events (gains by Portugal and then others in the Indian Ocean, followed by conquests by Spain and then others in the New World) gave Europe what began as a small
Why Europe and the West? Why Not China?
David S. Landes
T
he world history of technology is the story of a long, protracted inversion. As late as the end of the first millennium of our era, the civilizations of Asia were well ahead of Europe in wealth and knowledge. The Europe of what we call the Middle Ages (say, tenth century) had regressed from the power and pomp of Greece and Rome, had lost much of the science it had once possessed, had seen its economy retreat into generalized autarky. It traded little with other societies, for it had little surplus to sell, and insofar as it wanted goods from outside, it paid for them largely with human beings. Nothing testifies better to deep poverty than the export of slaves or the persistent exodus of job-hungry migrants. Five hundred years later, the tables had turned. I like to summarize the change in one tell-tale event: the Portuguese penetration into the Indian Ocean led by Vasco da Gama in 1498. This was an extraordinary achievement. Some scholars will tell you that it was some kind of accident; that it could just as easily have been Muslim sailors, or Indian, or Chinese to make the connection from the other direction. Did not the Chinese send a series of large fleets sailing west as far as the east African coast in the early fifteenth century— bigger, better and earlier than anything the Portuguese had to show? Don’t you believe it. These affirmations of Asian priority are especially prominent and urgent nowadays because a new inversion is bringing Asia to the fore. A “multicultural” world history finds it hard to live with a eurocentric story of achievement and transformation. So a new would-be (politically correct) orthodoxy would have us believe that a sequence of contingent events (gains by Portugal and then others in the Indian Ocean, followed by conquests by Spain and then others in the New World) gave Europe what began as a small
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