This book does a pretty good job of outlining most of this stuff.

http://www.amazon.com/Wealth-Poverty...7661318&sr=8-1

It's eurocentric at some points but it's very insightful in the way it describes many of the world events. I will write a more accurate summary later after I get some sleep. The book does mention how Europe was behind for some long periods in history compared to the Islamic Empire/ Chinese. But Europe basically kicked it into gear after the Age of Exploration and that dominance rapidly expanded after the Industrial Revolution. Also tries to explain why some societies seemed to have regressed as time went on.

This played far less of a role than people think. Diseases and inter tribal feuds that the Spanish took advantage of had a lot more to do with it. Hugh Thomas's The Conquest of Mexico is a good book about it.

At some point, in the event I actually finish Niall Ferguson's nauseating book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, remind me to post my very negative review here. Initial impressions: Ferguson has gone full-on neocon.

as far as the Arabs go that whole Mongol thing ****ed their graph up pretty goddamn bad. The only reason ( the *only* reason) the same thing didn't happen to Europe is because that guy dropped dead and everybody had to go back to their home village in Mongolia to elect a new leader. Pure luck akin to that packet of cigars before Antietam.

have to start earlier than that if you want to play that game

Their respective societies were structured such that Carthage couldn't win and Rome couldn't lose. Like, what the **** could Hannibal possibly have done better, dude was megaelite as we $ay in SE, he did pretty much the best anybody could have possibly done every step of the way, he won crushing, titanic, civilization-altering victories, his tactics worked, his strategy worked and it *still* wasn't enough. The history of Carthaginian political leadership is just a long sick joke except for one guy and his three sons, or damn near. So you need to dig for a deeper root cause.

WAY overstating the effects of the "whole Mongol thing".

The Islamic world turned itself in the wrong direction by following one of their owns philosophy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghazali

So you're saying that having the Calipahte de facto destroyed and the greatest city in the world destroyed and maybe the agricultural underpinnings of Mesopotamia destroyed are events that can be 'WAY overstated?'

No way, not even close. al-Ghazali steered epistemology in one direction (one that didn't turn out well), but he no more changed Islamic society overnight than Thomas Aquinas changed Christian society overnight. Baghdad remained the world's most cosmopolitan city and one of the great centers of learning up to the sacking by the Mongols, which was followed by the huge influx of Turks who themselves had been disrupted by the Mongol incursions, leading to the establishment of three rival States: the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals, and they remained at least on par with Europe into the 1600s.

To say that the Islamic world's fate was set by the Mongols is an overstatement and completely ignores what was going on inside that world itself.

I never said it happened overnight. Society-wide philosophical change never happens overnight. It can take a very long time.
As you say, the major Islamic societies were indeed at least on par with Europe for a long time to come. This shows that the Mongols didn't cause Islam's downfall, but it doesn't mean that al-Ghazali's way of thinking didn't eventually take a stranglehold on their culture.
While it was taking hold over the following centuries the Muslims' decline from within was subtly apparent. By the time of the Industrial Revolution it was glaring. It was the rejection of Hellenistic philosophy that eventually led their society to value things like building mosques instead of factories and all the other voodoo nonsense currently on display that led them to where they are now. Al-Ghazali led the way.

Two points:

1. I think you over-credit al-Ghazali with massive changes within society that occurred simultaneously with precipitous ecological disaster and economic decline. Cultural conservatism may not have taken root had these side catastrophes not occurred. The loss of a competing tradition after the sacking of Baghdad certainly didn't help, either.

2. The extent to which an embrace of Hellenistic culture caused a momentous shift in Europe is also overstated, in my opinion. I maintain that it was a rejection of the Greeks as a primary source of authority that led to the creation of the early modern intellectual suite. To be sure, access to Greek ideas was fundamental to the Renaissance, but it was the rejection of Aristotle that gave us classical physics, and the rejection of Galen that gave us medicine. The failure of Aquinas' synthesis project might have been the best thing to happen to the West in intellectual history.

He could have destroyed Rome after the Battle of Cannai. Rome was on it's knees, and Hannibal failed to win.

It would have changed the world as we know it, Europe would not have been "Romanized," as the Roman empire would never have existed.

And most importantly, Christianity would not have become the major religion in Europe, the catholic church would not have surpressed the subconscious which resulted in a better differentiated consciousness which was the main reason that Europe/western world dominates the world in most fields.

Is this making any sense? Unfortunatly my english is not good enough to talk in the technical terms needed for this discussion.

He had no siege engines. Hannibal would have taken Rome if he could have, but he lost a good deal of his equipment and personnel in the risky march across the Alps, and the Carthaginian government failed to capitalize on Hannibal's northern advance the way he'd planned.

How do you know? Maybe Christianity would have arisen anyway. And what is this "differentiated consciousness" business? That has little or nothing to do with European domination, which is a product of only the last few hundred years.

This is highly controversial and afaik the majority of modern opinion thinks he made the right call.

He had enough soldiers left to destroy the Roman army at Cannai, we are talking what? 30.000? I am thinking that he had bigger army than what was left in the city of Rome at that point in time, no?

Siege engines could've been made I think.


I think that if Rome is destroyed by Hannibal then the Roman empire that conquered Europe would not have existed. Europe would have remained free of Roman occupation and would have remained pagan.
But indeed, that would not have stopped Jezus from happening, except he wouldnt have died at the cross, because the Romans would not have been there as they where destroyed by Hannibal. So we could even ask if Herodes would have been king for that matter, who knows what would have happened?


The better or higher if you will differentiated consciousness business is about the result of the surpressing of the subconscious by the church the last 2000 years in the European/Western world. So it has everything to do with European domination as it basically is what caused it.

That is BIG assumption.

But Europe was really, really Christian when the pattern of dominance began in the 1500s. Are you saying Christianity enabled Europe to conquer the world, or that it held it back from doing so? I still do not understand this "surpressing of the subconscious" business you are talking about. It's terribly vague.

Very good post...

Ian Morris certainly makes a good case in his "Why the West Rules, For Now" (an excellent work in my opinion) for the tremendous effects of climate change between roughly 900 and 1200 on the respective historical trajectories of Europe and the Middle East. In a nutshell, higher temperatures in the Middle East and Central Asia meant more deserts and less agricultural yields in the already dry climate of the Middle East, and forced various nomadic and semi-nomadic Turco-Mongol tribal entities to come out of Central Asia in search of pastures, again, with disastrous consequences for the Middle East. Whereas in Europe higher temperatures meant, less swamps, more and more land opening for agriculture especially in central and northern Europe, and, in general, more population. It is significant that the population of the Middle East did NOT increase between 950 and 1250.

It was rather fashionable to blame Al-Ghazali for everything bad in the Middle East in the 1960s (Bernard Lewis and even earlier Orientalists such as Joseph Schacht to some degree are responsible for that interpretation). Nobody in the Middle Eastern field takes this interpretation seriously anymore. It is just a silly idea.

In any case, if that is possible, I would like to know a bit more about your sources for your mentioning of a "precipitous ecological disaster" in the Middle East of the medieval period.

Thanks in advance,

Cheers

it is a rather difficult concept to explain, it is about how people got formed psychologically over time under the "rules" of the church during the last 2000 years.

It is about how the church considders free will to come from the consciousness rather than the subconscious, stuff like 'you shall not steal" and "you shall not kill," is basically an attempt to root out behavior that comes from the subconscious of which instinct is a part off.

And I am not really talking about war eventough it is a part of it ofcourse, I am talking a bit more general, it is about how we became somewhat smarter pêople and more knowledge and a faster developing society as a result of that.

Ian Morris and the incident you mentioned are part of what I was talking about. "precipitous" may have overstated my case a bit, since it was a longer shift in trends, rather than a sudden disaster. But there's good reason to suspect that this decline in agricultural output affected subsequent society in the Middle East. Kenneth Pomeranz hits this point (albeit briefly, since he's an East Asian rather than Middle Eastern specialist) in The Great Divergence and with Steven Topik in The World Trade Created. Safavid population grew at a significantly lower rate than Europe after 1500. Internal Ottoman population stagnated, though they added quite a few subjects via conquest. The ongoing drop in agricultural output and the desertification of the once "Fertile Crescent" hit the region especially hard.

On its own, this ecological shift might not have been a damning factor if not for the economic decline that took place at the same time, as Europeans gradually entered and then monopolized the sea routes and redirected a lot of trade around, rather than through, Middle Eastern states.

Alright, thank you.

Cheers

50% population density driving innovation, 50% a socio-economical-political system open to those innovations.

Grunch:

A Dr. Diamond had a work a few years back called "Guns, Germs, and Steel" that was excellent on this subject. It was both in book and video form. Enjoy.

The general consensus from historians that I've spoken with (that I happen to agree with) is that Diamond makes a pretty convincing case for why Eurasia, rather than the Americas, Africa, or Oceania produced a world-dominating society, but his case for why Europe became dominant relative to, say, China, is much weaker. But historians like Kenneth Pomeranz have fleshed out this problem a little more in subsequent years.

Of course, you also have complete hacks like Gavin Menzies trying to throw a monkey wrench into the works by insisting that China somehow kicked off the Renaissance and visited the Americas with almost no evidence. I remember the rant I went on when one student of mine actually recommended one of his books.

I have never read Pomeranz...will put him on the list of things to read. Thanks!


The only real key to dominance development that I can think of that properly belongs in China alone is dogs. Seems pretty clear that is where dogs were first domesticated according to a Scandinavian study that I can't recall how to point you to right way evaluation the mitochondrial dna diversity of dogs.

The Enlightenment, which caused much lower taxes and regulations of the structure of production (notably in education), which caused the industrial revolution, which caused massive increases in productivity and wealth accumulation for the european society, in comparison to the rest of the world which was still stuck with heavy statism.