I think that Joel Mokyr’s analysis at Aeon of how Europe became rich while, say, China or India did not is largely nonsense. It has several problems.
The most serious is that Europe didn’t become rich. Parts of Europe became rich but other parts didn’t. The Netherlands became rich. Russia didn’t. Germany became rich. Greece didn’t. Rather than looking at “political fragmentation” look at the differences among the fragments.
But another problem is that his article certainly appears to draw a dividing line sometime in the 17th or 18th century, but the United States isn’t Europe, it became rich, too, and by the 18th century it had already differentiated politically and socially from Europe.
Frankly, I find Jared Diamond’s guns, germs and steel hypothesis better.
If you think that the difference is between Europe and the United States on the one hand and Asia on the other is Christianity, try explaining why the experiences of Protestant Europe, Catholic Europe, and Orthodox Europe were so different. They were all Christian.
What I think happened is that the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States all adopted some very specific economic and social reforms mostly related to banking and money and they became rich. Wherever the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States invested became rich, too. Where they didn’t invest or, worse, disinvested (like Africa) became poor.
“try explaining why the experiences of Protestant Europe, Catholic Europe, and Orthodox Europe were so different. They were all Christian.”
Category error. The Protestant Reformation was not so much about theological differences but rather a rebellion against the monolithic, hierarchical structure of the Roman and Orthodox churches. Result: market economy vs. centralized control.
In his essay Dr. Mokyr considers and then rejects the idea that religion, Christianity in particular, had anything to do with Europe’s becoming rich. If there’s a category error it’s his.
But Christianity is not a monolith and IMO the cultural and economic effects of specific forms of Christianity, specifically Calvinism, had a lot to do with why Europe and the United States became rich.
One important thing that distinguishes Protestantism from both Roman Catholic and Orthodox faiths is that Protestants did not practice an effective excommunication or anathema, meaning that an anglican or Lutheran persecuted like Jon Hus, Galileo, Copernicus or Bruno could simply jump ship and become a Calvinist, Quaker, Methodist or other protestant without having to undergo exclusion, torture, renunciation or death for practicing science or disagreeing with doctrine.
Galileo wasn’t disciplined because of his scientific discoveries but because he mocked his patron, Pope Urban VIII. The moral of the story isn’t how rigid and anti-scientific the Church was (or is) but don’t mock your sponsor.
Dr. Mokyr seems to assume, as most do, that his starting point has no relation to prior events, and as such, it hangs in thin air like Wile E Coyote before he realizes nothing is supporting him.
An important event for Spain and the Netherlands was Isabella & Ferdinand expulsion of the Jews. They left mostly with the shirts on their, lucky to have a back to be shirted. The Netherlands were rather liberal back then, also, and they welcomed the expelled Jews.
The last Black Plague was like a forest fire burning out the underbrush, and it is generally overlooked as a pivotal event. The Italian City States were more like his competing intellectuals, but most European rulers kept an intellectual or two around to justify whatever unjustifiable action they were doing.
To my knowledge, Copernicus was never persecuted for his theories, and if anything, various members of the Church were intellectually interested in his works. The actual reason why Galileo got into trouble is rather inconvenient. I am not sure what the full story about Bruno is, or I have forgotten. The Inquisition, like witch trials, are often about anything but religion.
Too often, the present is imposed upon the past. In most pre-Industrial societies, slave labor is the equivalent of machinery, and it is not viewed unfavorably by most people. It is just a fact of life. Things need to get done, and rather than slaughter everybody you conquer, you allow some to live. While not technically slaves, serfs were effectively slaves. They were not free to live anywhere or do anything.
Also, nobody ever includes the ancient Egyptians in their discussions. They ruled in one form or another for around 2,500 years, depending upon how you date it. The Chinese are the same, but I think that there may be continuity between the modern era and the past.
This article is missing a big datapoint, Japan. The non-western country to industrialize one century before any other.
What an odd piece. It smells of ‘publish or perish,’ an academic needing to write something, anything. He’s reverse-engineering western success, but sort of randomly excluding possible solutions while leaning on the data to bring it back to ground he feels comfortable with. Let’s just a priori dismiss any notion of western cultural superiority? What? Why? The underlying culture didn’t form the institutions he’s so pleased with?
Here’s an equally wild-assed guess. Look at how fringe the most successful (eventual) nations are. Germany looks geographically central now, but it was the wild west for most of its history, as was Scandinavia. The UK, separated by the channel. Japan, ditto. The US had a really big channel. Fringe = success.
Here’s another: subtract Jews from western civilization and see what you’ve got left. Who invented representative democracy? Arguably the Hebrews in the time of the judges. Who insisted above all on the rule of law? Jews. Who – thanks to Christian foolishness – ran international banking? Jews. And who – thanks Romans – was present in every western city? Representative democracy, the rule of law, and compound interest, subtract those three notions and ‘the west’ looks quite a bit less impressive.
One can play this game all day. It’s blind men describing an elephant. It’s a rope. It’s a snake. It’s a pillar. It’s an attempt to make the complex simple which only works when we ignore and shrug off vast amounts of inconvenient data.
I believe I can address that. Japan had a very strong predisposition towards capital investment rather than consumption, distinctively so. I could trace the origins of that but that wouldn’t be relevant. Suffice it to say that it had such a predisposition which made the Japanese more likely to build a new factory than to spend the money on wine, women, and song.
Note that the Japanese example supports one of my underlying points: there’s more than one way for a country to develop and more than one set of attributes that make that possible
Or the Sumerians who flourished between about 6500 BC and 1700 BC, largely without change. Let that sink in for a moment. That’s longer than everybody who came afterwards put together.
As to the Chinese, nobody really knows and the Chinese believe their own propaganda.