Historians like to talk about revolutions. They're exciting. Life was going along in its usual humdrum fashion and then -- boom! -- everything changed. The Commercial Revolution of the late middle ages. The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. The Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Information Revolution of the late twentieth century. The upcoming Singularity Revolutions.
But have the changes in (and wrought by) Western civilization really been so revolutionary? Has the West grown through the punctuated equilibrium of periodic revolutions or through an ever-quickening, cumulative evolution? John Adams is famous for having said this about another revolution:
The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments, of their duties and obligations...This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution.
And those of us who have studied the history of the Anglosphere know that there were deep continuities between the "minds and hearts" of Revolution-era Americans and pre-Revolutionary Britons. And that those continuities have even deeper roots in the culture of the offshore islanders, going back even to the times of the Roman occupation.
So: what caused the Industrial Revolution? Well, first of all, was there even a revolution? Things changed fast in England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and that needs to be accounted for. But that seeming inflection point was preceded by much laying of groundwork. So did the true inflection point occur during the Scientific Revolution? During the Commercial Revolution? Was the critical period 1275-1325, as Alfred Crosby argues in The Measure of Reality (recently reviewed by James McCormick)? Or, as Lex argued in the comments to that review, was there in fact no one inflection point?
The latter view seems closer to the truth. Most everyone wants to find one cause for the rise of the West and of the Anglosphere, but there is no one cause. Consider:
Don't get me wrong, these all played a part. But the key word here is part.
As Lex said:
I think part of the problem of looking for a "take-off point" is that is no take off point. There are just different trajectories, and some have a slightly higher average slope, and over time that allows very major disparities in outcome.
Or as Aristotle said: small differences in the beginning lead to large differences in the end.
Europeans were experimenting with new power technologies and agricultural techniques as early as the 900s, perhaps even earlier. In some ways they had to: they didn't have slaves around to do all the work (unlike their classical ancestors). Christian ideas of human dominion likely played a part. Seriously applying new tools led to a greater interest in machines, and an increasingly mechanical outlook on life. Not that Europeans invented all these tools -- water mills and wind mills were known to the Chinese, Persians, and Romans; the Romans had heavier plows but didn't use them much; the Chinese invented paper, printing, gunpowder, etc. But the Europeans applied and perfected the technologies that they didn't invent, were uncommonly good at borrowing ideas and technologies from other cultures, were flexible and diverse at a time when the other major cultures on the planet were becoming inflexible and monolithic, and eventually became pre-eminent in just about every scientific, cultural, technological, military, and economic endeavor you can think of.
Many commentators have pointed to the fact that Europe contained not one culture or nation, but many. That didn't hurt. Competition and decentralization forced innovation. When one nation closed down or became less innovative, creative people on the forefront of commerce, science, or technology moved on. When northern Italy slowly lost its edge after 1350, innovation moved north, especially to Flanders, Holland, and England. This, again, is a kind of flexibility.
I am reminded of Claudio Veliz's image of the Anglospheric fox, who knows many things. Europe in general knew many things -- early on it was simultaneously innovating in agriculture, commerce, technology, and navigation; later it added science to that list. Let us not forget the rise of independent towns, cities, and city-states, which resulted in competition and innovation in the realm of law. So we have a veritable brew of reinforcing areas of innovation, each growing at different rates, but growing (slowly at first, but then more and more quickly).
The more I read, the more I see a consistent pattern of growth and change starting around 900 and continuing up to the present, rather than one inflection point or transformative revolution. The baton of primary (but not sole) change was passed on to whichever area of Western civilization was most open and flexible at the time -- originally northern Italy, then Flanders and Holland, then England, then America. The Anglosphere has retained primacy in these changes over the last 250 years because it has been the most open, flexible, resilient, forward-driving sub-civilization within the West with regard to technology, law, corporate structures, business processes, scientific methods, military techniques, philanthropic ventures, and more.
That doesn't mean the Anglosphere is inherently better, faster, or more innovative than other sub-civilizations within the West, or civilizations in general. But inherence is not what matters here. The Anglosphere was not always the most open, flexible civilization, and there's no guarantee that its lead in that regard will be maintained. Yet the Anglosphere has been in the forefront of change for most all of the last 250 years, and that shows no signs of stopping. Given that ever-more radical changes are coming soon to a planet near you, the key will be to maintain the open, pragmatic, rational, individualist, flexible, resilient, innovative, market-oriented, fox-like ways that have gotten us this far. It won't necessarily be easy, but understanding the reasons behind the rise of the West over the last 1000+ years should help.
(Cross-posted at one small voice.)
Posted by Peter Saint-Andre at February 10, 2006 10:11 PMOne could make the argument that modern Asia is a sort of analogue to medieval Europe. They don't do a lot of innovation themselves, true, but they do adopt and perfect the innovations of other cultures (ie the Anglosphere) very quickly. And whereas, in the Anglosphere, power is basically under the hegemony of the U.S., in Asia it is distributed amongst a number of players of varying size and influence (Japan, China, India, South Korea, and Singapore come to mind) who are constantly competing with each other.
Not that the Rise of Asia is written in the stars or anything. They may well perceive GRIN technologies as being more profitable, but at the same time there's a certain societal brittleness (ie, Chinese authoritarianism, a general tendancy towards conformity) which could well undermine their rise to power. The Anglosphere has it's own problems, though: while there is a strong tradition of personal freedom and individualism, we're the top dogs right now, and any serious disruptions are as likely to undermine our position as to reinforce it ... a dynamic which, historically, has led to loss of nerve and conservatism (precautionary principle, anyone? How about the Copyright Wars?.)
Posted by: Matt Shultz at February 10, 2006 11:25 PMTwo things that I believe contributed mightily to the rise of the Anglosphere.
The first was the bloody wars that led to the separation of Church and State. As long as the ruler could proclaim his title was ordained by God the idea of private property backed by impartial courts of law was near impossible.
Once citizens gained the right to own property and that title was ensured by the courts, it became possible for them to achieve wonderful things by risking their monetary, physical, and intellectual capital. The successes out-numbered the failures and gradually led to our present system of regulated capitalism. This, I believe, is the Anglosphere's "secret."
When men are taking risks in the hope of gain they are highly motivated to use new ideas, technologies, and materials. That is not allowed in societies, which are theocracies, kleptocracies, and thugocracies. It is, IMO, the reason so many African and Middle Eastern countries are desperately poor.
These ideas are all laid out in THE MYSTERY OF CAPITAL by Hernando De Soto.
Posted by: Jimmy J at February 11, 2006 11:46 AMIf you want to understand the way groups of people, organizations and societies behave, look at the reward structures.
Organizational success can not be reliably predicted. If you ask ten people to predict what some aspect of the future will be like in ten years, you will get 11 answers and at least ten of them will be wrong. Progress is not planned, it works by trial and error. That means to have any chance of success, you need lots of experiments. If you only have a few experiments going on at the same time it takes a long time to make progress. If you have lots of experiments going on, then progress is quicker. The driving force behind people experimenting is their perception of the possible rewards for success. There will be no innovation if there is no perceived reward for risk taking. Two examples from 18th-century America illustrate this: Benjamin Franklin, and the US Constitution.
Benjamin Franklin was welcomed into French high society when he was sent as one of the representatives of the Continental Congress to the court of Louis XVI because of his standing as a scientist. His research into the properties of electricity were known throughout the courts of Europe. That kind of status was worth more than money. Being a successful research scientist was socially fashionable in 18th-century Europe independent of any wealth that accrued because of it.
The second example is Article I, Section 8, Paragraph 8 of the US Constitution which establishes copyright and patent protection. The framers of the Constitution agreed that one of the explicit goals of the foundation of the Republic was to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts..." They implemented that "by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." They felt that the best way to promote progress was to protect the intellectual property of inventors; not to reward inventors directly, but rather to protect the possibility of their benefiting from their inventions.
The converse of rewarding success is punishing failure. It is not sufficient to reward people for experimenting, you have to also be willing to cut your losses on failed experiments. The biggest problem with statist societies is not that they don't reward inventors, it is that they continue to pour resources into failures. They don't need to admit when they are wrong, so they never do. The East India Company was a great example of rewarding failure for over 200 years. In that sense I would disagree with Jimmy J that the successes out-numbered the failures. I would say instead that the successes out-weighed the failures. On the other hand, if the punishment for failure is greater than the reward for success, you lose the incentive to experiment.
What I look for when I study a group of people are what behaviors get rewarded and what behaviors get punished. I don't believe that any group of people are more or less likely to have good ideas. The question becomes what happens to them when they do have a good idea. The Chinese are a great example of this. Nobody succeeds like Chinese once they get out of China. The cultural factors that make them good doctors and merchants and lawyers and teachers in other countries must have existed in China, but something was interfering with their manifestation. There is a biological analog in genetics called epistatis where the genotype in one locus has a direct effect on the expression of a genotype at another locus. The instructions in one locus can mask or override the instructions in another locus. In the complex interaction of personalities that make up a society, very small factors could have a major damping or amplifying effect on other factors. I don't think that any factors can "force innovation" in the sense that you can make people have good ideas. What you can do is reward them or punish them for having certain kinds of good ideas.
This complex interaction of factors makes identifying critical components or inflection points very, very difficult. I think it goes a long way to explaining why a culture can appear to have a radical change in structure in a short period of time. For example, in Japan the country goes from the Sengoku-jidai, a period of continuous political upheaval, to the Tokugawa Shogunate, a period of rigid political ossification, in a single generation. I don't think it was so much that Japanese concepts of governance changed in a major way during that period, but rather that Tokugawa Ieyasu was able to make the final tweaks to what Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi had been trying to do that finally caused the structure to crystallize. Similarly, the appearance of Commodore Perry cracked the structure, but the stresses were already there and the shape it recombined into could not have been predicted in advance.
In short, I'm skeptical of revolutions in general, and I'm especially skeptical of attempts to predict the future. I think the best you can do is try not to punish people for innovating and try not to reward them for failing.
If you haven't been reading it, I would recommend Rudy Rummel's blog, Democratic Peace.
His site is at:
http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/
Rudy has pretty good credentials as a political scientist and has been at the heart of a gathering movement that credits democratic institutons with a host of social goods, preemminent among which is his thesis that democracies don't make war on democracies. His various themes are pretty well supported by statistical data derived from pretty authentic sources.
I think his relevance to this issue relates to what he terms "relative freedom". Most of the social goods he discusses improve with the relative "freeness" of a society, hence the more free a society, the stronger the social goods, like personal economic growth.
I think that the inability of Chinese society to develop strong personal economic growth is a result of the success of the early Chinese dynasties in establishing strong bureaucracies which have a tendency to throttle individual initiative. I suspect there is a lesson here on the value of limited government. Perhaps Jimmy J should add bureaucracy to his list of other "..ocracies".
Peter has outlined a gradualist, "multithreaded" vision of historical change. As he notes, the specialists each have their own hobbyhorse to ride.
A very useful resource on the development of technology from classical antiquity to the 20th century (with reference as well to China) is the 1990 book by Joel Mokyr ... "The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress", Oxford Univ. Press.
Mokyr generally supports the theory that Europe's diversity of political entities allowed good ideas to survive and prosper in ways that the vast unitary states of the East did not tolerate.
He also posits "Cardwell's Law" ... that real innovation never stays too long in any given culture and even Britain's lead in the Industrial Revolution has started to dissolve by the 1850s.
Finally, Mokyr draws from theories in evolutionary biology (cf. Steven J. Gould) to suggest a "saltation" theory of change ... many microevolutions in technology and occasional macroevolutions. This view stands opposed to the gradualist view proposed by Peter, and conforms to a lesser degree with Alfred Crosby's view of a major change in cultural perceptual emphasis in late medieval northern Italy. A distinctive European cognitive style which seems to identifiable still in social psychology labs around the world.
For myself, I'm quite willing to accept a multiplicity of influences, as Peter so elegantly lays out, but I still feel that there are some central dynamics in the Anglosphere (and Europe!) in the areas of cognition, social dynamics of decision-making, and overall sociopolitical structure (identified by Macfarlane as decentralization of power, mobility in social hierarchy, and the lack of a"Mandarinate" of information gatekeepers).
It may be Quixotic, but I'm going to keep plugging away at trying to find the stronger threads among the multiple threads that might explain history and constrain the present and future.
Posted by: James McCormick at February 12, 2006 10:40 AMThis may sound simplistic, but I don't think we can overlook the influence of Christianity on the rise of capitalism. It seems more than mere coincidence that a religion of self-sacrifice for the sake of the future just happened to encourage saving, investment, and the accumulation of capital -- in other words, self-sacrifice for the sake of the future.
We forget -- indeed, can hardly imagine -- how soaked in Christianity early modern Europeans were.
Even so, I would be the first to admit that this particular religious orientation would be at best a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for the process of capital accumulation and the emergence of capitalism, as witness the many Christian areas where capitalism did not arise.
Furthermore, once the benefits of capitalism were plain for all the world to see, state compulsion could take the place of voluntary, religiously motivated behavior to bring about similar transformations, as happened in Japan and is happening in China.
In short, Weber was on to something even if he did short-change the Catholic contribution.
Posted by: Luke Lea at February 16, 2006 05:30 PM
By almost all standards China was ahead of Europe (invention of paper, compass, gunpowder, more sophiticated art, silk etc) up until the Mongol invasions (1200 on).
Apart from the direct effect of destroying cities, genocide etc there may also by psychological effects. Having a glass ceiling beyond which nobody who isn't a heavily armed barbarian psychopath may rise is likely to stultify enterprise.
Even so the voyages of Cheng Ho the Chinese explorer of the 1430s round the Indian Ocean rival those of Vasco Da Gama 30 years later. For one culture to overtop another you only need to get a couple of centuries, if that, ahead.
Posted by: Neil Craig at February 17, 2006 09:51 AM