The Rise of Western Power: A Comparative History of Western Civilization 9781350066120, 9781350066137, 9781350066168, 9781350066151

Citation preview

THE RISE OF WESTERN POWER

i

ii

THE RISE OF WESTERN POWER A COMPARATIVE HISTORY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

Jonathan Daly

iii

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 This edition published 2021 Copyright © Jonathan Daly, 2014, 2021 Jonathan Daly has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover design by Graham Ward Cover image: Vasco de Gama arrival in Calecut in 1498, c. 1900, by Alfredo Roque Gameiro (1864–1935). Courtesy of Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permissions for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Daly, Jonathan W., author. Title: The rise of Western power : a comparative history of Western civilization / Jonathan Daly. Description: [Second edition]. | London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020035911 (print) | LCCN 2020035912 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350066120 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350066137 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350066144 (epub) | ISBN 9781350066151 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Civilization, Western. Classification: LCC CB245 .D265 2021 (print) | LCC CB245 (ebook) | DDC 909/.09821--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035911 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035912 ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3500-6612-0 978-1-3500-6613-7 978-1-3500-6615-1 978-1-3500-6614-4

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

iv

CONTENTS

List of Maps Preface to the Second Edition Prologue: Why the West? Definitions Acknowledgments

viii x xiv xvii xx

1

Innovation in World Civilization Prehistory The Ancient Near East The Classical World Ancient China Other Great Civilizations Astonishing Human Ingenuity A Latecomer

1 2 6 7 9 13 17 23

2

Medieval Transformations Agricultural Revolution The Rise of Feudal Society Urban Revolution Technological Innovations Commercial Revolution Construction Boom Literary Flowering Women’s Social Status The Divine Comedy and Medieval Culture Music and Art

29 29 31 33 35 38 40 42 43 47 49

3

Papal Revolution The Early Church The Western Church Reform Builds Revolutions in the Church Revolutions in Learning Revolutions in the Law The Investiture Conflict Spiritual Revolutions in the Church Political Revolutions in Christendom

55 55 58 62 64 66 70 72 73 76

v

Contents

4

Military Revolutions Ancient and Early Medieval Warfare Medieval Warfare European Arms Race Infantry Revolution War and the Origins of Representative Government Gunpowder Revolution Revolution in the Nature and Scale of War

83 83 86 90 92 95 96 100

5

Discovery of the World Migrations Internal Colonization The Crusades World Travelers Global Traders Seafarers and Explorers Conquerors

111 111 113 116 119 121 125 129

6

Explosion of the Printed Word Icon, Token, Symbol Papyrus, Scroll, Codex Libraries The Printing Revolution Publishing Boom

141 141 142 144 147 150

7

The Reformation The Renaissance Worldly Theologians Voices from Below Luther Social and Political Transformations Christendom Shattered The Foundations of Modern Rights

161 161 163 164 167 170 173 179

8

Scientific Revolutions Ancient and Medieval Roots Methods and Approaches Life Science Cosmology Demystifying Nature: Chemistry and Electricity The Enlightenment The Dark Side of Modern Science

189 190 193 199 202 206 209 211

9

Commercial Revolutions Consumer Revolution Agricultural Revolution

219 219 223

vi

Contents

Pooling Resources The Banking Revolution Spreading Risk Sharing Information

225 236 237 239

10 Political Revolutions Foundations of Liberty Early European Self-government The English Revolutions The American Revolution France and the Revolutionary Tradition

245 245 250 254 260 268

11 Industrial Revolution Accumulation of Resources Perfect Conditions Scholarly Disputes Chains of Innovation Diffusion

279 279 282 285 291 297

12 Technological Revolution Food Production Harnessing Thunderbolts Flashes of Inspiration Explosions in a Box Revolutions in Chemistry Electronics and Information Revolutions

307 307 315 320 323 327 331

13 Crises of the West Imperialism World War I Totalitarian Ideologies World War II The Cold War

341 341 349 352 359 366

14 Social Revolutions The Revolutionary Middle Class Bringing in One-half of Humanity Living Like Lords and Ladies Ending Discrimination Explosion of Rights

377 377 381 385 391 402

Conclusions: A New Type of Society Notes Works Cited Index

407 421 541 617 vii

LIST OF MAPS

0.1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1 4.2 4.3 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 6.1 7.1 8.1 9.1 9.2 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 11.1 11.2 11.3 12.1 12.2 12.3

viii

Geography of Eurasia Early river ralley civilizations Chinese and Roman Empires juxtaposed The Islamic lands, A.D. 750 The Earth’s axes Mongol Empire at the death of Genghis Khan, 1227 Coastline and major water routes of Europe Europe, c. 1350 Principal European trade routes of the fourteenth century The voyages of Saint Paul Charlemagne’s Empire The Spread of monasteries in Medieval Europe Early European universities Campaigns and Empire of Alexander the Great The Battle of Crecy, August 26, 1346 The Ottoman Empire before 1453 The world according to Herodotus, 450 B.C. The Crusades Routes of the seven fleets of Ming treasure ships The chief voyages of exploration (to 1522) The spread of printing presses in Europe Extent of the Reformation, 1524–72 Scientific and scholarly institutions in early modern Europe Map of Europe and Asia, c. A.D. 1200 The triangular trade The Netherlands at the Truce of 1609 English Civil War at the end of 1643 The thirteen American colonies and Early Republic, 1760–90 Empire of Napoleon Britain before and after the Industrial Revolution The eight circuits of the Asia-centered System of Exchange, thirteenth century Railroad networks in Europe, 1901 Chief railroad systems, 1910 Cable communications and some leading wireless stations Principal ocean trade routes, 1934

xvi 5 10 15 19 21 24 32 40 57 61 65 69 85 94 98 112 117 124 128 151 176 210 220 221 253 257 263 272 283 286 299 311 317 319

List of Maps

13.1 The European colonial empires, 1913 13.2 The USSR in 1932 during Stalin’s collectivization and industrialization drives 13.3 Japanese expansion in Asia, 1937–41 13.4 Principal Nazi camps and killing fields 13.5 Allied and axis possessions in the West, 1944 14.1 Women’s suffrage in the United States before adoption of the nineteenth amendment in 1920 14.2 Slavery and sectionalism

348 355 360 363 364 384 400

ix

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Temperance (1560), reproduced below, depicts a beehive of activity.1 Scholars, artists, musicians, artisans, scientists, soldiers, mathematicians, and many other practitioners are deploying their skills and applying mathematical, musical, scientific, astronomical, computational, surveying, timekeeping, and other instruments. No walls divide intellectual and abstract from practical and applied pursuits. Rationality and orderliness infuse every undertaking. This picture encapsulates the main argument of The Rise of Western Power. Europeans were not smarter, more creative, or possessing greater excellence of any kind. All human beings are extraordinarily creative. That is our essence. But for a variety of reasons, Europeans built societies with greater openness to change, learning from others, collaboration across crafts and professions, and experimentation. Brueghel shows technologies Europeans borrowed (lute and quadrant), improved (gunpowder weaponry and mechanical clock), and invented (musical notation

Figure 0.1 Temperance (1559), attributed to Philip Galle (1537–1612), after Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Courtesy of National Gallery of Art. x

Preface to the Second Edition

and eyeglasses). He highlights single-minded and collaborative study, analysis, performance, labor, and constantly pushing toward excellence. Of course, all the other great Eurasian cultures had accomplishments in all these spheres of endeavor. Yet by the time the engraving was produced, Europe was diverging from them. How this development unfolded is the subject of my book. Since the publication of the first edition, a flood of new scholarship has appeared concerning the rise of the West and the Great Divergence of Europe from the major Eurasian cultures. Such works in the fields of history, sociology, political science, economics, law, and other disciplines confirm the centrality of Europe’s divergence to understanding modern historical development. Engaging with the intellectual output of these scholars has broadened and deepened my historical interpretations and contributed greatly to their distillation in my recent How Europe Made the Modern World: Creating the Great Divergence.2 This book in turn has shaped my revisions to the present book. Most important, it conceives of human development and the evolution of societies as similar to alchemical experimentation. The idea is this: alchemists searched the stores of nature and systematically experimented to discover the properties, capacities, reactions, and uses of all available materials and substances as they sought elixirs of life or the philosopher’s stone.3 In a similar way, our most distant ancestors learned to survive and thrive in the most punishing environments on Earth—by mastering the readily obtainable bounties of nature. Likewise, once sedentary cultures emerged, with the domestication of plants and animals starting 10,000 years ago in the prehistoric Near East, they flourished not only by drawing upon material features of their environments but also by appropriating ideas, inventions, customs, learning, and other breakthroughs of the mind and spirit. All cultures learned from each other. None advanced in a vacuum. In human cultural development, there has been no pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. Each culture and each people owes much of its success to peoples and cultures that went before. We are all standing on the shoulders of our global forebears. Yet historically, some cultures have flourished more dramatically than others, contributing more breakthroughs and innovations to the human patrimony. Each such culture seems to have had a peculiar genius. It is the contention of this book, however, that what sets the most flourishing cultures apart is their greater openness to learning from others and the greater opportunities for experimentation of their members. The image on the cover of this book, Vasco da Gama’s Arrival in Calicut in 1498, painted by the Portuguese artist Alfredo Roque Gameiro around 1900, is suggestive of this openness and emphasizes that the Europeans had much to learn from the peoples of the great civilizations of Asia. The splendor and riches they encountered and their own comparative weakness and poverty are visually represented in the contrast between the tiny ships and rowboats to the right and the splendid urban landscape and teeming population to the left. The Europeans enjoyed much of their success in the early modern era thanks to their willingness to open themselves to the ideas, techniques, lore, institutions, practices, and other achievements Asian peoples had built up over the centuries. xi

Preface to the Second Edition

This was a “gift of backwardness.” Unlike the great Indian and Chinese civilizations, Europe did not emerge from an ancient and deeply rooted culture. Such a culture might have inhibited the incorporation of foreign achievements. Europe developed, instead, as a blank slate or a tabula rasa on which cultural and technological borrowings from across Eurasia and eventually the wider world could be inscribed: logic and the principles of democracy from ancient Greece, sophisticated civil law from ancient Rome, alchemy and Hindu numbers from the Islamic world, gunpowder and paper from China, and many other treasures from great and lesser cultures globally. Human societies are naturally conservative and cautious, and with good reason. For most of our history, we humans have lived at the very edge of subsistence. Each mistake, each deviation from the norm invited danger and even death. No wonder our ancestors resisted change. Yet some cultures fostered more exploration and trial and error than others. Such cultures achieved more breakthroughs, seemingly not because of any peculiar characteristics but because of greater opportunities for unleashing the extraordinary creativity that characterizes all humans. Some were outward looking, engaged in vast commercial networks like the ancient and Hellenistic Greeks or the early Islamic cultures. Others had huge, inward-looking populations like the Chinese and Indian. What they had in common were opportunities for exchange of all kinds and learning from each other’s successes and mistakes. Leading members of the so-called California school, including Kenneth Pomeranz, Robert Marks, and Peter C. Perdue, attribute the West’s rise to accidents of geography (Europe’s proximity to the Americas) and geology (abundant deposits of coal close to iron ore in the United Kingdom) and to exploitation. There was nothing historically unusual about Europe, on this view; its rise was almost accidental. In the words of Perdue, “the Industrial Revolution is not a deep, slow evolution out of centuries of particular conditions unique to early modern Europe. It is a late, rapid, unexpected outcome of a fortuitous combination of circumstances in the late eighteenth century.”4 Numerous other scholars push the onset of the Great Divergence back a century or two.5 Yet whether it began in the 1600s or the 1800s, the argument of the present book is that the Industrial Revolution, the Great Divergence, and the “rise of the West” were not accidental, not a stroke of luck, not unexpected, but precisely the result of “a deep, slow evolution out of centuries of particular conditions unique to early modern Europe.” Not that Europe’s divergence from the other great cultures was inevitable or foreordained. Contingency stalks every historical development. Rather, as I seek to show, a slow but accelerating accumulation of factors, most of them not directly engendered by material circumstances, contributed to Europe’s takeoff. One does not build a sophisticated machine by chance, nor does large-scale coal and iron production arise fortuitously. Human ingenuity is needed. Nor is exploiting colonies enough. Spain and Portugal imported vastly bigger quantities of gold and silver from the Americans than any other colonial powers, yet they became among Europe’s least industrially and commercially developed countries. What scholars of the California school are leaving out are the invaluable contributions of thought, imagination, insight, and creativity, as if all that matters are brute strength and tonnage. Instead, this book will xii

Preface to the Second Edition

try to show that unleashing the power of the human mind specifically in Europe held the key to making the modern world. A key feature of this development was the unusual openness of Europeans to learning from other cultures. In addition to drawing on a wide range of new scholarship in preparing this edition, I have also greatly expanded the coverage of women’s roles in the development of the major Eurasian cultures, have emphasized more the influence of the environment on the historical development of Europe and the world, and have enhanced the treatment of India, the Islamic world, and China. Numerous maps have been redrawn or created for this edition. A list of especially pertinent scholarly books and articles has been appended to the end of each chapter for readers who would like to dig deeper into the main topics of this volume. As much as possible, the entries in these lists draw upon the latest scholarship in relevant disciplines.

Companion Website This book is linked to several hundred relevant historical primary sources, maps, and images, organized by chapter and subchapter and available at http://www.bloomsbury.com/ uk/the-rise-of-western-power-9781441118516/. The primary sources are referenced throughout the text, for example The Song of Roland (see PS 4.2.3).

Acknowledgments For useful advice and support I am grateful to Eric Mielants, Frederick Boissevain, Luis Disotuar, Marvin Perry, Kaveh Yazdani, Martin Tracy, Ahmet T. Kuru, Philip Devenish, and my teaching assistants Sharaya Tindal and Elizabeth Maher. Many students in my Global Transformations course at UIC, in particular Boguslav Balata, imparted to me insightful thoughts. Elinor Pearlstein, James Sack, Joaquín Chávez, Laura Hostetler, Junaid Quadri, Anantdeep Singh, Timur Kuran, and Kevin Schultz commented helpfully on drafts or presentations of the new edition. Eric Brimstin, Stephen Broadberry, Sara McDougall, and Sandra de Pleijt kindly shared references and unpublished work. Two anonymous reviewers provided invaluable comments and criticism. The kindness of all these friends and colleagues has enabled me greatly to improve the final product, though of course any remaining errors are my own. The author is also grateful to Peter Bull for creating all the maps in this book, except Maps. 4.2, 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 14.1, and 14.2, for which I thank Bloomsbury’s excellent production team. Maddie Holder and her editorial team at Bloomsbury were, as always, a pleasure to work with. S.D.G.

xiii

PROLOGUE: WHY THE WEST?

A thousand years ago, Baghdad was a vast and flourishing city of broad streets and spacious gardens, abundant markets and marble-clad palaces, efficient sanitation and water-supply systems, and innumerable mosques.1 Córdoba, the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate in the Iberian peninsula, boasted by far the richest library on the planet.2 Kaifeng the splendid capital of the Song dynasty, featured seventy-two large and many more small restaurants where one could dine indoors or in pleasant gardens.3 Even the biggest European towns in those same years, by contrast, were mere collection of villages still interspersed with forests, marshlands, fields, and vineyards.4 Nearly 300 years later, when Marco Polo visited the splendid Chinese city of Hangzhou he was amazed by its magnificence (see PS 0.1.1). Some 500 or 600 years later, Europe began to diverge from the rest of Eurasia. By 1800, the West, especially Europe and North America, was without peer technologically and economically and had brought to life a host of cherished goods, including representative government, the free enterprise system, individual liberties, modern science, and the rule of law. Western economic development has spread to the rest of the world, as well. In 1820, 94 percent of all people living on Earth were stuck in extreme poverty, defined as subsisting on less than $1.90 per day adjusted for inflation and local purchasing power. That proportion plummeted to 44.3 percent in 1981, 29.1 percent in 1999, and 9.6 percent in 2015—nothing short of a miraculous transformation.5 Even more extraordinary, it has been recently calculated that “half the world is now middle class or wealthier.”6 When one takes into account the West’s negative contributions to world history, such as the physical and cultural genocide of tens of millions of native peoples in the Americas, the systematic and dehumanizing Atlantic slave trade, an arrogant and often vicious worldwide imperialism, the Holocaust, and two frightfully destructive world wars, it is obvious that no other region, empire, culture, or civilization has left so powerful a mark upon the world. How can one explain the unexpected rise of a small promontory at the end of the Eurasian landmass? My book aims to answer this question. Scholars have offered many explanations for the West’s rise.7 One can divide them into material and cultural interpretations. The former emphasize economics, class conflict, control of natural resources, and imperialism. The latter point to Europe’s cultural dynamism, inventiveness, openness to the outside world, intellectual curiosity, respect for individual rights, defense of private property, and the relatively high status of women. There are other ways to classify these interpretations. Some underscore internal rather than outside factors.8 For others, the key distinction is when Europe began to diverge—hundreds of years ago or more recently.9 xiv

Prologue: Why the West?

Presumably an interpretation drawing upon a diversity of factors is likely to get closest to the truth. This book argues that features peculiar to Europe enabled it to embrace change and learn from other cultures more dynamically than any other region in history and that its divergence from the major Eurasian cultures began in the Middle Ages though only came to dramatically change the world in the past couple of centuries. I do not argue that Europeans were inherently more creative or inventive than other people. They were undoubtedly not. Yet thanks to a series of historical and geographical accidents, Europeans had more opportunities to realize their capabilities than people in other cultures. Alexis de Tocqueville described this phenomenon after his trip to America in the 1830s (see PS 0.2.1). The story is complicated, but a single example may suffice to illustrate. When the Chinese emperor decreed an end to oceangoing navigation in the mid-1400s, such exploration ceased.10 By contrast, Christopher Columbus visited a number of royal courts before the king and queen of Spain agreed to sponsor his voyage across the Atlantic. Surely it was not the case that no one as daring as Columbus lived in China, but the yearning to explore was more stifled. As this book shows, such impediments were far less frequent in Europe. One strain of evolutionary biology helps to elucidate the nature of human creativity. Being alive and evolving over time means interacting with one’s environment. All living things—from bacteria to humans—are phenomenally creative in their ability to adapt. At every moment, we must process almost infinite data relating to our surroundings and our own bodies and mental processes. We create from this manifold an awareness of our corner of the world.11 On this basis, we act, react, invent, build, and collaborate. If each individual displays such extraordinary creativity on its own, imagine how much vastly more he or she can achieve in communities. All human collectives—from huntergatherer bands to sophisticated civilizations—connect organically among themselves and with their environments. Or as Aristotle argued: people in the aggregate bring more to society than any one genius, no matter how talented.12 This alone makes them all worthy of the profoundest respect and even awe. No living thing can thrive in isolation but only in intricate interplay with the widest range of living and nonliving things.13 As cultures develop, institutions and customs form. These often become rigid, hindering further development. It is, thus, not surprising that the most innovative cultures have been decentralized and politically fragmented, such as the Greek city-states, China of the Warring States era, the diverse states of the Islamic Golden Age, and perhaps most especially medieval Europe. Such polities are presumably more open to change, its leaders less able to impose uniformity. An intricate web of waterways divides Europe into many separate regions. Historically, they provided excellent transportation routes, but none was so important as to foster the development of a centralized state.14 Aside from the unification of much of the continent in Roman times and three brief interludes of centralized rule by Charlemagne, Napoleon, and Hitler, for centuries Europe was split into hundreds of highly independent polities. Intensive competition, exchange, interaction, and mutual emulation created hothouse conditions for innovation, the scale and vigor of which increased over time. xv

Prologue: Why the West?

Map 0.1 Eurasia: Earth’s biggest and most interconnected landmass.

Yet Europe was also part of the world’s biggest landmass, Eurasia (see Map 0.1). Its position at the extreme opposite end from the world’s richest and longest continuously thriving culture—China—was highly favorable: sufficiently isolated to avoid conquest, the European peoples nevertheless were exposed to insights, wisdom, technology, inventions, concepts, cultural achievements, religious visions, and knowledge from across Afro-Eurasia. A key fact was the Europeans’ willingness to embrace these riches. The cultural explanation for Europe’s extraordinary openness to outside influences is elusive, though it was surely conditioned by its geography and history. European intellectuals embraced the rationalistic heritage of the Greeks, the Roman imperial model and conception of the individual person enshrined in both thought and law, and several key values handed down by Judaism and Christianity. These values placed spiritual and moral goods above material ones, advocated resistance to unjust authority, substituted linear for cyclical time, called people to the improvement and even the perfection of themselves and their institutions, insisted on the intrinsic goodness of material reality, and defined the universe as rational and the human mind as capable of understanding it.15 The absence of centralized rule enabled Europeans to challenge authority and pursue innovation and change in every sphere of life. Features of European culture may have enabled Europeans to begin to liberate themselves from the constraints of climate and geography before the modern era. Bruce xvi

Prologue: Why the West?

Campbell shows that, while the Black Death of the mid-1300s devastated societies within the entire Eurasian landmass, northwestern European societies practically alone managed to weather the crisis and emerge stronger and more successful.16 Similarly, the Dutch Republic not only adapted to the Little Ice Age but even turned climatic adversity to its benefit, thriving in what is called the Dutch Golden Age.17 It is unclear what enabled societies to flourish in such difficult conditions, yet presumably culture must have been involved. In other words, while the environment sets certain parameters for the development of human societies, those societies have a range of possibilities determined not only by those impersonal forces but also by their own values, attitudes, traditions, institutions, and other factors. The Europeans’ willingness to learn from others and to try new things began in the Middle Ages, as Europeans traveled throughout Asia and translated hundreds of books from Hebrew, Arabic, and other languages, and then gradually increased in scale, scope, and intensity. Throughout the past thousand years, Europe was shaken repeatedly and, in later centuries, continuously by major transformations. Some were dramatic and swift; in other cases, small innovations gave way cumulatively to broader transformations. Over the centuries, they fused into a continuous transmutation,18 like a controlled chain reaction, an extraordinary concatenation that continues through to our day: a human society hardwired for constant innovation and change.

Definitions Several key concepts—Europe, the West, Western civilization, and civilization—should be defined at the outset. “Europe” is not only a geographical entity but also a social construct. No natural boundary separates it from Asia, and many people disagree about what countries it encompasses; in particular, Russia’s inclusion is often seen as problematic.19 Until the 1700s, Europe was usually called “Christendom,” a term that developed partly in opposition to the Islamic Middle East.20 Geopolitics involving alliances with the Ottoman Empire and the secularizing thought of the Enlightenment gradually fostered a preference for the term “Europe.” Montesquieu was the first, in 1748, to delineate Europe “as a geographical, cultural, political, and intellectual entity with its own history and its own distinctive features.” In 1752, the Scottish philosopher David Hume emphasized the importance to European culture of a strong middle class. Four years later, Voltaire argued that several other features distinguished western Europe from the Ottoman Empire, including climate, government, and religion, but especially the treatment of women. The European selfimage that began to emerge thus highlighted temperate climate, political liberty, property rights, an aristocratic check on despotic government, a dynamic middle class, the relatively high status of women, scientific advancement, and later economic prosperity.21 Scholars have also defined Europe with reference to the cultural streams that influenced its development, including ancient Egyptian and Babylonian foundations, the Persian doctrine of good and evil, the Arabic lyric sensibility, Judeo-Christian ideals of xvii

Prologue: Why the West?

self-examination and universal justice, Greek philosophy and the ideal of harmony, Celtic mysticism, Roman law and citizenship and ideals of empire, and Germanic selfgovernance, among many others.22 One historian has pointed to specific movements that transformed Europe—such as the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, nationalism, imperialism, communism, fascism, and totalitarianism—as a way to characterize what it means to be European.23 It is also possible to define Europe as those countries that participated in key historical events, such as the Crusades, the Age of Discovery, the Scientific Revolution, and the early development of mechanical printing, railroads, and political representation. To a large extent, the peoples from Portugal to Scotland, from Sweden to Poland, and from Russia to Gibraltar would fall under this classification. So would former European colonies like the United States and other lands considered part of the “West.” The idea of the “West” as a geographical and cultural entity opposed to the “East” emerged in ancient Greece. European intellectuals later took up this idea, often with derogatory attitudes, as of a superior West and an inferior East.24 In reaction, peoples of non-Western lands have rightly challenged such views.25 Such rhetorical disputes are unfortunate. Even so, the term “West” has come, often without any discussion or prejudice, to mean Europe, along with the United States and other European settler societies, like Canada and Australia.26 This is the sense implied here. “Western civilization” has the same meaning in this book as “the West,” though it also has a long and often checkered past. One scholar dismisses the very idea as a set of “intellectual constructs” devised for political and propaganda purposes.27 Still, most historians consider it a valuable concept. The “Western Civ” course emerged in the United States after World War I.28 With their European brethren slaughtering one another in the trenches, one could even say destroying their civilization (see Chapter 13), it seemed to many American academics that the essence of their culture had to be grounded in something better than modern European history. Scholars from several academic departments at Columbia University, therefore, anchored the development of the American ideals of liberty, the rule of law, political participation, and individual rights back through European history to ancient Greece and Rome or even ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Theirs was a vision of progress through time, which in an epoque of violent nationalism was meant “to keep civilization alive.”29 Civilization can mean several things. First, high standards of behavior, politeness, manners, self-restraint, and the like, in the sense in which Norbert Elias understood the “civilizing process.”30 Second, complex societies made possible by the domestication of plants and animals beginning 10,000 years ago and featuring sophisticated economies, cities, written language, sharply differentiated sociopolitical hierarchies, labor specialization and exploitation, multifaceted systems of mythology or religion, and significant artistic and scientific achievements.31 Third, coherent cultural spheres in which all the members share some specific attributes, such as values, outlooks, historical consciousness, linguistic and ethnic affinities, social norms, and sometimes political unity.32 A civilization in this sense is “a culture writ large,” such that “none of their constituent units can be fully understood without reference to the encompassing xviii

Prologue: Why the West?

civilization.”33 Such is how I understand “Western civilization” in the present book. The English historian Arnold Toynbee enumerated twenty-one distinct civilizations, from the Egyptian and Sumeric to the Chinese, Islamic, and Western, as well as the Andean and Mexic.34 Naturally, scholars have compiled a wide variety of such lists. Civilizations and cultures interact in many ways, both positive and negative. For example, their intermingling has stimulated innovation. William H. McNeill considers this the main source of progress in history.35 They have also collided. In the medieval and early modern period, Christian Europe and the nearby Muslim peoples defined each other as hostile camps—thus, the Dar al-Islam (territory of submission) and Dar al-Harb (territory of war), in Muslim terminology.36 Only in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries did some Muslims begin to view Europe as worthy of respect and emulation.37 Early modern Europeans tended to be far more curious and well informed about the Islamic world, yet they were equally hostile to it.38 Recent studies have illuminated these interactions in modern times. The American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington identified eight major “civilizations,” of which the three most important to him were the West, China, and the Islamic world. What divides them and also unites each of them separately, he argued, is culture and, in particular, religion. Yet these cultures are so different, and the populations, resources, and territories encompassing them so great, that violent clashes between them are nearly inevitable.39 The American political theorist Benjamin Barber has presented an equally grim analysis of the fate of civilizations. In his view, while many countries are fragmenting into petty religious and tribal enclaves perpetually at war with one another, much of the world is being transformed “into one homogenous global theme park, one McWorld tied together by communications, information, entertainment, and commerce.”40 One need not agree with either assessment to conclude that understanding the past development and present configuration of world cultures is an urgent necessity. This book aims to contribute to this understanding by providing a comparative history of Western civilization, the most dynamic modern culture.

xix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My gratitude cannot be adequately expressed to the colleagues and friends who have read and commented on parts of this book in their areas of expertise—Michael Alexander, George Huppert, Nanno Marinatos, Deirdre McCloskey, Rachel Fulton, Esther Klein, Guity Nashat, Roman Yukilevich, Richard John, Scott Palmer, Willemien Otten, Rick Fried, Dan Smith, Robert Johnston, Mark Liechty, Scott Smith, an anonymous reviewer, and the staff of the Core Course in the History of European Civilization at the University of Chicago. I am especially indebted to those who critiqued the entire manuscript— James Sack, Philip Devenish, Steven Marks, and four anonymous reviewers. Others kindly shared their knowledge and expertise, including Steven Fanning, Sergei Maksudov, Leon Fink, Leonid Trofimov, Donald Holtgrieve, Kenneth Sawyer, James Cracraft, Richard Levy, David Morgan, Martin Tracey, and J. P. Brown. Thanks to all the suggestions and insights of my dear friends and colleagues, this book has turned out far better than it could otherwise have been, though for any mistakes they missed or in which I have stubbornly persisted I bear full responsibility. I would also like to acknowledge Zane Elward and Amy Zimmerman for their diligent research assistance. My wife Sofia prompted me to investigate the rise of the West, helped me create a successful undergraduate colloquium as a laboratory for its exploration, and inspired me to write this book. She inspires me in every aspect of life—emotional, intellectual, and creative. I dedicate this book to her.

Further reading Acemoglu, Daron, and James Robinson. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. New York: Crown Publishers, 2012. Birch, Charles, and John B. Cobb, Jr. The Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Bosker, Maarten, Eltjo Buringh, and Jan Luiten van Zanden. “From Baghdad to London: Unraveling Urban Development in Europe, The Middle East, and North Africa, 800–1800.” Review of Economics and Statistics 95, no. 4 (October 2013): 1418–37. Campbell, Bruce. The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Daly, Jonathan. Historians Debate the Rise of the West. London and New York: Routledge, 2015. Daly, Jonathan. How Europe Made the Modern World: Creating the Great Divergence. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997. Headley, John M. The Europeanization of the World: On the Origins of Human Rights and Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

xx

Acknowledgments Huang, Philip C. C. “Development or Involution in Eighteenth-Century Britain and China? A Review of Kenneth Pomeranz’s ‘The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy.’ ” Journal of Asian Studies 61 (May 2002): 501–38. Jones, Eric. The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia, 3rd edn. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Karayalçin, Cem. “Divided We Stand, United We Fall: The Hume-North-Jones Mechanism for the Rise of Europe.” International Economic Review 49, no. 3 (August 2008): 973–97. McCloskey, Deirdre M. The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. McCloskey, Deirdre M. Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. McCloskey, Deirdre M. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016. McNeill, William H. The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963. Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Principe, Lawrence M. The Secrets of Alchemy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012.

xxi

xxii

CHAPTER 1 INNOVATION IN WORLD CIVILIZATION

In the years from 32,000 to 12,000 B.C., Cro-Magnon artists north and south of the Pyrenees Mountains painted thousands of pictures of horses, bulls, deer, and other large mammals on cave walls. Some remain among humankind’s most stupendously beautiful artistic creations (see PS 1.1.1).1 When Pablo Picasso visited a newly discovered cave near Lascaux in 1940, he exclaimed: “We have invented nothing.”2 In the subsequent Neolithic Age, humans across the globe subsisted in hunter-gather bands scarcely differing from one another in their technology and cultural achievements.3 Once civilizations emerged in the Near East, India, and China, however, Europe would have seemed a stagnant pond to any wanderer from the banks of the lower Nile or the Fertile Crescent. What can explain the rise of one civilization or the decline of another? Why were migrants from Asia 40,000 years ago able to build seaworthy boats and to colonize New Guinea and Australia, while apparently no other people on earth for the next 30,000 years managed to reproduce such a technological feat? It seems that innovation—conceiving and bringing to life brilliant ideas—can largely explain the rise of civilization and the successes of human cultures. People who devised ways to stretch available resources, to outsmart their enemies, to boost their confidence and camaraderie, to build up and deploy knowledge and information—in a word, to make themselves more powerful—flourished. Others who clung to routine and tradition and failed to open new pathways failed to keep up with the innovators. Nature endowed some places more richly than others, but resources do not explain success. Consider the third-biggest economy, Japan, with its limited resources, or the earth’s natural treasure chest, Russia, a land of more woe than fortune. No, more important than resources was the ability of peoples or societies to find it within themselves to achieve great things. Available resources, geography, climate, values and beliefs, habits and traditions, talented leadership, individual genius, and blind luck all played a part in the success or rise of a given people. Yet success can follow only if several of these things line up and lead to innovation. Just as random mutations that enter a species’ genome can enable it to thrive in a given environment, so random innovations that strengthen a people’s cultural makeup can determine its success in its corner of the world. I write “random innovations” in the sense that humans are always trying new ways of doing things in the hope of making our lives easier, happier, healthier, and more abundant, but only the occasional innovation proves historically pivotal. Indeed, as with genetic mutations, the vast majority turns out useless or even harmful. Indeed, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues—doubtless rightly—that “no culture could assimilate all the novelty people produce without dissolving into chaos.”4 The key difference, though, is that biological species do not 1

The Rise of Western Power

arbitrarily reject genetic mutations with the capacity to increase their adaptability, whereas human societies throughout history have repeatedly spurned potentially valuable innovations. Thus, after Europeans invented mechanical printing around 1450, all the major non-European countries refused for some 300 years to adopt that breakthrough. Such resistance to change surely hindered their development.

Prehistory Humankind’s first innovations contributed to all later achievements.5 Despite fragmentary evidence and ongoing debates, researchers agree on the following. Around 7 million years ago, our remotest ancestors began to speciate, or separate genetically, from other hominids in sub-Saharan Africa. Their descendants could both swing from branches and walk upright by around 4 million years ago. They continued to evolve through several stages, some of which bear exotic names like Australopithecus africanus. Homo habilis (“handy-man”) began crafting simple stone tools in East Africa some 2.3 million years ago, thanks to the gradual evolution of their hands. No other hominid ever figured out how to do this. (This does not mean that hominids cannot be taught to flake stone, something Bonobos or “pygmy chimpanzees” have learned to do since 1990.6) Roughly a half-million years later, H. erectus began migrating to Asia and then to Europe.7 So far, we have noted three big innovations: walking upright, making tools, and probably relatively complex thought, all thanks to favorable genetic mutations. It is also possible, as some scholars now argue, that our ancestors began from the time of early tool-making to use hand gestures to convey messages, a skill that may have preceded and influenced the far later development of vocal language. To take one example of gestural communication that remains with us even today, human babies learn to point fairly early, whereas other primates never do.8 Later still—at least 790,000 years ago—one or more beings of the genus homo, probably including erectus, learned to harness and then to make fire.9 The world’s first great nonbiological advance, it also introduced the first powerful tool. Fire could be used to clear forests, to ward off predators, to maintain warmth, to illumine the darkness, and to unlock nutrition from many foods, particularly tubers and meat, and to make them easier to chew and to preserve, contributing to neurological expansion and the emergence of Homo sapiens.10 Yet it could also destroy habitats and kill populations if improperly used. All human transformations, which substitute tools or ideas for instinctive behaviors and thus separate us from the reign of nature, are two-edged swords. An essential feature of being human is to decide how to act and what to value at each step, rather than to follow clear-cut instincts, as our nonhuman fellow creatures do. Our tools, including conceptual ones, enable us to overpower animals and some humans to overpower other humans. They allow us to come to terms with our environment in myriad ways, both good and bad. The mastery of fire to some extent therefore prefigured not only the rise 2

Innovation in World Civilization

of great civilizations through innovation but also the endless human story of conquest and subjugation.11 The next breakthrough came perhaps 300,000 years ago through biological evolution, when anatomically modern humans, or H. sapiens, began to evolve at various sites across Africa.12 They had more rounded skulls, less protruding brow ridges, greater intellectual ability, and smaller, far less muscular and powerful bodies than their ancestors or the contemporaneous Neanderthals, who evolved in parallel to H. sapiens,13 and with whom there is now evidence of some cross-mating.14 Nature reoriented H. sapiens’s physiology from strength to intelligence. These developments took tens of thousands of years to bear fruit. Our ancestors’ greatest transformations either enhanced their power or increased their ability to use information. The first two major advances so far mentioned—control of fire and evolution toward H. sapiens—are instances of each. Fire constituted a powerful new tool, while becoming modern humans allowed our ancestors to process vastly more information. Then, between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, spoken language emerged, thanks to the evolution of the necessary vocal apparatus.15 No transformation has been more momentous. Complex language enabled our ancestors to work better together, to share insights, to fashion more sophisticated tools, to interpret the universe, and to store and to pass on knowledge and culture—in fact to become human. It is possible that artistic expressions, such as the crafting of jewelry, the preparation of pigments, and symmetrical etchings, some dating back 300,000 years, contributed to the evolution of language.16 Another recent theory argues that it was the repeated and painstaking fashioning of tools that permitted language to emerge over thousands of years.17 (Like all human advances, it naturally has a “dark side,” for example, unavoidable miscommunication.18) H. sapiens proved extraordinarily adaptive to diverse environments. Moreover, they began to use culture to replace biology. While nonhuman animals follow their instincts in nearly all instances, humans began to develop cultural patterns, including customs, lore, traditions (like burial rituals), values, and ideas to guide their behavior. In this way, each succeeding generation learned from the former one and, occasionally, was better equipped to adapt than their forebears. Their adaptability and mastery of tools and fire made them formidable hunters. From roughly 125,000 years ago, our ancestors hunted to extinction the megafauna on all the inhabited continents, including mammoths, giant armadillos, wooly rhinoceroses, and sabre-toothed tigers.19 They also began to catch fish and craft stone tools displaying regular patterns. Gradually, tools serving a much wider set of functions were crafted, including projectile points and instruments for engraving, cutting, drilling, and piercing.20 It would probably have been difficult to fashion such specialized devices without language, which made possible cooperation on a high level. The creatures with these capacities formed a new subspecies, ours: H. sapiens sapiens. Many paleoanthropologists call this transformation the “human revolution.”21 Early human societies in some places achieved extraordinary cultural mastery. The most stunning signs of this development are the cave paintings mentioned above. A hunting scene, possibly involving a narrative structure, dating to 44,000 years ago has 3

The Rise of Western Power

been discovered in Indonesia. The scene, moreover, may depict therianthropes, or shapeshifting humans, which would make it “the first known indication of religious-like thinking—the ability to conceive of non-real entities.”22 Even so, the most sophisticated known cave art is still to be found in southern France and northern Spain, some of them stunningly beautifully preserved depictions of animals dating to 34,000 years ago and many possibly fixing astronomical data.23 Nevertheless, it seems likely that such artistry emerged simultaneously throughout Afro-Eurasia and has either simply not yet been discovered or has not survived as extensively outside Europe. All such cultures must have also developed poetry, music, mythological stories, and religious beliefs that are now lost. Around the time of the first cave paintings, the longevity of H. sapiens sapiens increased sharply, followed by the extinction of his closest competitor in Europe, H. neanderthalis. Lacking both complex language (scholars debate whether they could talk at all) and sophisticated tools, the Neanderthals apparently could not survive for long in the same habitats as our ancestors. (Scientists are uncertain about the ancestral relations between these two species and exactly how much genetic material they had in common; it may have been up to 25 percent.24) Scholars have put forward many theories about their demise. The most convincing emphasizes that they were less adaptable than our ancestors, perhaps in part because they lived in far smaller social groupings.25 Over the next several thousand years, our ancestors constructed more and more refined tools and instruments. Bones etched with tick marks dating to 25,000 years ago may have served as a form of calendar. Sewing needles began to appear from the same era, and pants, shirts, and shoes sewn from animal skins and dating from a few thousand years later have been discovered near Moscow. Spear throwers appeared next, and by 15,000 years ago spears, hooks, and nets grew more common. The most sophisticated weapons of prehistoric times, bows and arrows, were invented around 10,000 B.C. Periodic contacts during millennia among communities scattered throughout the globe’s inhabited spaces must have resulted in fruitful exchanges of technology and lore. Innovation occurred too slowly for one community to advance far beyond any other in material capacity. The next great human transformation, the domestication of plants and animals, began around 10,000 years ago. It started in the Near East, the region boasting thirty-two of the world’s fifty-six most productive wild grasses (compared to only six in East Asia), and four of the five major domesticated animals—sheep, goats, pigs, and cows—compared to only one in East Asia. The terrestrial biosphere was transformed from wild habitats into one dominated by humans and their livestock, many provisioned with domesticated crops. These ingenious farmers thus gained control over “two storehouses of nutrients— soil and atmosphere.”26 Thanks to these reliable sources of food, complex societies emerged with writing, metallurgy, sophisticated technology, and specialized systems of government. Over the following half-millennium, sedentary agriculture spread across Eurasia and became the economic foundation of most societies.27 (Agriculture arose independently, but later, in Africa, Australia, and the Americas.28) This shift has been called “the first energy revolution” (the second was the Industrial Revolution 10,000 years later; see Chapter 11).29 4

Innovation in World Civilization

Map 1.1 Civilizations first emerged in the ancient Near East, Egypt, India, and China.

Our ancestors went from living in small communities of hunters and gatherers to larger, more complex societies. Most of their members consumed more uniform, grainbased diets and ate less animal protein. They also suffered from more diseases, grew weaker, and led shorter, less healthy lives. Yet elites were able to emerge and to dispose of surplus agricultural production and develop plans and visions for concerted political and economic activity. Specialization in learning, technological innovation, manufacturing, and resource management also arose. It did not take long for larger communities to form. The first city on record, Jericho, near the Jordan River, has been dated to roughly 9,000 B.C.30 Others soon followed not only around the eastern Mediterranean but also in the Indus Valley, in northern China (see Map 1.1), and later in Africa and the New World.31 This burst of creativity marked a qualitative leap forward, the emergence of a new being. Our earlier biological ancestors fashioned stone tools, made and wielded fire, and probably communicated with rather sophisticated hand gestures. In these ways, they differed significantly from all other living creatures. Yet the gap between them and H. sapiens sapiens was far greater. For well over 1 million years, the first members of the Homo species learned to fashion slightly more efficient tools and possibly to communicate in more effective ways. Then suddenly, in the space of 100,000 or perhaps only 50,000 years, anatomically modern humans—in reality the only true humans—invented complex verbal language, created stunningly sophisticated art, domesticated plants and animals, founded the great religions, and established the early civilizations. In all sobriety, it is hard to see much in common between these beings and their biological ancestors.32 5

The Rise of Western Power

The Ancient Near East In southern Mesopotamia, by 5,000 B.C., olives and grapes were cultivated and wine was fermented. A thousand years later, artisans invented the plow and the wheel, at first to make pottery and then for cartage. A huge technological advance, which the preColumbian civilizations of the Americas lacked, the wheel spread throughout Eurasia. Around 3000 B.C., ancient Sumerians learned to melt tin and copper and to cast them together as bronze. The range of practical and beautiful objects that could be made quickly from the new substance was astonishing, at least for people used to hacking stone into the desired forms. The technology spread widely, reaching Europe by the late third millennium B.C. and Africa and China not much later. At the start of the Bronze Age, pictographic systems of writing—hieroglyphs and cuneiform—began to emerge in Egypt and Babylonia. Over time, they grew more refined and expressive. The two civilizations also developed simple but effective methods and practices in astronomy, metrology, and mathematics.33 By the late third millennium, law codes began to appear in Sumer. The best preserved of them, which was promulgated by the Babylonian ruler Hammurabi, dates to around 1790 B.C. Most of its 282 laws concern crimes against person and property (including slaves and livestock); many also regulate the institution of marriage (see PS 1.1.1). Since most of the Egyptian writings on papyrus perished from the effects of time, one cannot understand the ancient Egyptian society and culture fully. From an analysis of indirect evidence, however, Martin Bernal has argued that their contributions enabled ancient Greece—and by extension Western civilization—to flourish.34 His assertions have sparked an intense and ongoing scholarly debate.35 Whatever its eventual outcome, few scholars would deny that the sophisticated technologies and institutions of modern times could not have emerged without ancient Middle Eastern and North African social, economic, political, cultural, and scientific foundations.36 Yet in these great ancient civilizations, something was missing. Writing was the preserve of only highly educated people. Perhaps the centralized nature of political and economic power gradually impeded further development. These societies had hit a dead end, it seems, even before mysterious “Sea Peoples” from the north invaded and conquered them around 1200 B.C.37 Henceforth, smaller cultures would bear the mantle of innovation. Some contributions were relatively small, others great. The Celts, for example, created the first pan-European Iron Age culture by 300 B.C. and left behind a powerful storytelling tradition, which included the heroic tales of King Arthur and Tristan.38 More important was the discovery of how to smelt iron, first in Anatolia or the north Caucasus and then throughout the eastern Mediterranean and Africa and beyond, by the twelfth century B.C. Though weaker than bronze, iron could be sharpened. Also, iron ore was far more abundant than copper or tin.39 Around the same time, the Phoenician people established a seagoing trading culture on the easternmost coast of the Mediterranean. For this purpose, they invented the galley ship with two rows of oarsmen (the bireme) and, far more important, a phonemic system of writing dating to roughly 1000 B.C. Unlike hieroglyphics, which 6

Innovation in World Civilization

consisted of many hundreds of ideographic characters, the Phoenician script is limited to twenty-two letters (see Chapter 6). People with less leisure time than elites could readily master it. Since each letter represented a distinct phonetic sound, other languages could easily adapt it. The Greek alphabet, which added vowel sounds, probably made possible the flourishing of ancient Greek culture.40 The next set of transformations occurred in what the German philosopher Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age. During this period, from 800 to 200 B.C., thinkers and prophets in China, India, the Middle East, and Europe developed most of the great religious, philosophical, and ethical systems of world history. These included Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle.41 No other half-millennium has seen a more creative profusion of ways of apprehending the world and the human place within it. “Since then,” Jaspers adds, “there has been only one entirely new, spiritually and materially incisive event . . . the age of science and technology [of the modern West].”42 Some Axial worldviews aimed at universal applicability; others related mostly to a small population or territory. Several laid the foundations for some of the world’s great civilizations, including China, India, and Persia. From two of them, Israel and Greece, flowed great cultural streams shaping much of European civilization. The ancient Hebrews were the first people on earth who experienced a concrete, personal, loving relationship with a being utterly beyond human understanding and completely transcending all contingent reality, whom they called Yahweh.43 Most humans, it seems, have perceived mystery in the world, a reality beyond what we see and feel. They have represented such things as forces, spirits, beings, even persons. Yet none previously had experienced this reality as a single all-powerful deity, who created all things and personally and continually intervenes in the historical world in an effort to perfect creation. Scholars, recognizing the influence of Judaism on the rise of the West, have pointed to its various specific contributions to Western civilization, such as the first consciously developed written history of a people,44 respect for manual labor, the subordination of nature to humanity, and a sense of linear rather than cyclical and nonprogressing time.45 Judaism also contributed to the rise of the other two Abrahamic religions—Christianity and Islam. Moreover, without a personal sense of being chosen by a creator who wishes to perfect the world through his creatures, it is hard to imagine either Christians or Muslims taking up the stupendous challenges of spreading their faith across the globe.

The Classical World The ancient Athenians supplied the tools of modern science. They, more than any other ancient people, pursued a rational and systematic investigation of the world. No doubt the Greek achievements would have been impossible without Mesopotamian and Egyptian cultural foundations and probably even specific contacts—Plato and many other cultivated fourth-century Greeks studied in Egypt and marveled at its 7

The Rise of Western Power

culture.46 Yet the Greeks integrated these precious influences to conjure a unique cultural synthesis. It occurred in the bosom of a highly practical society. A mercantile, seafaring people emerging from a broader Greek civilization with hundreds of city-states and colonies— mostly facing the sea—all around the Mediterranean and Black Sea basins, the Athenians established the world’s first rule-governed, participatory democracy. The Greeks’ farflung trading network was probably harder for rulers to control and tax than the Persian land-based empire and thus more conducive to the development of limited government and the rule of law.47 In this context, the major Greek philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle (see PS 1.3.1 and 1.3.2), subjected to rigorous, methodical analysis nearly every aspect of life and reality. First, they established rules of thought—logic and rhetoric— and then worked their way through fundamental questions of esthetics, ethics, law, medicine, politics, faith, social relations, psychology, metaphysics, nature, and many other areas of knowledge. Other cultures had posed questions about the world but none ever furnished such lucid answers to them.48 One can even argue that no other humans on earth ever again achieved such an intellectual transformation, except the Europeans with the Scientific Revolution (see Chapter 8), which itself would have been impossible without the foundations laid in Athens 2,000 years before. Any civilization that has truly assimilated ancient Greek thought has experienced a mental revolution. Yet this was rare. Islamic scholars drank rich drafts from the wells of Greek thought, and their brilliant achievements in philosophy and science owe much to that elixir. Yet most eventually recoiled in fear of the dangers that relying on pure rationality posed to their religious faith. The Greek legacy did not end with Athens. Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.) conquered a vast empire from North Africa to the Indus Valley. Egyptian, Persian, and Indian culture contributed to the rise of Hellenistic civilization. Its most important city, Alexandria in northern Egypt, founded in 331 B.C., became a great center of learning. It boasted the world’s first research library, where Greek, Egyptian, and Jewish scholars made important breakthroughs. Around 300 B.C., Euclid