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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45550 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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With all due respect, where was China's industrial revolution then? How come they got conquered by the warlike people who keep murdering each other over small bits of land and not the other way around?

Ian Morrison's Why the West Rules - For Now offers the following explanation

  1. China is at the heart of East Asian civilization. At the very least, it is where civilization spreads outward from, and other nations in the area are at its periphery.

  2. The people at the periphery tend to be fairly good at fighting the people closer to the civilizational center as they can exploit institutional weaknesses more dynamically. The adoption of better war-making technology or theories is not an easy thing to do, especially if politics is lethal.

  3. When you conquer the center, you become it and thus start succumbing to the same flaws you exploited.

As for your question about the IR, he argues this.

  1. Parts of China were on par with Europe's most industrialized areas even as late as the 1700s (edit: 1600s, not 1700s. My mistake).

  2. You need both willpower and the ability to industrialize. China had so many people that it could simply add reliable human power instead of capital-heavy machinery that might be unreliable. Europe, on the other hand, was caught in centuries of war which encouraged nations to and their citizens to constantly try to improve their technology. The phrase "Necessity is the mother of invention" also works in a genetic sense, as what you need influences what you make. If you don't need to industrialize, then you won't.

Parts of China were on par with Europe's most industrialized areas even as late as the 1700s.

Do you know where to read more on this?

Whoops, looks like I misremembered. It was the 1600s, not the 1700s. My mistake. First, I'll quote Morrison:

Calculating Eastern [energy capture] scores is more difficult still, partly because scholars such as Cook and Smil were concerned only with the region of the world that had the highest energy capture, not with regional comparisons. We can begin, though, from the United Nations (2006) estimate that in 2000 CE the average Japanese person consumed 104,000 kilocalories per day (less than half the Western level). In 1900 the Eastern core was still largely agrarian, with Japanese oil use and even coal-powered industry in its infancy. Japanese energy capture may have been around 49,000 kcal/cap/day (again less than half of Western consumption). Across the previous five centuries coal use and agricultural output had risen steadily. In 1600 productivity was higher in the Yangzi Delta than anywhere in the West, but by 1750 Dutch and English agriculture had caught up and Eastern real wages were comparable to those in southern Europe rather than wealthy northern Europe. I have estimated energy capture in the Eastern core around 29,000 kcal/cap/day in 1400 and 36,000 in 1800, with the bulk of the increase coming in the eighteenth century.

The context here is that he's basically trying to estimate the "advanced" nature of a civilization by how much energy it uses.

I don't know why Europe industrialised while China didn't, the latter are in the same boat as other more warlike peoples for failing to do so.

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