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Comment by riazrizvi | Hacker News Reader

> "There was once a workman who made a glass cup that was unbreakable. So he was given an audience of the Emperor with his invention; he made Caesar give it back to him and then threw it on the floor. Caesar was as frightened as could be. But the man picked up his cup from the ground: it was dented like a bronze bowl; then he took a little hammer out of his pocket and made the cup quite sound again without any trouble. After doing this he thought he had himself seated on the throne of Jupiter, especially when Caesar said to him: 'Does anyone else know how to blow glass like this?' Just see what happened. He said not, and then Caesar had him beheaded. Why? Because if his invention were generally known we should treat gold like dirt. " (Satyricon 51)

This apocryphal story on economic incentives vs progressive incentives is as relevant today as it was 2000 years ago.

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The rise of technology was not so much the birth of new capacities, but the removal of old constraints.

China, despite a much larger and more educated population, did not spark the industrial revolution. Their feedback loops were too stable, their elites too competent.

From the perspective of the old power hierarchy, the industrial revolution was a disaster.

The nobility floated on that great cruel ocean first charted by Malthus, an ocean which began to boil.

How much of the Chinese/Japanese vs Western Europe dichotomy in term of technological development do you think is due to geography (Europe has been fractured, politically, for all of history, mostly due to geography, I think, whereas China and Japan have both been comparatively unified and stable for thousands of years). My thinking is that this has a lot to do with how European elites were not able to prevent accumulation of new technology and ideas, whereas Chinese and Japanese elites were (and did).

And then I guess a follow up question would be: do you have an opinion on why the scientific revolution happened in Western Europe and not in the Mediterranean, which is similarly fractured, but also better situated for exchange of technology and ideas (being connected to Asia and Western Europe).

How did geography have an effect here? I don't see what you mean.

And China hasn't really had too much stability. It's always been full of revolutions, competing empires, dynastic changes, warring states, shifts in power, changes in ethnic ruling class, and so on. Go through a list of deadliest wars and revolutions and a good chunk of them are in what is today China.

China has been a largely continuous political entity for about 8,000 years.

It's been invaded at least in part a few times (Mongols, 13th c., English, 18th c., and Japanese, 20th c., most especially), but retained its overall identity and either assimilated (Mongols) or repelled (English, Japanese) the invaders, eventually.

Contrast Europe which has seen vast shifts in control, and utter replacements or eradication of local culture or tribes multiple times, going to prehistoric times, to the present (past century certainly, past few decades quite arguably). There have been very few constant borders or identities, certainly not on the scale of China.

Even written language in China is still largely intelligible to moderns, from a thousand years ago or more. English, more than about 400 years ago is almost wholly foreign:

Hwæt,ic swefna cyst secgan wylle, hwæt me gemætte to midre nihte siþþan reordberend reste wunedon.

("Behold, I wish to tell the best of dreams which I dreamt at the middle of the night, after speakers remained in rest." https://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/stella/readings/OE/ROOD.HTM)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_China#/media/File:T...

Watch that graphic to see the evolution of the extent of "China" since the Zhou Dynasty in 1000 BC. It occupies a fraction of the current extent of China. So there were lots of wars, and lots of revolutions before modern Chinese borders were established.

I get that Chinese have had more cultural and language cohesion, but that's at least partially because certain dynasties and regions won over these other regions in large swaths and history is written by the winners.

And a nearly comparable (and orchestrated!) time-lapse evolutionary map of Europe, though extending back to only 400 BCE:

https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=UY9P0QSxlnI

Note that China was under a largely single and unified set of linguistic, cultural, and political organisation throughout the entire 3,000 year period you depict. The "modern" map of Europe has changed dramatically just in the past 30 years, let alone the past 100 - 200. Entire linguistic and cultural tribes have completely vanished, save for a few pitiful relic remains. Political continuity has been nil (Greece, Macedonia, Byzantine Empire, Rome, Moorish Spain, the Gauls, Britons, Celts, and Germanic tribes, the Rus? (Swedish invaders, BTW), Holy Roman and Austro-Hungarian Empires? Soviet Bloc? Independent Baltic and Balkan states? Ireland, under English subjugation since 1601, the north to this day. Poland as the pinball kid of Prussia, Russia, and Germany.

That's Europe.

Addenda: The extreme extents of the Chinese empire varied greatly. The bulk of the population, then as now, was in the eastern coastal region, largely the Yellow and Yangze river floodplains.

Oh, sure, I'm not arguing that Europe was less tumultuous than China. There were many, many schisms, and wars however. Had some of these civil wars or invasions from Mongolia, Japan, etc within China had gone a different way, they could have ended up as fractured as ancient Rome.

Here's a few hundred wars that occurred during the past couple millennia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_wars_and_battl...

Quantitative assessment's a poor qualitative metric at best, and I've not done a tally, but conflict's not been unknown in Europe either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_conflicts_in_Europe

I'm not disputing that. I'm arguing that China's history hasn't been some "straight line" since 4000 B.C. It's been a very rocky road.

And I'm saying it's been a continuous curve, straight or not.

The language, culture, identity, philosophical and religious beliefs, government, urban centres, technologies, currency, writing systems, etc., have persisted in a largely unbroken continuum or chain. There are points at which one or the other makes some jump from one form to another, but there's never been a wholesale wipe of one system to another. Over a period of 4,000 years of recorded history and arguably going back even further.

The West has nothing comparable to offer. Not in Egypt, not in Mesopotamia, not in Rome, not in England, not in France, not in Germany, not in Scandinavia. Maybe in Persia or India. Vietnam may have an older continuous civilisation. Japan does not, though it comes close.

The opening sentence of an arbitrarily selected webpage on ancient China makes this case: "Ancient China produced what has become the oldest extant culture in the world."

https://www.ancient.eu/china/

To be clear: I'm not some defender of the present regime in China. I'm only casually aware of its general history, geography, and culture. But as I study it the vastness of the culture, in both time and space, has impressed the hell out of me. And it seems that this isn't as widly known or appreciated as it could be.

> English, more than about 400 years ago is almost wholly foreign

Are you suggesting this text is from the 17th century? I'm no expert but this much Germanic influence seems much older.

Indeed it's much older:

"The poem is recorded in its fullest form in the Vercelli Book, a late-tenth-century West Saxon manuscript which was left in Northern Italy in Anglo-Saxon times. Vercelli is on the road to Rome; the manuscript was either abandoned or forgotten by a pious Anglo-Saxon pilgrim. An Old Northumbrian version of part of the poem also appears, carved in runic script, on the late-seventh-/early-eighth-century"

Source: https://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/stella/readings/OE/ROOD.HTM

It’s Anglo Saxon, which much older. With a bit of effort a modern speaker can read Chaucer which is about 1300

I'm suggesting it's 1) English and 2) more than 400 years old.

> Even written language in China is still largely intelligible to moderns ....

That's largely because Chinese characters themselves didn't change, even though the underlying sound and grammar changed. In your English example, imagine "ic" is written as "I", "nihte" as "night", and so on, so that every word is written as the modern spelling of its descendant word. It will be much easier to guess its meaning.

True, and an interesting contrast in properties of Western alphabets vs. Eastern logosyllabic writing.

Advantage West: a compact, typeset- and keyboard-friendly characterset with a writing style that generally allows sounding out of unknown words.

Advantage East: a pronunciation-independent mapping of ideas allowing mutually unintelligible spoken language across either space (Japan, to some extent Korea, as well as modern Chinese provinces, particularly Mandarin vs. Cantonese) or time (modern vs. ancient) to at least largely understand one another.

Much of the shift in written English parallels changes in spoken English. Chinese doens't have that problem. But it's far harder to learn and type or encode in modern computers, where it is not letterforms but encodings standing for letterforms which are stored and projected via fonts and Unicode codepoints.

Chinese, as a tonal language is so dependent on inflection that my own primitive attempts to pronounce even simple phrases are not understood based on my incorrect tonality.

Contrast with various Germanic languages (German, English, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish), which vary greatly in pronunciation and orthography. German is spelled and spoken logically. Danish is spelled much like German but not pronounced the same. Norwegian pronunciation differs, but its spelling at least corresponds to that pronunciation. Swedish is pronounced very differently, and the spelling doesn't much conform.

All share common linguistic roots.

Each approach of writing and alphabet appears to be brittle in its own ways.

>Contrast Europe which has seen vast shifts in control, and utter replacements or eradication of local culture or tribes multiple times, going to prehistoric times, to the present (past century certainly, past few decades quite arguably). There have been very few constant borders or identities, certainly not on the scale of China.

Except you wouldn't contrast that. Those same events have happened in the region of China on the same scale as continental Europe as a whole. Entire societies have risen, conquered lands, and vanished.

The Manchu are the most notable example for coming in from the Northeast and conquering China. They had their own unique culture and language. Native speakers of their language are now countable on one hand.

The Tangut are another interesting example. They had a very unique culture and writing system unlike anything else and had their own empire in the middle of China. They were wiped out/eventually absorbed by Mongols and were completely forgotten for centuries until their writings were recently rediscovered.

Written Chinese today is an evolution of only one of the many, many cultures that formed what China is today. Even Japanese people can read classic Chinese texts with just a little practice, but they're definitely a separate society and always have been.

You could also argue western European cultures are all just Rome since they retain parts of the Latin language and writing system and can make out some words if they squint enough.

That text is over 1000 years old.

This is Shakespeare, from 1599:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus Hath told you Caesar was ambitious: If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.

Hardly foreign

That's a modernised version! Because the original isn't easy to read, I guess. Punctuation, spelling, letterforms, the alphabet, have all changed since then. Pronunciation too. The original is something like this ('f' is the closest I can get to the old 's'):

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears:

I come to bury Cæfar, not to praife him:

The euill that men do, liues after them,

The good is oft enterred with their bones,

So let it be with Cæfar. The Noble Brutus,

Hath told you Cæfar was Ambitious:

If it were fo, it was a greeuous Fault,

And greeuoufly hath Cæfar anfwer'd it.

Heere, vnder leaue of Brutus, and the reft ...

https://iiif.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/iiif/image/74391696-b1e6-4b56...

https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/doc/JC_F1/page/13/

I think these days it should be OK to assume that people's browsers will render a long s directly: « praiſe ».

I'm given to understand (as I neither speak nor read Chinese) that a fairly typical high-school or college educated modern Chinese can at least read some Confucious (551-479 BCE). There is no comparable English-language case as 1) Old English didn't exist until the 5th century -- the Britons of Roman time (43 CE) were Celts and spoke Celtic, 2) The Latin alphabet hadn't been imported, and 3) literary tradition was slight -- largely oral.

Even taking the tack of following Germanic Anglo-Saxon culture buys you little -- spoken and written language would be unintelligible.

A Western college graduate of ancient languages today might understand Latin, which could get you to 240 BCE, or possibly, with a different alphabet, Greek, whose earliest writings, the Illiad and the Odyssey, date to the 6th century BCE in written form. But that's not a common skill.

Greek and Latin had been taught, as part of the high school curriculum, through the 1940s or 50s, but not generally any longer. Keep in mind that high school graduation rates in 1900 in the US were about 6%, lower than Ph.D. attainment rates today.

> Even written language in China is still largely intelligible to moderns, from a thousand years ago or more. English, more than about 400 years ago is almost wholly foreign:

You're pretty much equating English and Europe when talking about language, which in this case is very wrong. I, as a spaniard, can read poetry from a thousand years ago perfectly fine, and we do indeed do it in school.

In 1000 CE, the principle language of Spain was Arabic.

Though Spanish, Castillian, etc., were spoken. Well, back until 210 CE:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Spanish_languag...

Spanish (or the dozens of romance languages and dialects that would eventually converge to it, anyway) predated Arabic in the peninsula, and survived it. As a consequence, we study arabic presence as an invasion/influence that came and left, rather than "what our culture was" at the time - whether that's fair or not is an entirely different topic, but the point is that I can perfectly read the literature made in romance languages since it hasn't changed that much. Even latin would be somewhat understandable.

I would say the south eastern part of china has been relatively recognizable borders for a long time. Modern china is the result of Qing expansion around the 1650s. Take a look at the historical map by year - it's really amazing how quickly things changed at the turn of the century. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWqVzZnwnOk

Your reasoning is actually an argument for why Japan developed like Europe, and that's indeed largely what happened. Have a read on sengoku- and meiji period. Japan's trajectory was very different from China's. What you probably mean is the 250ish year stable edo period under the Tokugawa warlord control when the emperor was stripped of power.

The Emperors were stripped of power back in the 12th Century, after the Genpei War and the formation of the Kamakura Shogunate. They remained stripped of power for almost the next seven hundred years; the power struggles were about who would get to be Shogun.

(The logic of the Meiji "Restoration" was essentially "Let's get rid of the archaic Shogunate system that has dominated Japan in one way or another for the last seven hundred years, and pretend we're handing power back to the Emperor where it really belongs.")

yes. what I wanted to say is that the emperor in Japan had a minor role for the longest time, i.e. it had a middle age that was not unlike Europe, with a steady development of warfare techniques and other parts of culture, as well as a constant trickle of foreign influences. Until edo period, where Tokugawa Shogunate was able to grab all power and basically freeze development and shut down borders. In Meiji, Japan industrialized rapidly under a US-backed emperor and with Germany as an ideal. There's a deeper reason why Japan wanted to become a European-style colonial power - because it was already on that path before the 250y stasis anyways, almost taking on Imperial China during Sengoku-jidai.

The general form of this question, or at least one version of it ("why did the Industrial Revolution occur in England and not in China, which had developed a vastly larger set of technologies far earlier") is known as the Needham Question, after sinologist Joseph Needham, author of Science and Civilisation in China, an epic 30+ volume work covering Chinese invention and technology, begun in 1954 and still in process. (Needham himself died in the 1990s.) There's a fascinating Wikipedia article on the topic, and if you can find a copy of the completed volumes (many college/university libraries have it), it's a treat.

The general question of the how, why, and when of the Industrial Revolution has fascinated historians, technologists, and economists for ages. Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms,[1] and numerous other works address this.

Geographic determinism has become tremendously unpopular among historians, though elements of it carry weight with me. Of China and Japan vs. Europe and Britain, there are several factors:

- Political unity vs. disunity, as you note.

- Crops. Wheat is suitable to individual, independent farming. Rice requires community coordination.

- Hydrology. The Chinese empire effectively started as a large civil water works management bureaucracy. Outside Egypt and Rome's aqueducts, there was no similarly-scoped coordination in the West.

- Watersheds. Europe's rivers diverge from the interior, China's flow in parallel to relatively proximate mouths. Political boundaries in Europe have typically conformed reasonably well to watersheds, though allied / opposed alignments have changed with time. Even today, many county-level jurisdictions correspond to local watersheds. And in both China and Europe, virtually all heavy transport until modern times was along rivers or canals, if not sea or lakes.

- While Britain and Japan are both large islands near continental empires, the geology is utterly different: sedimentary with vast coal deposits, and volcanic with virtually no fossil fuels. While each island was tremendously politically stable, resistant to invasions, England could fuel growth of iron, glass, and steam industries, Japan could not. England was generally relatively wealthy, Japan was one of the poorest countries prior to industrialisation.

- China has long been politically unified (if subject to occasional invasions), Europe has long been politically fractured. China could shut down innovation and foreign trade. No such global policies were possible in Europe.

Within Europe, the distribution of coal is almost wholly in the north: Wales, England, a tiny patch in northern Spain, some in France, and heavy deposits in Germany and Poland. Southern Germany is very fuel-poor, excepting petroleum (not very handy in pre-industrial times) in Silesia, Romania, and Baku (Russia). Coal fueled metalurgy, glassmaking, and eventually steam power in England.

England's flat terrain and ready access to the sea (no part of Great Britain is more than 60 miles from the coast) made transport of the bulky fuel by ship viable. Overland transport wasn't an option -- firewood fuel locally gathered was far more attractive. A similar situation existed in the US where coal didn't overtake wood as a fuel until the 1880s. Rail transport finally made hauling coal from mountain-based mines in Apallachia possible, but benefited greatly from advances in steelmaking (Bessemer process, 1860s), allowing stronger, less fracture-prone rails, and stronger, more powerful locomotives. Rail is effectively canals-on-land, the first truly viable overland freight tansport mode.

There are many other factors, there's tremendous dispute over all of this, and as I've hinted, there's a large literature. I obviously find the geological argument at least plausible in many regards. Given the lack of testability, final adjudication of the question is unlikely.

________________________________

Notes:

1. Clark teaches a course at UC Davis on economic history before the Industrial Revolution, which touches somewhat on this (the principle focus is Europe). A corrected playlist for the YouTube lectures, in proper order, is here: https://pastebin.com/raw/bgKkGyjt

Clearly by the 13th Century China could be considered a technological forerunner, but then the Mongols took over. I suspect the cultural tendencies of the Chinese civil service that drove innovation just couldn’t weather the merging of cultures and the scholarly edge of Chinese culture was collateral damage.

I'm still very weak on my Chinese history, but it was the turning-inward of the Ming dynasty (15th century), not the Mongol invasions, which precipitated the halt.

Also (as already mentioned in this thread), the asset-sheltering tendency of established power groups, halting the emergence of potential rivals, as Bernhard Stern documents in other (non-Chinese) instances.

To add to your points on both flat terrain and waterways in England: in fact the current railway that runs a few blocks from my house runs along what used to be a canal dug from the Thames to enable transport. It was one of the last ones to open before the railway took over (and the operator went bankrupt and sold the land to a railway company that drained it and used the conveniently flattened land for more rails)

A local lake used to be an artificial reservoir to keep the canal filled.

The UK is full of canals that were viable to dig because of that flat terrain.

So large parts of England that were not reachable by river are still reachable by canal boat, and even more used to be before many of the canals were filled in or drained when no longer commercially viable for transport.

Right, though the bulk of canals in Europe were dug after 1500, and most of England's in the 18th & 19th centuries. This contrasts with Japan's general lack of same; digging through mountainous volcanic rock is far harder than flat limestone (and yields fewer fossils, another story).

China though has its Great Canal which dates to 12 BCE and has had pound locks since the 10th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_(China)

In the US the Erie Canal opened up the West and cemented New York City as a transport, commerce, and financial hub, beginning in the 1830s.

And, researching just now: there are a few canals in Japan, though even a modern listing is short:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Canals_in_Japan

Among the earliest is the Takase River canal, in Kyoto, 9.7 kilometers, dug in 1611. Most of the remainder date to the 19th or 20th centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takase_River

The Tatsumi Canal was constructed in 1623, 11 km.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatsumi_Canal

Contrast the UK:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canals_of_the_United_Kingdom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_canals_of_the_United_K...

Thanks for that most excellent answer! It gets at the industrial revolution (and the importance of coal deposits), but the scientific revolution preceded the industrial revolution by quite some time and was not dependent on coal. Something was happening around the English Channel and what is now Germany starting in around the 1600s. Why there and not somewhere else?

Again, views and theories vary greatly.

The Renaissance, printing, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the breaking of uniform Catholic control over thought and science. That's an area I've been exploring (I'm exploring a lot of areas, progress is slow), and it's fascinating.

The Bacons (Francis and Roger, no relation), free-thought movements especially in the north (Amsterdam and Copenhagen), and relative political freedom of inquiry in England all seem to have helped. It's interesting that the Enlightenment itself played heavily in Scotland, otherwise a hinterland (Adam Smith travelled to London for an education he didn't think much of, taking six weeks to make the journey by coach or on horseback, in the 1740s or 50s).

James Burke's television series Connections and The Day the Universe Changed cover much of this development (as well as earlier and later periods), and have been useful, though I'm starting to find holes in Burke's treatments (he wholly ignores Joseph Needham's work and Chinese invention, as examples).

Gregory Clark, mentioned above, has a generally excellent treatment of the question, one of the best I've read yet, though there's much I've yet to read.

Another excellent resource is the History of Information website. It's a useful place to explore questions such as this.

http://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php

For the curious, here's the watersheds of Europe map I had in mind:

http://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-c...

The borders especially of Spain, France, the former Austro-Hungarian (better described as the Danubian) Empire, and much of Germany and Poland are reasonably well evidenced.

The Balkans are as fractured hydrologically as they are politically.

Currently contiguous peninsular regions are defined in significant part by their coasts rather than rivers, probably showing the significance of sea-borne transport. Norway and Sweden are divided along their fall line, as are Spain and France by the Pyreneese Mountains. Switzerland is an identifiable mountain valley.

What's impressive about Russia is how unified it is by waterways. The Volga-Baltic Waterway provides contiguous maritime communication from the Black Sea to the Baltic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volga–Baltic_Waterway

A comparable watersheds map of the US, showing the immensity of the Mississipi-Missouri-Ohio-Arkansas-Red river system:

https://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...

(Also the utter insanity of most current US state boundaries. At least if you're a fish.)

And the comparable watersheds map of China:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190825155610/https://s3.amazon...

Were China and Japan really as peaceful as is sometimes stated? Just looking at a timeline of Chinese historical events (and probably by no means exhaustive) I see rebellions and invasions and peasant army uprisings for thousands of years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Chinese_history

Not peaceful, but stable and unified. Relatively. Consider that there has been something resembling a Chinese identity for several thousand years. Whereas Europe hasn’t been unified since the fall of the Roman Empire ~1600 years ago. And even then, the parts of Europe that played host to the scientific revolution were barely part of the Roman Empire. Or consider the fact that, relatively recently, the Japanese decided to cut off all contact with the outside world and forgo technological development. The idea of a European power trying to do similar is basically unthinkable due to the fact that they would have had half a dozen other nearby polities where no such restrictions were in place and change would have simply leaked in.

> do you have an opinion on why the scientific revolution happened in Western Europe and not in the Mediterranean, which is similarly fractured, but also better situated for exchange of technology and ideas

Not the GP, but I think this one was very clearly caused by the English Revolution protecting people with weird ideas.

A large part of the early English intelligentsia was composed of people fleeing from persecution in Italy.

The resistance to technological innovations is a very well-established human practice. I've shared Bernhard J. Stern's "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations" (1935) multiple times -- it's because I find it highly illuminating and well worth reading.

Original: https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag... (faint copy)

Re-typed / markdown: https://pastebin.com/raw/Bapu75is (updated and corrected from April, 2019 version.)

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