Why Europe and why not China?

A year ago I was lent and encouraged to read Jared Diamond’s fascinating book Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond, an evolutionary biologist and not a historian, attempted to apply the tools of his discipline to understanding the larger path of human economic development and did so quite successfully. He made visible certain aspects of biology (especially botany) and geography that can be seen as significantly responsible for the larger strokes of human events. A short version of his history is available online.

But thinking never stops on this planet. Gale Stokes, writing in the November issue of Lingua Franca surveys the latest thinking in the realm of World History (macrohistory) in Why the West?. Stokes, professor of history, is quite readable in looking at the four most important authors, post-Diamond in this field: David S. Landes, Andre Gunder Frank, Kenneth Pomeranz, and R. Bin Wong. This article points out that the latter pair quite easily outdistance the first two authors in both sophistication and utility.

Cutting to the chase of the question I posed in the title of this entry, “Wong and Pomeranz agree that the coal revolution was the defining moment of the modern world.” Up until the end of the 18th century, both regions were very similar in their exploitation of (Adam) Smithian resources and the future, at that point, could possibly have gone either way. The Europeans, and especially the British, were able to exploit the huge increase in energy made available by coal and the race was, for the time being, over.

Good reading for the interested non-professional historian, well worth the time. One question not well-answered by Stokes, possibly because the answer isn’t terribly interesting to her intended audience, is whether either Pomeranz’s or Wong’s books are as accessible to the reading public as Diamond.

Update: Steven differs with the conclusion given here; he makes an interesting argument that the key factor differentiating Europe from the rest of the world is “there is a very close correlation historically between the power and wealth of a nation and the efficiency with which it is capable of moving soldiers, information and bulk cargo.”