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Home > Features > Why the West?
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Why the West?
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by Gale Stokes
Rice University
Houston, Texas
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| | Europe's Rise to Dominance
The issue that has occupied macrohistorians over the past generation can be stated quite succinctly: Why Europe? Why did a relatively small and backward periphery on the western fringes of the Eurasian continent become a dominant force in almost all corners of the earth in modern times? Until recently, two responses have dominated: first, that something unique deep in the European past, such as reason, freedom, or individualism, lay behind its eventual economic development and power; and second, that nothing particularly special distinguished Europe. In this view, Europe's rise to dominance was due not to any exceptional qualities but to its ability to seize vast amounts of gold and silver in the New World.
For these analysts, most of the last thousand years have been dominated by the rich cultures and vibrant economies of Asia, especially China. The two studies that best exemplify these ideas are David Landes's The Wealth and Poverty of Nations and Andre Gunder Frank's ReOrient. Both of these books, as well as the approaches they represent, tend to be polemical. Landes emphasizes values such as work, initiative, and investment, as well as willingness to learn, as key Western qualities and advises the less developed parts of the world to stop whining and get to work. Frank, on the other hand, argues that the success of the West had little to do with its qualities and a lot to do with the operation of a large-scale world economic system. In his view there were three areas of surplus agricultural production in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (India, China, Southeast Asia) and four deficit areas (the Americas, Japan, Africa, and Europe). Three of the deficit areas made up for their lack of exporting: Japan and the Americas exported silver, primarily to China, and Africa exported slaves, primarily to the Americas. Europe, with nothing important to export, achieved success by managing these exports. As Frank puts it, "The Europeans had no exceptional, let alone superior, ethnic, rational, organizational, or spirit-of-capitalist advantages to offer, diffuse, or do anything else in Asia."
Beyond Aggressive Polemicizing
In discussing these and related issues, historians like Landes and Frank have been engaging in conversations initiated more than a generation ago. Arguments for European uniqueness grow out of the practice of teaching courses in Western Civilization, which entered the American curriculum in the 1920s, while the arguments of their opponents grow out of a Marxist style of criticism that became salient in the 1960s. Recently, however, some historians have begun to transcend these Cold War categories in books that go beyond aggressive polemicizing. The two pivotal books in this new approach are R. Bin Wong's China Transformed and Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence. Wong and Pomeranz argue that both Europe and China had been growing economically in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through what they call "Smithian growth," named after Adam Smith. In other words, by division of labor, use of markets, and technological advances, important regions in both areas had created increasingly efficient agriculturally based economies that were capable of feeding growing populations. This was as true in China as in Europe, which is to say that contrary to the traditional view, China was neither stagnant nor backward. Indeed, they argue that markets there were probably better developed than in the West. Still, by the eighteenth century, neither area showed signs that a breakthrough we would characterize as "modern" was about to happen.
According to Pomeranz, one of the two main factors that permitted the European breakout was the existence of colonies in the New World, which enabled England to grow more agricultural goods than its own limited land resources would have allowed, thus getting the English around the problem of land shortage that was beginning to have a negative effect elsewhere. Both Wong and Pomeranz agree, however, that the main differentiating event was the discovery in England of how to extract energy systematically from coal. Fortunate geography and wealth created by colonies permitted the English to exploit the invention of the steam engine and to begin the transformation to a modern world. Indeed, one could argue that in terms of energy production, there have only been two major historical experiences: the invention of agriculture and animal husbandry, which extracted energy systematically from living things and spelled the doom of hunter-gatherer societies, and the discovery of how to extract energy systematically from nonliving things such as coal and oil, which in the last two hundred years has led to the death in the developed parts of the world of agriculturally based societies.
Wong and Pomeranz have moved beyond Cold War arguments to discussions more appropriate for a globalizing world. Rather than talking about hegemony, advanced or backward, vigor versus stagnation, and similar categories, they point out the broad similarities between agriculturally developed regions, alert us to how late the key moments in the economic modernization process were, and show how unexpected the coal/steam engine breakthrough was. Through their work, the beginning point of the "European miracle" is in the process of being moved from the era of the voyages of discovery about 1500 to the spread of the steam engine about 1800. It remains to be seen how this new approach will lead to revised assessments of the main characteristics and significance of the European breakout as it has played out over the past two hundred years.
This summary is based on Gale Stokes, "Why the West? The Unsettled Question of Europe's Ascendancy," Lingua Franca (November 2001), 30-38. For the scholarly version, see Gale Stokes, "The Fates of Human Societies: A Review of Recent Macrohistories," The American Historical Review, 106:2 (April 2001), 508-525.
Gale Stokes is the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of History and Dean of the Humanities at Rice University. He has authored, co-authored, and edited a number of books on nationalism and Eastern European history, including The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe (1993). |
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