Was the growth triggered by the Black Death unique to Western Europe? Why did similar calamities elsewhere not trigger such growth? The Mongols wiped out a number of central Asian countries, even down into Persia, yet we saw nothing equivalent there. The deadliest wars in history were in China. The Americas had no chance to go into growth because the invaders from Europe arrived too soon after the plague. But what about Africa? The Far East? Why did only Europe respond to calamity this way?
I don't know if any single answer would be adequate. Europe had a basket of factors that played into this, from the geographic (the shape of the land itself) to the environmental (the biology that adapted to that land) to the cultural (a history of a particular flavor of imperialism which left legal, bureaucratic, cultural, martial, and ecclesiastical legacies that predisposed its inhabitants towards a particular mode of inter-generational wealth transmission, a particular flavor of separation between the private and public spheres, a particular separation between secular and sacred forms of knowledge, and a bias towards the democratization of technology and knowledge), not all of which were home-grown, but all of which interacted with each other to produce Europe's underlying character of being both functionally un-governable and warlike (keeping it from falling early play to the Mandarin smother that afflicted China), and yet not SO ungovernable and warlike that its competitions kept it occupied with constant blood feuds that ate up all productivity (as happened in large swaths of Africa and the Middle East).
Getting deep into how those worked would be an article series on its own, but I will attempt to keep such factors in mind going forward, as they do play an important role in the forces of centralization that I'll be talking about in the next couple chapters.
Was the growth triggered by the Black Death unique to Western Europe? Why did similar calamities elsewhere not trigger such growth? The Mongols wiped out a number of central Asian countries, even down into Persia, yet we saw nothing equivalent there. The deadliest wars in history were in China. The Americas had no chance to go into growth because the invaders from Europe arrived too soon after the plague. But what about Africa? The Far East? Why did only Europe respond to calamity this way?
I don't know if any single answer would be adequate. Europe had a basket of factors that played into this, from the geographic (the shape of the land itself) to the environmental (the biology that adapted to that land) to the cultural (a history of a particular flavor of imperialism which left legal, bureaucratic, cultural, martial, and ecclesiastical legacies that predisposed its inhabitants towards a particular mode of inter-generational wealth transmission, a particular flavor of separation between the private and public spheres, a particular separation between secular and sacred forms of knowledge, and a bias towards the democratization of technology and knowledge), not all of which were home-grown, but all of which interacted with each other to produce Europe's underlying character of being both functionally un-governable and warlike (keeping it from falling early play to the Mandarin smother that afflicted China), and yet not SO ungovernable and warlike that its competitions kept it occupied with constant blood feuds that ate up all productivity (as happened in large swaths of Africa and the Middle East).
Getting deep into how those worked would be an article series on its own, but I will attempt to keep such factors in mind going forward, as they do play an important role in the forces of centralization that I'll be talking about in the next couple chapters.
Thanks!
-Dan