7/08/97, Nikolai S. Rozov wrote to wsn & philofhi:
>please find below 4 lists of factors - my view on reasons of European
>predominance in the world since 1850
Interesting, perceptive list. Nikolai is to be commended for frequently
putting forward agendas for discussion and going out on a limb on with some
of his theses.
I don't know enough about European history (not to mention all the other
histories to which it is being implicitly compared by Nikolai) to challenge
the particulars of his list, but I do have a problem with that kind of list
in general, and the analytic premises on which that kind of argument is
based.
When an historic outcome is known (eg- recent Euro dominance), it is all
too easy to list lots of known facts, and attribute to them causative
weight. In some sense, you can't be proved wrong. Especially when you say
the factors operate in "combination", and the list is half-way reasonable
looking, how can anyone object? If you make the list long enough, there
won't be another culture that possesses all the elements. It is
significant, methodologically, that a student with far less knowledge and
perceptivity than Nikolai could make a very-plausible such list.
My methodological objections are two-fold. First, I find this shotgun-list
approach insufficiently discriminating - I want rifle shots. Rather than a
list of apparently relevant contributing factors, I want to know THE
critical factors - those which were characteristic of the culture in
question and whose absence would have prevented the phenomenon from
occurring. Are we really sure Euro dominance would not have occured, for
example, if American precious metals weren't available? Might not the
explorative, explotative, and innovative mindsets of Euro expansionists
found other fulcrums for their ambitions to leverage?
Answering such questions is admittedly more difficult than assembling a
shotgun list, and that brings me to my second methodological objection.
Rather than a list of "factors" - whether it be short or long, and whether
it be all-inclusive or pruned by considerations of criticality - I would
find more useful a more dynamic analysis. My methodological theory would
be that there were modes of operating, and specific sets of ambitious
operators, who were _nurtured_ by Euro culture, in this case, and who
outgrew the operating theater offered to them by Europe, and who became,
then, the critical instigators of Euro expansionism.
Phlofhi readers may recall, in our discussion of Randy Grove's "Cultural
Foundations of Civ", my proposition that Randy's "key civilizational
elements" need to be examined as evolutionary developments. They didn't
emerge full-blown and suddenly birth a civilization, but they and their
embedding culture evolved together and eventually reached a scale and level
of sophistication that we later dubbed a "high culture" and a
"civilization".
Similarly, I believe there were economic/political/social dynamic patterns
operating in Europe which evolved and grew, and led naturally to Euro
expansionism when they outgrew Europe.
Consider for a moment Ghengis Khan. One can talk about horsemanship,
ferocity of spirit, and disdain for city-fication - as obvious and relevant
factors in Mongolian culture - but I think it would be more instructive to
focus on the dynamics by which a local chieftan consolidated his power base
and systematicaly expanded it. What motivated him? What strategic
paradigms lent him success? Why was he dissatisfied with conquering only
his own region? How did he avoid/contain internal squabbling?
Similarly, in the case of Rome, one finds a useful focus in the
alliance-building skills of the early Romans, and one might inquire as to
how and why those skills developed in Rome in particular, and why they
found a need to expand their scope ever more widely.
---Nikolai might well argue that his list, perhaps pruned for criticality, is indeed about dynamics: the rise of capitalism, for example, is in fact a dynamic force, seeking new markets, new resources, and new venues for investment. And capitalists would be an example of one of the "sets of ambitious operators" I'm asking for. In the case of Elizabeth I, for example, it is clear that her American colonies were set up primarily as capitalist ventures, several of the entire colonies, such as Pennsylvania, being in fact privately-owned corporations.
But what is missing from Nikolai's list is structure - an explicit characterization of how the factors worked together, which were primary and which secondary, which were essential and which might have been replaced if necessary by available alternatives. Also missing is a sense of tempo, growth, and quantity - what started first, what led to what, and what outgrew which boundaries - fuelling expansion.
The identification of dynamic pattern-trends, the tracing of their growth _within_ their host culture, and the careful observation of how they managed to burst from their boundaries - this mode of analysis automatically forces useful structure on a "factors list", and highlights the most critical factors.
Please don't think I'm asking for an entire historical treatment to be supplied instead of a half-page list - that would be ignoring Nikolai's noble intent to distill essence from a wide universe of facts. What I _am_ asking for is perhaps a full-page treatement - with the factors structured within an outline of dynamics, and perhaps some accompanying quantitative growth curves.
---As regards the attempt to show why Europe dominated globally instead of someone else, that is yet a further analytical challenge. What I've been asking for above is better understanding of why Europe expanded at all, not why its expansion was so relatively successful.
The kind of dynamic analysis I'm proposing serves especially well in this latter quest - to identify relative competitive advantages. For one thing, only expanding powers could have been competition for Europe. A non-expanding but very strong power would simply be a boundary to European enroachment, not a colonial competitor on the world scene.
Dynamic analysis allows us to focus our attention on cultures with nascent growth-components - potential exapansion-drivers - rather than considering all cultures which happened to be large or diverse enough to include (to one degree or another) some static list of "factors". Capitalism, for example, controlling 1% of a culture's commerce, is a less significant force for expansion than when it controls 40%. This kind of comparison is not visible in a static factors list.
Rather than comparing Europe with Japan, for example, I'd want to compare "expansion vectors" in Europe and Japan, and chart the relative growth of those vectors. A case could be made, for example, that it wasn't "Europe" that expanded at all, but European-based capitalists that expanded their control-domains. Europe, you might say, was a carrier for a voracius virus, rather than being a voracious beast itself.
Bukminster Fuller made just such an argument in "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" when he made the bold assertion that the British Empire was a fiction - that "white man's burden" and "glory of empire" were populist ruses to get British taxpayers and soldiers to make the world safe for the British East India Company. His thesis was that Britain was selected by capitalist interests due to its location and defensibility, and that expansionist politics was then aggressively sold to British royalty and other indigenous elite elements.
Regards, rkm