WesternCiv

Six "killer apps" from Nials Furgenson.

**Competition**. At the beginning of this story, in 1500, the Western
   European territories were occupied by a nasty bunch of uneducated
   murderous louts who would have cut your throat for a ducat but who died
   of plague before they found their cuirass. Over in the East there were
   the empires of China and Ottomania which had the science and the
   tourist attractions. It was clear where civilisation was. But then
   Westerners discovered the New World and some really violent Portuguese
   merchant adventurers began creating havoc, followed by Spanish and
   English versions of the same. Urgent competition broke out between the
   petty European states. At the same time China stopped trading with the
   outside world and declined Western approaches.
   
    And this is often how it goes in this book - yes, this outbreak of
   early colonising fervour in South America and elsewhere was vital to
   what came next, as was China's inward-turning. Exactly why these things
   happened remains obscure.

**Science**. Christianity accepted a church/state division of power -God
   and Caesar, the pope and the emperor, spirit and matter - and this
   allowed a secular science to eventually flourish, once Gutenberg had
   re-invented printing. In contrast, Islam recognised no such division.
   Science had flourished under Islam but just at the time Western
   scientists were freed by printing Muslim theologians were successfully
   shutting down science in Islam. In 1515 Sultan Selim threatened anyone
   using a printing press with the death penalty. In the 1570s a scientist
   Taqi al-Din , who designed astronomic clocks and experimented with
   steam power, got permission to build an observatory. It was the equal
   of the famous Tycho Brahe's observatory in Denmark. On 11 October 1577
   a comet was sighted over Istanbul. They asked Taqi for an
   interpretation. He said it prophesied a great Muslim military victory.
   Theologians then said to the sultan that such peering into heavens and
   prophesying was blasphemous. In 1580 the sultan ordered the observatory
   to be abolished. End of Islamic astronomy.
   This translates to the following statistic - between 1980 and 2000 the
   number of patents registered in Israel was 7,652. The number of patents
   registered in all Arab countries for the same period was 367.

**Property**. The history of North and South America provides us with a
   perfect experiment to see which economic system - the
   Spanish/Portuguese or the British - worked better. Why did South
   America not become the economic superpower that the USA did? Because,
   says NF, of property rights, followed by the rule of law, followed by
   representative government. Which the North got and the South didn't.
   Imagine if Britain had discovered Mexico and Peru and had captured
   their gold and silver instead of the Spanish. Then the British monarch
   would have had this vast source of private wealth which would have
   freed him from dependence on Parliament to vote him his tax revenue.
   The importance of Parliament itself would therefore have dwindled.
   Democracy would never have got going. Gold and silver killed democracy
   in Spain and Portugal.
   
   Labour was scarce in North America and plentiful in the South.
   Emigrants to North America were given land if they were freemen or if
   (as most were) they were indentured servants, they could work off their
   indenture in five or six years, and then be granted land. In South
   America the Crown owned all the land and simply granted the rights to
   exploit it to a small conquistador class who immediately turned into
   the idle rich. They did not plant and farm, as in the north.
   The North American Revolution created a federal republic . The South
   had their revolution 40 years later yet this consigned the whole area
   to 200 years of division, instability and underdevelopment.

**Medicine**. NF says that imperialism was not all bad - look at the war
   waged by the colonialists against tropical disease. But some of it was
   absolutely awful. This chapter was actually a survey of Western
   imperialism in Africa, and I discovered the story of German Namibia.
   Here's a great review of the book NF used for this part of the story :
   [63]http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...

**Consumption**.
   Unlike modern medicine, which was often imposed by force on Western
   colonies, the consumer society is a killer application the rest of the
   world has generally yearned to download.
   (What's that sound - could it be Gibbon and Macauley spinning in their
   graves?)

Here we run into another conundrum as we read about the remarkable
   explosion of human activity called the Industrial revolution, which
   began in Britain, spread to Europe and then north America. In one
   century, say 1750-1850, everything went off the charts - factories
   appeared, population doubled and trebled, wages increased, workers
   abandoned the countryside for the cities, appetites were discovered and
   attended to, such as the insatiable desire for clothes and crockery,
   and in general the idea came about that everyone gets rich if everyone
   can afford to buy the stuff and then work more and earn more to buy
   more stuff from more factories, and as we know, this tendency has not
   stopped, the gadgets and must haves have kept on a-coming, so the name
   of this chapter is consumption, which is also the name of a disease.
   
    Is this the shape of the Industrial Revolution? :
   World's largest cities : in 1800 seven out of ten were in Asia. Peking
   was bigger than London. In 1900 only one was Asian, all the rest
   European or American. In 2012 seven out of ten are Asian again. Only
   one European/North American (New York).
   Ferguson lurches ever more hectically from one topic to another as the
   book proceeds - talking about the post-World War One period he goes
   from national self-determination to the Bolshevik Revolution to Fascism
   to the US economy to Hollywood movies to Duke Ellington to Federal
   banking policies to Keynes to the USSR to the nude in Western art all
   between pages 227 and 232.

Work. NF says it was Protestantism's work-and-save ethic which built
   up the capital which created the powerful economies in the West. I did
   not get how frugality, working all the hours and saving co-existed with
   the consumerism whose demands also created the powerful economies. It
   seemed a contradiction. But this is what NF is like, by the time you're
   formulating an objection to the points he slings out right and left,
   he's off onto something else.

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