A Question of Timing
by Anthony Pagden
The Conversation
November 11th, 2009
I would like to thank Professor Davies for his courteous response to my criticism of this thesis. I still do not think that his chronologies work. Without becoming bogged down in an historian’s squabble over dates, what seems to be at stake is just how much time one assumes has to pass, in particular in a world, or worlds, where communication is slow and imprecise, before a given event — a crisis a revolution or whatever — takes effect. If, for instance, the Malthusian crisis of ‘roughly 1320 to 1450’ was directly responsible for a ‘military revolution’ which led to the consolidation of the innovation — reluctant ‘gunpowder empires’ then the Ming (1368-1424) must have gone to work very speedily indeed; and the Ottomans would seem to have anticipated the crisis altogether. The question of lag (so to speak) becomes rather more significant, however, when it comes to the origins of European exceptionalism. Stephen Davies says that “The big problem is that there is no evidence either for Europe being distinctive in the ways alleged before the 17th century or for its clearly overtaking the rest of the world until about 1790-1800”. True, but why is it a problem? The ascendancy of the West began slowly much earlier than 1790s. By 1700, the British, the Dutch and the French empire between them spanned the entire globe. However massive, however mighty the Ottomans, the Mughals, the Safavids or the Qing might have been — and I have no wish to underestimate their achievements — none of them had that reach. (For one thing, they were land-based and largely land-locked. One of the secrets to the rise of modernity is surely the rise of European sea-power.) But even if it had not, the kind of innovations which transformed Europe in the 16c. and 17c. would surely have taken the best part of a century to have the consequences which gave many — but by no means all — the peoples of the continent the capacity they subsequently acquired to dominate, in one way or another, so much of the planet.
