Why Europe had surpassed China in the Age of Exploration
Why has Europe dominated the world's seas and China has not? How did this relate to the number of royal courts in Europe? Why don't we brainstorm solutions in Europe anymore? Is it related to the numb
In the introduction to International Politics1, Czech political scientist Oskar Krejčí reflects on why Europe rose to prominence and overtook China at the beginning of the modern era. This topic has been addressed earlier by the American geographer and historian Jared Diamond2.
At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Chinese admiral Zheng He embarked on a naval expedition at the head of a fleet of 317 vessels to India, Persia, Arabia and as far as East Africa, from where he brought back, for example, a giraffe. There were treasure ships, nine-masted ships with brass and iron guns, 128 metres long and displacing 2.7 thousand tons. If we were to guess at the time whether the Chinese or the Europeans would dominate the world's seas, Zheng He's expedition clearly told us that the future would be Chinese. Unless it wasn't? Where was the mistake?
In the mid-15th century, the Chinese emperor banned all sea voyages in order to concentrate all valuable resources on defending the northern frontier from Mongol nomads. The construction of ships with more than two masts was banned and shipbuilders were imprisoned; all technical sketches for shipbuilding were also destroyed.
A few decades later, the young Genoese Christopher Columbus, also with the calculations of the Florentine astronomer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, tried to persuade the Portuguese king to support his expedition to find a western route to Asia. His proposal was judged unworkable by three royal advisers who brushed it off the table. At the time, the Portuguese were concentrating on finding a route to India by circumnavigating Africa.
Fortunately for Columbus, when he was rejected by the Portuguese, there were still plenty of other royal courts that could support him. He also presented his project to Spain (then still a personal union of Castile and Aragon) and had England as a backup plan. The Catholic Majesties : Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile had just completed the Reconquista with the conquest of Granada and, having captured its wealth and ended several centuries of struggle, were willing to support the expedition across the Atlantic. They certainly did not want to allow neighbouring Portugal to suddenly gain a monopoly on overseas trade with Asia.
The decisive difference between China and Europe was clear: in China it was enough for the emperor to ban overseas voyages. Even if Columbus failed to convince the Portuguese king, there were still plenty other royal courts where he could present his project. Zheng He and his followers did not have that option; there was no Cantonese governor who would have sponsored one more expedition, say to Australia. As Oskar Krejčí notes, The existence of multiple economic and military centres of power in Europe, manifested in so many wars, became an important defence against its rigidity3.
Frankish civilization, on the other hand, was characterized by an anthropocentric (emphasis on man as an individual) and ecclesiocentric (viewing man as part of a community of believers - the church) paradigm, and Europe, besides being politically fragmented, also had very diverse elites - besides the feudal nobility, we had free cities (such as Hamburg, Bremen, Venice, or Genoa) with their merchant elites, and the Church as a separate institution. In short, as Samuel Huntington wrote4, the Frankish civilization was distinguished by its social pluralism. The existence of noble, bourgeois or ecclesiastical privileges meant that no emperor or monarch could one day, for example, ban gunpowder weapons. And even if he did, a neighbouring monarch would not, and with a stronger army would defeat him in the next war.
Lets say that in the name of efficiency and harmonisation of regulations, more and more competencies are being concentrated in Brussels or Washington D.C. There lies the responsibility for the future of almost the entire continent. Such elites would naturally be risk-averse and and therefore prefer to reject many ideas. Alternatively, in utopian triving, they would proceed by banning harmful combustion engines. In any case, we have one decision centre that will, hopefully in good faith, make a decision that will ultimately prove to be harmful in the long-term. Sometimes, it is hard to tell in advance which policy proposal is going to be the golden goose, and prior to making the decision we lack the luxury of hindsight. The problem is that one decision-making body has the power to harm the entire continent.
Now imagine that we loosen the bridle and we strengthen the decision-making powers of every county or every district. Many would go on business as usual out of inertia. However, we would brainstorm a little bit about the measures, and we would try each one out. Let's say 20 of them decided to try a new measure: 10 of them would be harmful, 5 would do no harm but no good, and 5 would be really beneficial. However, it's very hard to tell ahead of time which of those 5 solutions are really the beneficial ones; if we don't want harmful measures to mess things up, we often end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The harmful solution may indeed be harmful, but its harm is only local: it won't mess up the whole state, just a small part of it.
Douglas Murray has written a book, The Strange Death of Europe. He sees the problem in immigration. Arnold Toynbee observed5 that the penultimate stage of any civilisation is unification in a universal empire with one decision-making centre. When that happens, the creative minority is pushed out, and a dominant majority rules, but it doesn't know what to do next.
If we want to stop the decline of our civilization, let us allow the creative minority to find solutions to the challenges of our time.
DIAMOND, Jared: Guns, Germs and Steel
HUNTINGTON, Samuel Philips: Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
TOYNBEE, Arnold Joseph: A Study of History, 12 volumes
A compelling exploration of how political will, maritime ambition, and institutional incentives—not technological capacity alone—shaped the divergent paths of Europe and China on the global stage