At the time, the positive contribution of the state system was much narrower. Only in certain respects did interstate rivalries encourage the authorities to embrace innovators—mostly by competing for artists who conferred status on their patrons as well as for craftsmen, captains, and armorers who contributed to military and nautical capabilities. Yet competitive pressures also made Europeans willing and indeed eager to adopt and adapt foreign inventions, most consequentially gunpowder and paper.8
In addition, the English and French crowns in particular promoted innovative research. In the seventeenth century, the establishment of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge and the Académie royal des sciences in Paris for the first time created bodies dedicated to the autonomous study of the natural world by cohesive groups of scholars.9
Fragmentation between and within polities was coupled with a high degree of mobility among European intellectuals, both in person and even more so through communications. This connectivity greatly boosted the size of the market for ideas. Yet even in this arena, systemic competition played a central role: the transnational intellectual community famously known as the “Republic of Letters” transcended political fractures by creating a “competitive marketplace not only for ideas but also for the people who generated them in their struggle to gain recognition, fame, and patronage.”
This market connected people with new ideas with potential customers who needed to be persuaded of the merits of these ideas. Insofar as competitive patronage served as an incentive mechanism, Europe’s political fragmentation once again emerged as a crucial precondition. It dispersed patronage opportunities that might otherwise have been concentrated at a bloated imperial center or court such as Alexandria, Rome, or the various capitals of imperial China. That, in turn, helped ensure diversity.10
The “Respublica Literaria,” a term first attested in 1417 and in common use by the seventeenth century, served to diffuse useful knowledge. Governed by basic rules—freedom of entry, contestability, transnationality, and the commitment to make results accessible—it fostered standards of rigor, argument, and proof unencumbered by centralized political or religious fiat or patronage. It was cumulative and converged toward consensus based on the merit of the ideas. This was not a given: if Habsburg Spain or the Jesuits had prevailed, this dynamic might have been aborted. Mokyr thus plausibly contends that “had a single, centralized government been in charge of defending the intellectual status quo, many of the new ideas that eventually led to the Enlightenment would have been suppressed or possibly never even proposed.”11
But these networks effects also highlight the limits of fragmentation: although political pluralism was essential in ensuring free discourse, so was the relative ease of transnational intellectual communications. In the absence of some degree of underlying cultural unity, the costs of catering to a larger market of ideas would have been higher, limiting entry and competition and protecting incumbents from disruptive innovation. This cultural unity—manifest above all in the use of Latin and Christian norms—was a legacy of the Roman empire: later polycentrism was made more productive by a shared background of antecedent, if safely distant, hegemonic empire. I revisit this issue in the Epilogue.
For now, suffice it to note that whereas the widespread use of Latin as an elite language undeniably served to maintain and reinforce connections beyond individual polities, persistence of its privileged position would have limited access to useful knowledge beyond refined circles. Thus, the gradual shift to vernacular languages—which was itself driven in part by polycentric state formation—not only fractured this ecumene but broadened the base of participants: use of regional languages made writings more approachable while recourse to translations mitigated the decline of hegemonically monoglot publication.12
Many of these developments unfolded all over Latin Europe. This raises the question of whether the North Sea region and particularly England stood out in ways that can be meaningfully linked to their later leading role in bringing forth industrialization and modern economic growth. Spatial-temporal variation does suggest a trend: whereas scientists from Italy had been the most prominent during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they were eclipsed by those from Britain (alongside the Netherlands and Paris) during the following two centuries.13
The Reformation arguably played a major role in opening up Europe north of the Mediterranean to fresh ideas. Numerous studies of persistence effects—based mainly on German and Swiss data—have tracked the beneficial consequences of the adoption of Protestant denominations over the long run, as they became visible from the nineteenth century to the present. These benefits include greater human capital accumulation with higher literacy rates and smaller gender gaps in schooling and reading scores. Protestant cities with formalized public mass education both produced and attracted more high-level human capital than others. These effects reflect payoffs from early Protestant emphasis on Bible reading and education more generally. Other persistence effects pertain to work ethic, with Protestants working longer hours, achieving higher incomes, and displaying less preference for leisure. Protestantism is also positively correlated with proxies of economic development such as tax revenue, sectoral distribution of the labor force, and urban growth.14
Other payoffs are already documented for the more distant past. In the sixteenth century, printing for the Reformation made the Swiss the European leaders in book production. Afterward, the Netherlands and Britain took the lead. By the seventeenth century, half of the adult Dutch and English populations were literate, a much larger share than in other European societies. This contributed to the growth of a skilled apprentice class. Cultural specifics mattered: high literacy rates were not simply a function of elevated real wages but acted independently on development. Well before the nineteenth-century onset of mass schooling, human capital formation already had a strong impact on economic performance.15
More specifically, the various types of Protestantism appear to have differed in their capacity to foster an environment that was congenial to technological creativity. In this respect, the Reformed Church in England did better than the Dutch Radical Enlightenment, which retarded the utilitarian turn in natural philosophy. Besides, the Dutch Reformed Church became increasingly less tolerant of other denominations. Once again, political polycentrism was critical in sustaining diversity in outcomes.16
The growth of science coevolved with local culture and institutions. In Britain’s case, Puritanism proved influential by enhancing the prestige of experimental science, focusing on empiricism and utility, condemning leisure, valuing education, and accepting scientific pursuits as a form of worship. Even if this movement did not directly benefit the mechanical arts and was separated by a considerable time lag from the Industrial Revolution, it nevertheless helped raise the social standing of empirics and science.
Puritanism was itself an outgrowth of the Reformation, which in England had been made possible in the first place by the country’s political sovereignty. Domestic conflicts with that country first brought Puritans to power in the 1640s. Renewed struggles after Restoration led to a liberalization of Anglicanism: the national church endorsed experimentalism and the notion of material progress, and accommodated Newtonian principles as a symbol of divine harmony under natural laws.17
When compared to other European societies, the British Enlightenment has been credited with greater emphasis on “empiricism, pragmatism, and individual utilitarianism.” These preferences go back to the Baconian premise that knowledge ought to be useful. A growing divide thus separated Cartesian rationalism in continental Europe and Baconian empiricism in Britain. The latter prioritized instrument-based experimental research and promoted the adoption of the experimental method more widely, most notably in industry.18
Over the course of the seventeenth century, this helped foster a culture of improvement that expressly valued and encouraged economic progress driven by the accumulation of investments and skills. Systemic expec
tations of progress were embodied in the notion that current levels of knowledge exceeded anything that had come before. Constraints on scientific endeavor gradually fell away, to be replaced, in Chris Bayly’s words, by new “routines of intellectual behavior” that turned science into a “modern integrated doctrine.”19
Incrementally, these developments prepared the ground for ongoing and self-sustaining changes that underpinned the transitions to modernity: a commitment to useful knowledge not only as a good in and of itself but as a means of economic development, the improvement of human welfare through aggressive manipulation of nature, and the conception of the universe as a mechanistic and intrinsically intelligible order.
HEGEMONY AND CONSERVATISM
This outlook differed quite systematically from the experience of a persistently imperial culture such as China. We must be careful to be precise about the differences that mattered. It was certainly not the case that Chinese society did not produce useful knowledge, or that rulers did not sponsor such production, at least at times. But two particulars merit attention.20
One concerns process. Inasmuch as state support was contingent on centralized preferences and sensitive to turnover at the very top, it could be supplied or withdrawn at will: monopolistic decision-making shaped expectations and outcomes in ways that were alien to conditions in a competitive state system. Just as one regime (say, the Mongols) wished to invest in engineers and mathematicians, another (say, the Qing) could make different choices. In some sense, it may well have been coincidence that disincentives to scientific and technological progress strengthened in late imperial China at the same time as they weakened in much of Latin Europe: the Chinese authorities could just as readily have followed a different track. What is crucial here is not so much actual outcomes but the potential for centralized intervention and regulation across a large territory that contains within it, however latently, the option of discouraging innovation: in Mokyr’s pithy judgment, under conditions of monopoly “the government can flip the switch off.”21
The other is about content. Recurrent and deepening imperial unity and continuity reinforced respect for ancient, foundational authorities. A very long time ago, the Warring States period had sustained a flowering diverse schools of thought that encouraged argument and debate. Confucius is portrayed as having resented this approach, and it was later consequently regarded as undesirable: only the Mohists continued to regard argumentation as a path toward the truth. The violent demise of Warring States pluralism discouraged “intellectual vigor and élan”: a key proponent of Confucian thought under the Western Han, Dong Zhonshu, called for the suppression of “perverse teachings” so as “to unify governing principles, to clarify laws and measures; and the people will know what to follow.”22
As already noted, serial imperial reconstitution gradually cemented the hegemony of neo-Confucianism over the course of the second millennium. Upholding an orthodoxy that valued stability and continuity above all else, it was structurally inimical to disruptive innovation. The fact that Confucian thought was primarily social, more interested in human relations than in nature, contributed to its utility as a means of preserving the established order but not to scientific curiosity.23
In late imperial China, the canonization of neo-Confucian compendia furthered a closing of the literati elite’s mind. Engagement with classical texts, always a cornerstone of this tradition, was stepped up under the Ming and Qing. Critiques increasingly focused on putative misreadings of these privileged texts. Even before they were dropped from the reading lists for the civil service examinations, natural studies had been based on a fixed classical canon. Literature dominated over technical fields, and the study of science did not bring the same rewards to candidates. The whole edifice of learning was overshadowed by “conservative giants.”
More generally and regardless of content, the examination system favored incumbents by encouraging rote learning and focusing on refined literacy and calligraphy. The incentive structure diverted intellectuals away from science, especially the mathematization of hypotheses and controlled experimentation, in favor of memorization of the 431,286 characters of the Confucian “classics.” It is hardly an exaggeration to call this system “a prescription for stagnation” that misallocated human capital. Moreover, the impact of this canonization was amplified by the fact that commercial elites tended to emulate the lifestyle and tastes of the conservative literati elite, for the reasons discussed in chapter 10. This prevented alternative spaces of discourse from opening up.24
While scholars competed for imperial patronage, the absence of interstate competition removed incentives for monopolistic patrons to encourage or adopt innovation. The rivalries of the Warring States had generated mobility and competitive patronage of scholars and experts much in the same way as they much later existed in Europe. Demand for specialized services ensured a degree of protection from persecution. Later, under hegemonic empire, exit options had vanished: the system was all-encompassing and anyone who managed to leave was effectively shut out from future interactions—the exact opposite of the experience of footloose dissidents in Latin Europe. The lack of productive competitiveness in the market of ideas was a faithful reflection of the lack of competition for political power.25
Science was more strongly affected by this than engineering, which helps account for the fact that technological innovation continued to take place. In the end, however, the weakness of incentives for scientific research robbed practitioners of the opportunity to develop more ambitious applications.26
In imperial China, the “classics” were endlessly commented on but never overthrown. In Western Europe, by contrast, the “rise of modern science and technology” was “not just … the natural continuation of ancient, medieval and Renaissance culture but also … its repudiation.” The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were rife with such challenges, from the discovery of the New World to advances in anatomy, the conceptualization of the solar system and elliptical orbits, and the Baconian rejection of Aristotelian deductive logic, all of which openly contradicted established classical authorities. As long as centralized power persisted, this was not a viable route in an empire that derived legitimacy not least from its guardianship of ancient traditions.27
China did not host independent institutions of higher learning for disinterested scholars akin to Europe’s universities, the enduring products of social power fragmentation. Nor were there scientific academies: the state sponsored only institutionalized reflection of affairs that were of concern to Confucians, namely, political and moral ones. The imperial center invested in education but not in specialist, technical training, which was left to family tradition. Little was published on machines and mechanics, unlike on farming. Scholarship and technology, scholars and artisans were hardly connected.28
It is telling how Chinese scholars responded to Western knowledge: they continued to adhere to dominant values, a choice Nathan Sivin explains with reference to the persistent unification of Chinese society in which the classic mode of education involved strong identification with elite culture, and few scholars gravitated toward the margins. This sidelined those “for whom science was not a means to conservative ends, for whom a proven fact outweighed the whole body of millennial values.” That these preferences survived into the late nineteenth century shows how powerful traditions rooted in monopolistic empire were not only in stifling domestic innovation but even in shaping the reception of external knowledge.29
Are there plausible counterfactuals? Even a champion of later imperial China’s development such as Kenneth Pomeranz finds it hard to conceive of European-style breakthroughs had China been left alone. Even as elements of a culture of shared scientific inquiry emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, characterized by collaboration among scholars in different fields who circulated letters and debated intellectual priority and citation practices, it is unclear whether this process would have continued and where it would have turned. For a variety of rea
sons, several modern observers have deemed the counterfactual of an indigenous Chinese steam engine unlikely.30
And what was true of imperial China also applied, to varying degrees, to other imperialized societies. Abatement of scientific inquiry and genuine technological innovation was already visible in the mature Roman empire, compared to initiatives in the preceding centuries of competitive polycentrism in the Greek and Hellenistic worlds.31
In the Islamic sphere, science research, writing, and teaching—which had indeed flourished and received support under the first two caliphates—declined after the eleventh century in the wake of the Sunni revival. Madrassas proliferated, funded by religious endowments that prohibited teachings contrary to Islamic doctrine and turned scholars into employees. This fashion, which gradually spread from Central Asia westward and intensified over time, cannot readily be related to imperiogenesis per se, for instance, to the rise of the Seljuqs. Even so, it appears to have been associated with state formation in a more general way.
As military rule—most notably under slave soldier regimes—expanded and civilian bureaucracies dwindled, religious leaders became the principal representatives of civil society and providers of public goods. This raised their overall profile, turning them into invaluable allies for foreign conquest regimes. In this case, the critical variable was not so much the degree of political fragmentation—after all, these processes preceded the later Ottoman-Safavid-Mughal triopoly—but the lack of diversity in regime type, a state of affairs that contrasts starkly with conditions in Europe where a variety of institutional orders sustained considerable plurality of outcomes.32
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