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By Root 1239 0

with lively traditions of scholarship, invention, and trade. The Middle East was at the forefront of civilization, preserving and building on Greek and Roman knowledge and producing pathbreaking work in fields as diverse as mathematics, physics, medicine, anthropology, and psychology. Arabic numerals, of course, were invented there, as was the concept of zero. The word “algebra” comes from the title of a book, Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah, by an Arab scholar. The word “algorithm” derives from the scholar’s name, al-Khwarizmi. Militarily, the Ottomans were the envy of their rivals and continued to expand their empire, battling Western states in Central Asia and Europe until the seventeenth century. India, during its most vibrant eras, boasted scientific prowess, artistic genius, and architectural splendor. Even in the early sixteenth century, under Krishnadevaraya, the southern Indian city of Vijayanagar was described by many foreign visitors as one of the great cities of the world, comparable to Rome. A few centuries earlier, China was probably richer and more technologically sophisticated than any other country, using various technologies—gunpowder, movable type, the stirrup—that the West would stumble upon only centuries later. Even Africa had a higher average income than Europe during this period.

The tide began to turn in the fifteenth century—and by the sixteenth century, Europe had moved ahead. With the revolution in thought that is termed the Renaissance, men like Copernicus, Vesalius, and Galileo gave birth to modern science. Indeed, the hundred years between 1450 and 1550 marked the most significant break in human history—between faith, ritual, and dogma, on the one hand, and observation, experimentation, and critical thought, on the other. And it happened in Europe, pushing that civilization forward for centuries. By 1593, when an English ship equipped with eighty-seven guns traveled 3,700 miles to arrive in Istanbul, an Ottoman historian would call it “a wonder of the age the like of which has not been seen or recorded.”3 By the seventeenth century, almost every kind of technology, product, and complex organization (like a corporation or an army) was more advanced in Western Europe than anywhere else in the world.

To believe that Asian societies were, in any material sense, on par with the West in 1700 or 1800 is to believe that the scientific and technological advances that revolutionized the Western world over the preceding three hundred years had no effect on its material condition, which is absurd.* Scientific advances were not merely about creating new machines. They reshaped the mental outlook of Western societies. Take the mechanical clock, which was invented in Europe in the thirteenth century. The historian Daniel Boorstin calls it “the mother of machines.” “The clock,” he notes, “broke down the walls between kinds of knowledge, ingenuity, and skill, and clockmakers were the first consciously to apply the theories of mechanics and physics to the making of machines.”4 Its broader effects were even more revolutionary. The clock freed man from dependence on the sun and moon. It made it possible to order the day, define the night, organize work, and—perhaps most important—measure the cost of labor, by tracking the number of hours that went into a project. Before the clock, time had no measurable value.

By the sixteenth century, when the Portuguese brought them to China, Europe’s mechanical clocks were much more sophisticated than the clumsy water clocks made in Beijing. The Chinese, however, saw little value in these machines, viewing them as toys, and they never bothered to learn how to run them. Having acquired some, they needed Europeans to stay behind to work their inventions. Similarly, when the Portuguese brought cannons to Beijing a hundred years later, they had to supply operators for the machines. China could consume modern technology, but it could not produce it. And by the eighteenth century, Beijing no longer even wanted to see foreign gadgets. In a famous letter to George III, the Qienlong emperor,