The received Eurocentric mythology is thatEuropean technology was superior to that of Asia throughout our period from1400 to 1800, or at least since 1500. Moreover, the conventional Eurocentricbias regarding science and technology extends to institutional forms, which areexamined in the following section. Here I focus on the following questions: (1)Were science and technology on balance more advanced in Europe or in Asia, anduntil when? (2) After importing the compass, gunpowder, printing, and so onfrom China, was technology then developed indigenously in Europe but no longerin China and elsewhere in Asia? (3) Was the direction of technologicaldiffusion after 1500 from Europe to Asia? (4) Was technological development onlya local and regional process in Europe or China or wherever, or was it really aglobal process driven by world economic forces as they impacted locally? Topreview the answers that will emerge below, all of them contradict or at leastcast serious doubt on the received Eurocentric “wisdom” about science andtechnology. Technology turns out not to be independently parallel. Instead,technology is rapidly diffused or adapted to common and/or differentcircumstances. In particular, the choice, application, and “progress” oftechnology turns out be the result of rational response to opportunity coststhat are themselves determined by world economic and local demand and supplyconditions. That is, technological progress here and there, even more thaninstitutional forms, is a function of world economic “development” much morethan it is of regional, national, local, let alone cultural specificities.Nonetheless an oft-cited student of the subject, J. D. Bernal (1969) attributesthe rise of Western science and technology to the indigenous rise of capitalismin the West (which he accounts for in the same terms as Marx and Weber). RobertMerton’s now classic 1938 discourse on “Science, Technology, and Society” isentirely Weberian and even linked to the latter’s thesis about the Protestantethic and the “Spirit of Capitalism.” That in itself should make his derivativethesis on science and technology suspect, as already argued in chapter 1; foranother critical discussion, see Stephen Sanderson (1995: 324 ff.). Coming fullcircle, Rostow’s (1975) “central thesis” on the origins of modern economy isquite explicit: it all began in modern Europe—with the scientific revolution.The study of the history and role of this scientific and technologicalrevolution seems to be much more ideologically driven than the technology andscience that allegedly support it. For instance, Carlo Cipolla (1976: 207)favorably cites one of the Western “experts” on the history of technology, LynnWhite, Jr., who asserts that “die Europe which rose to global dominance about1500 had an industrial capacity and skill vastly greater than that of any ofthe cultures of Asia…which it challenged.” We have already seen above thatEurope did not rise to “dominance” at all in 1500 if only because exactly theopposite of White’s Eurocentric claim was true. The second volume of theHistory of Technology edited by Charles Singer et al. (1957: vol. 2, 756)recognizes and even stresses that from A.D. 500 to 1500 “technologically, thewest had little to bring to the east. The technological movement was in theother direction.” Reproduced there is a table from Joseph Needham (1954) thattraces the time lags between several dozen inventions and discoveries in Chinaand their first adoption in Europe. In most cases, the lag was ten to fifteencenturies (and twenty-five centuries for the iron plow moldboard); in othercases the lag was three to six centuries; and the shortest time lag was onecentury, for both projectile artillery and movable metal type. “It was largelyby imitation and, in the end, sometimes by improvement of [these] techniquesand models…that the products of the west ultimately rose to excellence” (Singeret al. 1957: vol. 2, 756). However, these accounts are themselves alsoexcessively European-focused. There was indeed much technological diffusion;but during the millennium up to 1500 it was primarily back and forth amongEast, Southeast, South, and West Asia, and especially between China and Persia.Before any of this technology reached Europe at all, most of it had to pass viathe Muslim lands, including especially Muslim Spain. The Christian capture ofToledo and its Islamic scholars and important library in 1085 and later ofCordoba significantly advanced technological learning farther “westward” inEurope. The Byzantines and later the Mongols also transmitted knowledge fromeast to west.
Andre Gunder Frank. ReORIENT (KindleLocations 3926-3928). University of California Press. Kindle Edition.