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Asia and EuropeJack GoodyPublished online: 07 Jul 2015.

To cite this article: Jack Goody (2015) Asia and Europe, History and Anthropology, 26:3, 263-307,DOI: 10.1080/02757206.2015.1048072

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Asia and EuropeJack Goody

In this extended essay, Jack Goody summarizes his long-standing intellectual effort todevelop a comparative historical anthropology that would challenge the widely held percep-tions about the supremacy of the West in the context of world history. Throughout the essay,Goody focuses on the similarities existing in all Eurasian cultures to turn much of Europeanhistory and historiography on its head. The essay documents the unity across Eurasia as aninterconnected landmass, the legacies of the common Bronze Age of the Ancient Near East,its associated plough agriculture, and the traditions of writing and use of metals in order toreassess the primacy of material resource endowments in shaping human history. Goodypresents a series of characteristics conventionally cited in the West as evidence of the unique-ness of Europe and shows that, in each and every case, equivalents can be found in Asia, andnotably in China.

Keywords: Age of Metals; Capitalism; Eurasia; Industrial Revolution; World History

Part I

The Impact of Mass (Iron) Production

As he comes into the iron country farther north, such fresh green woods as those ofChesney Wold are left behind; and coal-pits and ashes, high chimneys and red bricks,blighted verdure, scorching fires and a heavy never-lightening cloud of smoke, becomethe features of the scenery. (Dickens 1853, 878)

How is it that China and India, apparently without the development of “capitalism”,which was Western, are now challenging the West for supremacy in so many fields?This is a problem that has concerned me ever since my colleague, Ian Watt and I fol-lowed in the line of so many European thinkers and historians in attributing a unique-ness to the developments in the West, leading to the emergence of capitalism. This

Correspondence to: St John’s College, Cambridge CB2 1TP, UK. (For any enquiries associated with the articleplease contact the editor at: d.henig@kent.ac.uk)

History and Anthropology, 2015Vol. 26, No. 3, 263–307, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2015.1048072

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

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uniqueness had been emphasized by Marx, Engels and many nineteenth-century (andlater) historians, writing at the time of European pre-eminence in manufacture andother related spheres, which they saw as unique to the West. The belief in the unique-ness of the West, in its progression from the Ancient, to the Feudal and then to “capit-alism”, has formed the background to much of my intellectual activity. Indeed, itseemed obvious at a time when Europe had conquered America, Africa and the restof the world. But nevertheless the question worried me and at various times I havediverted my attention to one aspect or another of this supposed Western superiorityand to try and get an alternative view. The thoughts have been somewhat dispersedand for this reason I have thought it sensible to try and summarize the various argu-ments that I have made in the course of trying to demonstrate the relative equalityof West and East ever since their common origin in the Bronze Age of the AncientNear East.In what follows my aim is therefore to recapitulate the attempts I have made in

different contexts to see the likenesses that exist in all Eurasian cultures that hadwriting, whether alphabetic or logographic, as well as in the production of materialgoods, with a view to bringing out the similarities rather than the differences thatmarked the East and the West. This is to set the approach of much Europeanhistory on its head, for that has concentrated, especially in post-Industrial Revolutiontimes, on drawing attention to the differences in their history, mentality and so forth. Inthis essay, on the other hand, I want to try and summarize the many commonalitieswhich I have earlier tried to point out.When I began to write on this theme, the world was a different place. European

culture was obviously dominant in many spheres. Today the rise of the East is onlytoo obvious, with China and India becoming important industrial (and “capitalist”)nations, with all the “cultural” activities that accompany this mass communication,radio, especially cinema, but other forms too. What I have wanted to show is thatthis advent is no mere copying of the West, as too many westerners still like tothink, but a continuation built upon their earlier past. Like our own tradition, thiswas literate and had therefore the basis of a more complex form of society, as con-trasted with the purely oral variety. It was also metal-using. When Watt and I wroteabout literacy, it was the Western type that was mostly in our thoughts; that versionwas widely propagated through the work of UNESCO and other international organ-izations. It was essentially Western European literacy that was creating an educated newworld, not the more elementary forms we had come across in Thai or Italian villages.Although even in the Abruzzi belt of central Italy when I was lying up in a cave, we didhave with us a copy of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park. For Watt and I had both beentrained in the English School at the University of Cambridge, and we held tight toour own ideals of the educated person, what he should read and what he should be.The script of Thai workers, and even the scribblings of Northern peasants hardlymeasured up. They were employing lesser scripts for lesser purposes. What interestedus was mainly the fully fledged system of writing which permitted the poems ofChaucer and the plays of Shakespeare. But this full use of writing only became clearlater on in history; you had to begin with an “accountant’s script” before you could

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get to Jane Austen. It was partly to see what difference writing in any form made that Iwent to Ghana and worked in an oral society for two years into which schools had onlyrecently been introduced and where the difference between those who had been toschool and those who had not was very much to the fore.A number of people I knew worked in China, at this time: the literary critic I.A.

Richards who composed an English primer for Chinese schools; William Empson,poet and critic, author of Seven Types of Ambiguity; above all, Joseph Needham whochanged my ideas about Chinese sciences (and inevitably the role of Chinese charac-ters). In another context, I, of course, came across Needham’s writings where he haddiscussed the concept of Malinowski’s view of rationality and of Trobriand fishing.The interest in China was also stimulated by work on their philosophy, which invited

comparison with that of the Greeks; scholars in the West took up the work of Menciusand others, which seemed the equal of European philosophy. Eventually, all this con-tributed to a revaluation of Chinese achievements in different spheres. China hadearlier been seen as having a quite different mode of production (the Asiatic or hydrau-lic one) that had previously split off from the Bronze Age in Antiquity. Overlooked inthis reconstruction was the Bronze Age itself which had linked East and West and hadcertainly been at the origin of our civilization, and not the backward area we tend to seein recent times.This account of the radical divergence of the two systems had been formulated in the

shadow of the Industrial Revolution but today those “evolutionary” implications areseen to be partly mistaken. In fact, China developed an iron and coal economy atthe same time as the West, although in the nineteenth century it did not go as far inthe process of industrialization. It was perhaps the Marxist account that sufferedmost in this revision of the dominant position of the west’s modes of production,which were supposed to have occurred first in Europe eventually leading to “capital-ism”. But it was only the West that went down the line leading, through Antiquity,to “feudalism”, then finally to “capitalism”. The East was supposed to have got hungup and followed a different trajectory. The difference arose from the particular needof water in the East for the land and the requirement of a “water-borne” bureaucracyfor its centralized control in irrigation purposes, necessarily giving rise to a bureaucraticregime. The idea received a mixed reception from some but the notion that China had atotally different economic history nevertheless persisted. Of course, the country had adifferent history in terms of modernization, or even of “capitalism”, but there wasa common origin in the Bronze Age of the Near East. In elaborating this alternativethesis, I called attention to the work of Gordon Childe and other archaeologists whocame at the problem from the other end, that is, they were not starting from theurban mode of civilization of Europe after the Industrial Revolution but from thebeginning of metallurgy, from unity rather than difference.If it were not for the continuing strength of this historical tradition of supposed

divergence, and its hold on public thinking, there would be no need to stress the con-temporary links and parallels with China, for these are only too obvious in the worldtoday. However there are still many historians, and other thinkers, who are living withthe divergences of the past. So there is still a place for my polemic.

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I would begin by emphasizing the physical connection between the East and theWest of the Eurasian continent rather than the division between Europe and Asia,stressed by the Greeks and which has caused so much misunderstanding. We aredealing with one interconnected landmass, whose culture and economy derives fromthe common Bronze Age, in terms not only of the “culture of cities” and the associatedplough agriculture, but also of writing and the use of metals. However the supposeddivision between the two with the Bosphorus and the Aegean coast on the Asianside, which started with the Greeks and the Persians, has distorted much of historyever since.Too often comparative work is limited to the Mediterranean and its peoples and tra-

ditions, especially the culture. The important work of Braudel so often started with theinland sea, and even culminated there. That would have had less of a drawback if thearea had not been so tied up with the origin of “culture”, particularly of written culture,leading to the recent neglect of what took place in Asia, in India and China. A majorproblem occurs when the Mediterranean is taken as a microcosm of world history,neglecting the alternative literary tradition of the East. That however displayed manysimilarities but was given a different emphasis with the adoption of a different kindof script, which had other implications for society, but turned out to be equally creative.But much of European (and indeed global) social theory and history has been built

around a supposed contrast between the two in terms of the development of politics, aswell as the history of civilization and the arts. However, Europe and Asia were neithergeographically nor culturally distinct. Communication between the two parts was fre-quent from an early period. That was particularly clear in the activity of the Turks(Golden 2005), who following the Persians spread themselves between the two areas.Originating in the hinterland of China, they not only controlled the Silk Road,which extended as far as Rome, but acted as a channel for the adoption of NearEastern religions. One of the dynastic annals from China writes of the origin of theTurks as being descended from a wounded boy nursed by a she-wolf; near Turfan inMongolia she gave birth to ten sons, the leader of whom founded the Turkish rulinghouse. The sons married local women, came under the rule of the dominant Avar (aproto-Mongolic group) and served as ironworkers in the Altai in Southern Siberia(Golden 2005, 20), but their activity extended through the Western steppes as far asthe Bulgars. They were thus associated with the metal age and linked to both sidesof the Eurasian landmass. Those links were strong and preceded what later becamethe Silk Road.The Western religions were taken eastwards to the Turk and Uighur peoples by the

Soghdians, an Iranian group who provided the lingua franca of the Silk Road, and actedas subjects and intermediaries with the settled world, that is, with Manicheism, Chris-tianity and Mazdaism (a local form of Zoroastrianism) together with their writingsystems which were also based on the Aramaic-Syriac alphabets developed in theAncient Near East. Some Turks and Uighur in the North of China even converted toBuddhism and others to Nestorian Christianity. These people have continually beena thorn in the side of the Chinese, the Han, who replaced the Soghdians as the inter-national merchants and gave their alphabet to Mongolia where it is still used and as it

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was by the Manchus. And in the eighth–early ninth centuries some Khazar rulingelements of that ethnicity converted to Judaism (Golden 2005, 22), later occupyingthe Pontic area of Europe. The exchange of religious ideas took place in both directions.Right from the Neolithic we have evidence of considerable cultural transmission

between the two areas, as well as of their autonomous development, especially withthe climatic changes that followed the ending of the Ice Ages. In Eurasia, as in therest of the world, the end of the Ice Age saw a blossoming of the earlier fauna andflora, a blossoming which allowed the transition to the Neolithic, when the uses ofplants and animals occurred in permanent locations rather than by the gatheringand hunting over wide spaces that took place in earlier times. Ever since the ThreeAges of Man (Daniel 1943), archaeologists have marked the development ofmankind by referring to the tools used to earn a living, lithos (“stone”), metal(bronze, and then iron). The human species has moved from stone tools to metal(then plastic) ones and their use has been seen to mark out the great archaeologicalperiods. There was already the beginning of some general development in the StoneAge leading eventually to the use of more complex Palaeolithic tools, then to the Neo-lithic, but the whole process greatly speeded up once man began to write and to makeuse of metals, which often had to be extracted from ore by the application of heatalready used to help split stone.Many authors have indicated how important the control of fire was for the develop-

ment of human civilization. It led to the transformation of food from the raw to thecooked, to the transformation of materials like clay into pottery as well as of oreinto metals. Besides this it assisted man to dwell in otherwise difficult climates,keeping wild beasts away and warming the environment. Above all, I am concernedhere with the role of heat in the transformation of ore into metals that can then beturned into valuable or even everyday items. Gold and silver required little transform-ation, except by beating, but they needed finding and digging out, often by mining.Other metals were not in themselves precious although the belief arose they couldbe transformed into the valuable variety. Experiments were made by alchemists withthis end in view. And that alchemy was the beginning of modern chemistry. But itwas only iron and iron-making that led the way to the modern world as this wassuch a widespread and adaptable metal.With metals we enter the historic period with the initial onset of the Age of Bronze.

This first occurred in Western Asia in the valleys of Mesopotamia from whence, withmany modifications, the technique spread in all directions, North to the Caucasus,East to India and China, West to a part of Europe, South to Egypt and NorthAfrica. Following the initial spread, trade routes developed (they had, of course,existed before), to India by sea, as recounted in the Periplus (a sailors’ guide to theIndian Ocean of about 1–200 CE), by land along the Silk Road East to China(from about second century BCE) North to the Caucasus and even to Europe,South to Africa. The very existence of these well-travelled routes meant that the cul-tures were not entirely separated and unique; they exchanged goods and ideas withone another in meaningful ways; objects such as precious metals and shells wereused for both trade and display.

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The radical distinction between Europe and Asia, which is today enhanced by theexistence of political and other cultural claims, allocating them different trajectoriesin world history, began as we have seen with the Greeks who failed to give adequateweight to their own inheritance from the Near East where their enemies, the Persians,had occupied the ancient lands of the two rivers, Mesopotamia. The Greeks and thePersians were brought together by the Aegean Sea, especially after 546 BCE with thePersian conquest of the Lydian kingdom, which resulted in a number of Greek citiesin Asia Minor coming under Persian rule. This contact eventually led to further con-flict, to the destruction of the Lydian capital on the Mediterranean and even to theburning of the Greek Acropolis itself. Persia had become a rival power whose wayswere seen as the opposite of the Greeks, in government, in war, in private life.The Persians were from the East, “Asia”, the Greeks from the West, “Europe”, andthe two were seen by the participants as having different practices and beliefs, theone “civilized”, the other “barbarian”, even though Persians also spoke an Indo-Euro-pean language and had an urban culture complete with writing and all the trappingsof the Bronze Age. In the early days of that period, Persia had been the focus of muchactivity of a modernizing kind, as well as being a centre for the development ofwritten religions. The political and social advantages of having a single written reli-gion in a particular polity were becoming increasingly clear. Later, under ShapurII, the growing challenge of other literate religions, of Christianity and Judaism inthe East, and then of Buddhism in the West, seemed to call for a state religion inIran; with the development of Zoroastrianism, the Avestan kings were presented asthe first Iranian dynasty (Curtis 2005, 252). It was also in the Near East that Nestor-ianism, Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism, as well, as we have seen, as Judaism, Chris-tianity and Islam had their roots, not initially in the European world at all. Persia notonly inherited the urban civilization of the Near East from the ancient culture of theMesopotamian area but she transmitted this to the Arabs when they later conqueredthe region.Developments in the Age of Metals subsequently threw the emphasis on the West

with its proliferation of those resources which became increasingly less available inthe East. Wood too was scarce in the dry Near East, though the Lebanon supplied itscedar and some wood was also imported from India and Africa. Even coal was inshort supply in the Mediterranean. The West triumphed in the later stages of “moder-nity” mainly because of the abundance of these materials, especially coal and iron. Butto understand its history we have to shift our gaze eastwards, to what have been viewedin Western circles as Oriental Studies, not as European at all. This “oriental” world wasseen as a different universe, inhabited by a different type of humanity, even a different“race”. For in the nineteenth-century polyethnic theories even gave them a differentracial origin and these notions are not altogether dead, at least in the popular imagin-ation, but live on in a different form.In the process of adjusting to the shattering defeat by Athens,

the projection of the Persians as a barbarian “other” was a convenient foil against whichGreek values and norms could be set. The victory was seen as an ideological one, Greek

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discipline overcoming eastern weakness, democracy defeating despotism, civilization tri-umphing over barbarity. (Villing 2005, 238)

“One of the first and already very powerful manifestations of this development wasAeschylus’s Persians, the oldest extant Greek tragedy” (Villing 2005, 238). “It is Athe-nian values of freedom and equality that are presented as the cause for the Greeks’victory” (Villing 2005, 238).

Many of the contrasts between Asia and Greece contained in the play are further devel-oped by later authors, such as the Greek historian Herodotus, one of the main Greeksources on ancient Persia: the unaccountable monarchy of the Persians versus the accoun-table democracy of Athens, the slavish masses of the king’s vast flotilla versus the smallband of pious, disciplined and courageous Greeks; the empty pomp of the Persiancourt versus the masculine simplicity of the Athenians. (Villing 2005, 239)

Generations of European school children brought up on the classics have absorbed thisdichotomous view of the origins of the modern European world.For many years this classical period of Greece and Rome has been seen by those Eur-

opeans as the origin of our Western civilization. This view has been the result of ourteaching of “classics” in schools and universities when these were among the most pres-tigious departments of all. Our achievements went back to that time in Europeanhistory—to the origin of “our culture”, even of contemporary society. The modernworld began with the Greeks and they firmly put the keys in European hands. Thiswas especially true with the arts as with the very concept of democracy; both werefirmly linked to the Greeks. But with democracy, it was also etymological. Howeverwe need to distinguish between the origin of the word and the birth of politicalreality. The word is tied up with that of the language. But the reality goes backmuch further and it existed in earlier neolithic times.As far as the contrast between Greeks and Persians was concerned, both spoke an

Indo-European tongue, so the conflict did not lie at that level. If the latter were defeatedby Alexander, that was hardly because of greater “freedom” but partly because Greecehad more ample supplies of iron, not, initially at any rate, because of greater “wisdom”

in politics. Nor did the differences between East and West lie at the level of modes ofproduction, as some have suggested but in more immediate factors such as the modesof destruction, access to raw metals and to their products.However the Greeks themselves drew a heavy contrast with the institutions and ways

of life of their enemies, the Persians, although they in fact came to dominate the NearEast having taken over Mesopotamia. Politically that contrast remained comprehensi-ble since the two “empires” were at war with each other in the Eastern Mediterraneanarea, especially with the conquests of Alexander the Great (334–323 CE) whichextended as far as North India and Bactria reaching the boundaries of China. Froma wider cultural standpoint the opposition is less easy to understand as in both societiesit was the Near East that had originally given birth to writing, to metallurgy and to thewhole Bronze Age “civilization”. This the Greeks knew perfectly well, yet they never-theless defined the Persians as “barbarian” and played down their contributions tohuman affairs in favour of European ones. And this vision has been largely passed

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down to us, often through the partizan writings of the great classical Greek historians,Xenophon, Herodotus and many others. For what the Greeks certainly did do was helpdevelop a facility with the art of writing, which had begun as “an accountants’ script”for economic purposes, but spread into many other fields of knowledge, including thewriting of history. Writing itself they did not of course invent, but they certainlyexpanded its use, adopting the Asiatic Semitic alphabet to do so.The opposition between Europe and Asia was critical for the Greeks because it was

linked to their survival at Thermopylae as well as to the fate of their settlements on thecoast of the Near East that brought them directly up against the expanding Persianswho were among the direct heirs of the Bronze Age cultures of Mesopotamia. Theseevents put the Greeks determinedly in the other camp from the Near Easterners andwere the start of a distinct tradition for the West, for Europeans, which began withancient Athens. So we now sometimes see that society as bringing civilization evento Asia as well as Europe, although in fact Persia had a flowering culture of its ownderived from the area in the Near East it took over. In fact, the contrast between“democratic” Greece and “autocratic” Persia and Asia really was not, as some havemade out, valid. Greece also had its “tyrants” and Alexander of Macedon was hardlyan elected ruler. The East moreover also had its share of consultation, as in theLebanon. In fact, few regimes could afford to be completely autocratic for long at alllevels of government, especially when they needed the “masses” to serve in a largearmy or to transform the metals.Ancient Persia was in fact not only autocratic but a great centre for trade, both with

the East and with the West. It was also an important producer of metal goods, such aspewter (Weisehöfer 2001, 194). The East was never as foreign as the Greeks thought.Indeed, Persia, rather than the West, was at that time at the very centre even of theChristian world, as well as being the home of much other experimentation in the reli-gious field. When later on Islam took over, there were ninety-six Christian bishopricsin the country, which was otherwise Zoroastrian. The Christian church in the East hashad relatively little attention in the history of that religion which has been seen asessentially Western, even European. That was not originally so. It was in the NearEast, in the sands of Egypt that monasteries developed using as a baseSt. Anthony’s experiences (Dalrymple 1998). Indeed with regard to the key insti-tutions of monasticism, so central for the growth of literacy and for the developmentof certain arts, the monks have been described as the “provincial imitators of theEastern desert fathers” (Dalrymple 1998, 106). There may indeed even have beensome direct contact between the Celtic churches in the West and the Coptic in theEast. The Levant was “the heartland of Christianity”, “the richest, most populousand most highly educated part of the Mediterranean world” (Dalrymple 1998, 17).“Byzantium was still the focus of the entire Eurasian land mass”, the meeting placeof East and West (Dalrymple 1998, 17). “Constantinople was the capital of Christen-dom, the richest metropolis in Europe … the repository of all that had been salvagedfrom the wreck of classical antiquity” (Dalrymple 1998, 26). Not only did Christianityoriginate in the Near East, but it also spread substantially in an easterly direction. Itwas taken down the Silk Road not by European travellers and monks but, especially in

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its Nestorian form (Monophysite), by locals. This form was much closer to Muslimpractices than Western Christianity, indeed early Christians were said to haveprayed like Muslims (Dalrymple 1998, 105)

The Search for Metals and its Consequences

All this should make us modify the view of the role in world history, not only of Persiabut of the East more generally, including India but primarily China, as I have tried to doin a recent book on the role of metals in human culture (Goody 2012). This is an extra-vagant step to take as it involves questioning not only Marx and Weber but many othernineteenth-century historians in the West, as well as authors such as Malthus, in theirdiscussions of the difference between East and West (and above all in questioning theUniqueness of the former in the development of modernization). Every country is ofcourse “unique”, although not from the standpoint of the wider movement ofhistory. In that framework, many had assumed “modernization” to be the equivalentof “westernization”, not only Marx but Weber too, although in religious rather thanin economic matters.One aspect of Chinese culture that has been seized upon to account for China’s

apparent tardiness well before the period of Mao Tse Tung was the commitment to“backward” customs, such as the wearing of pigtails and the binding of female feet.It is true that the development of China fell behind that of the West in the IndustrialRevolution and that this was often put down to its clinging on to earlier customs (HsiaoCh’ien 1944). This opposition between the “traditional” and the modern has been seenin terms of that between poetry and the machine but the point to note is that thebalance was never permanent but subject to alternation. In the European MiddleAges, it was China that was the most prominent in a scientific and technical sense.The so-called backwardness of later times was contrasted with the civilized existenceof the West. However, the wearing of pigtails, which as Dickens notes in BleakHouse, was a temporary feature of Victorian societies (more long lasting in the Ortho-dox Church) and, as far as foot binding were concerned, the distortions of the femalebody were equally prominent in both societies given the Victorian addiction to staysand other ways of binding the body. There seems to have been little differencebetween the two.Even in classical times, the East was not backward by comparison with the West. In

that period trade took place with China in the Indian Ocean. This was stimulated by thefact that Rome was viewed as the centre of the world economy, exchanging with India,China and other parts (Whitehouse 1991, 216). But it was not alone. In the IndianOcean, there were three massive trading networks before 1000 CE: apart from theRoman, the other two were the Sasanian in the sixth century and that of Siraf in theninth and tenth centuries (Beaujard 2012). After Rome Baghdad became the mainfocal point of exchange. “In both cases, the elite accumulated extraordinary wealth”(Whitehouse 1991, 216), leading not only to further exchange, to the developmentof overseas trade and stratification, but to luxury and to a taste for the exotic whichextended to Europe, especially for pepper and silk.

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In this Roman trade with India, the balance always seems to have favoured the lattercountry (Deo 1991, 39). The amount was considerable. There are numerous inscrip-tions in India referring to “regular settlements of immigrant yavanas [Europeans] onthe west coast”. Their equipment included ceramics, some of which was importedbut some may have been made in India, although there is also important evidencefor extensive trade from the Mediterranean especially in the jars used for storingwine or oil; and from South India there are even signs of the import of glass objects(Stern 1991, 337).But trade was not easy; the sea voyage from the Near East to India was long and

dangerous. It was only made possible by the monsoon which took ships from Arabiato North India and from Cape Guardafui to the Malabar Coast (Beaujard 2012).But, especially at the beginning of that period, the seas were heavy, too heavy forAsian ships; however, the stronger boats built by the Romans, needed for the transportof heavier goods such as wood and metal, could withstand the waters and there was infact the development of considerable commerce, as well as the eventual settlement ofother human groups, such as Jews in both areas, of Thomasian Christians (Nestorians)in the South and later on of Muslims to Malabar (as well of course by land to theNorth).Indeed, merchant activity became of great importance throughout the continent. In

Europe, it also increased greatly at the end of the tenth century. Some peasants becamewell off by selling the products of their gardens in the market, especially after thePlague. In this context, the economy saw the rise of professional merchants such asHans Fugger who had installed himself as a weaver in 1367. He sold thread, wooland cloth as the result of which the business prospered. His sons, Andreas (1388–1453) and Jacob (1398–1469), expanded the activity into banking in Europe, lendingmoney especially to statesmen, and starting branches throughout the continent. Itwas Jacob’s son James who became interested in the copper and silver mines neededfor currency; he obtained control of the Tyrolean mines which were found in the Haps-burg territory. His riches thus enabled him to finance the young king of Spain, whobecame the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V (1500–1558). But the Fugger merchantsnevertheless failed to invest in productive activities and their credit rating dropped,with the money lent being used for wasteful military expeditions instead. They weretoo closely tied to the fortunes of the Spanish monarch to whom they had lentmuch money, neglecting the rise of the English, of Holland and of the Atlanticpowers, whose business was linked to the development of North America.It was this merchant activity that eventually financed not only the wasteful pro-

cedures of many rulers, but more importantly that of the manufacturing of firmssuch as the Rouncewells in Bleak House as well as the earlier activity in Augsburgand elsewhere. Eventually, these men became the middle class of Victorian Englandand elsewhere, the Gradgrinds as well as artists like Dickens himself. Exchange activityincreased; autosubsistences played less and less part in advanced economies whereexchange became the dominant feature of our economy.As far as Europe and Asia were concerned, the land route too was used not only for

trade with Rome and elsewhere but also for the diffusion of the monotheistic religions

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from the Near East eastwards as far as China including the Church of Manichee, towhich St. Augustine at first subscribed. This was a truly Eurasian church incorporatingas prophets Jesus, Buddha and others (Lieu 1985, 23); in China its presence long out-lasted its appearance in both the Near East and Europe. In fact, not only Manicheismbut all the major world religions reached the East: obviously, Buddhism, as the result ofa long-standing connection with India, which also provided a commercial channel forsugar and cotton. But Judaism too became established along the Silk Road as well asNestorian Christianity and later Islam, each providing many merchants and interme-diaries, including seamen in the Muslim case. These sailors developed the routes inthe Indian Ocean, possibly going back to Mecca but certainly visiting East Africa,where they left behind many shards of pottery on the Kenyan coast. They made avoyage of exploration that introduced the giraffe to the public back home, but theChinese also undertook more regular journeys not only to present-day Malaya,where they had a trading station at Malacca, but also to Kerala in South India fromwhere they traded up and down the coast. All this was part of a regular trade toSouth Asia until interrupted by the Chinese rulers themselves who became worriedby outside contacts and chose to close down communications with foreigners, notnecessarily because the West was feared as more advanced but also to prevent a diffu-sion of their own inventions. However, of course, the physical connections betweenEurope and Asia continued to exist and the West was by no means totally cut offfrom the East, nor the East from the West. The two areas developed together, as Ihave tried to show with regard to the Age of Metals, although there were of coursespurts in both areas. Asia was at first dominant for it had a high heat technology,which could not be matched in the West. The history of porcelain makes it clearthat Western science and technology did not have it all its own way. That applieseven to the Renaissance with the rebirth of classical knowledge which was preserved,and some extent initially developed, in the Near East.The growth of the worldwide porcelain industry in China and its very Smithian div-

ision of labour that accompanied it has been discussed by Ledderose (2000), and themore general growth of specialisms, so well treated by Gordon Childe, is excellentlyillustrated in accounts of ancient Persia, where the development of urban civilizationwas intimately linked to the surplus production of the Bronze Age made possible byplough agriculture and by the harnessing of animal power to the metal hoe blades.The increased production could then free other workers; some of these were employedin luxury production for those “bosses” who organized this activity and had “acquired”rights to larger areas of land than subsistence farming permitted.The Near East was important in the development of written civilization because that

was the first place that writing emerged. Writing first appeared on clay tablets. This wasnot of course independent of other transformations that were taking place in theBronze Age. We can trace some of these beginnings in the river valleys of the area. Itwas from there that writing and written culture spread eastwards to India and Chinaand eventually westwards to Europe as well. But that depended not on tablets of claybut on the more solid materials of the Age of Metals. These were no longer producedin the rich valleys of the region but mainly in the barren hill country that surrounded

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them and had to be dug out by men prepared or forced into having to collect them fortrade and manufacture.The use of clay for currency was replaced by metal coinage. The shift in materials

involved a move to more mountainous parts where metal was more available, eventhough it still had to be searched for. That process entailed the spread of many featuresassociated with the urban civilization of the river valleys to other parts where these wereobtainable. Civilization was no longer confined to the river valleys of the Ancient NearEast but was involved more widely in the search for new materials, specifically metals.So the fact that the Near East which was the home of our earliest system of writingbecame of less importance in the subsequent period.Both the Near and Far East continued to develop in the Bronze Age, although the

river valleys themselves had increasingly to import metal, exchanging them for theirown farming produce. In both areas, bronze was eventually replaced with iron, ametal that was much more available being found in large quantities in the earth’scrust. Iron was more complex to manufacture but in the end cheaper and stronger,and it was adopted in both the East and West. The Near East itself had little iron,nor did it have the coal or water power in the shape of fast-flowing streams, toprovide the energy to smelt the metal. Consequently that region fell behind in produ-cing the mass industrial products required in the Industrial Revolution of the modernperiod. But what we want to establish is that since the beginning of the Metal Age andof written civilization, which went hand in hand, the East and the West developed moreor less together, hand-in-hand without one permanently advancing out of kilter withthe other. That could be expected from their common origin in the Bronze Age ofthe Near East, in their common adoption of writing, and in the communication thattook place between them. This process can be clearly seen in the developments inthe technology of iron production which followed a roughly similar course in bothareas, whether because of communication or because of parallel innovation does notradically affect the issue. The point is that the Europeans and the Asians did nothave basically different histories of growth. They had similar starting points, and atcertain times one may have gained some primacy over the other but in general theyfollowed roughly similar paths, which led to the similar manufacturing technologyof today.This idea runs counter to the thinking of many. It was in the post-Renaissance

period, but especially with the coming of the nineteenth century, that Europe tooka distinct step ahead. Contemporary writers, including historians, often viewed thisnot as a temporary advantage but rather as evidence of a permanent state ofaffairs, witness to a more general superiority of the West rather than of a particular(historical) position. Following upon a primitive ethnocentrism, the idea even tookon a “racist” character, the West being seen as having a built-in superiority overthe East, a superiority that went back to the Classical Period of the Greeks andPersians.After the triumph of the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, Western

scholars tried to isolate quasi-permanent factors such as Protestantism or Christianityas a whole to account for what should have been seen as a temporary advance in the

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“civilizational process”. They even alighted on racial or cultural factors like Judaism ormonotheism to account for what they saw as the divergent tracks. But this attributionwas based upon the assumption that modernization, and indeed capitalism, was apurely Western development. The idea that the East and West had developed togetherwas resisted by those who wrote during that period when some saw Western develop-ments as “capitalism” which was seen as continuous from Antiquity and the establish-ment of Christianity, and made the notion of permanent superiority acceptable. But itwas Joseph Needham, in his ground-breaking work on Chinese science, who showedthat in pre-Renaissance times the general achievement of the East in science was inmany ways superior to the Western.In the West, the Renaissance, a rebirth of classical civilization, has been seen as the

foundation of the modern (Western) world, but that was very dependent on theChinese invention, first of paper, then of duplication by printing, as well as bytheir achievements in the treatment of metals and high heat. It was this treatment,in which China excelled, that led to the major developments in mass production,in weapons, railways and the steam engine which lay at the heart of the IndustrialRevolution and the Factory Age. Its first focus in Europe was Southern Germanywhere the Iron Age had originally flourished (around Hallstatt after which it isnamed) and which remained a centre of metal and iron production for centuries.From then it produced the metals that were later exported through the Mediterraneanby way of Venice to the Near East, which had a penury. That was the foundation ofthe wealth of the Serenissima and one of the pillars of the Renaissance in a trade thatbrought back Eastern spices and cloth to be exchanged with the rest of Europe; in thisway, the new dispensation spread rapidly. At first, the West had little to send, apartfrom metals (including bullion) together with wool in return for the manufacturesmade earlier in the Near East, that is, paper, soap, sugar, carpets, silk, scents, andcotton, not to speak of the imported spices and goods from India. Even simple“machinery” such as astrolabes and metal objects such as Damascus swords camefrom that area, which was in touch with both Chinese and Indian achievements,including their knowledge systems. The Near East also had a more luxurious standardof domestic life than Europe, depending for light and food on olive oil rather thanpork fat and tallow wax, houses fitted with baths and highly decorated rooms,albeit with abstract or formal designs. Baths were associated with the East ratherthan with the West. Indeed, St. Jerome declared that he who has bathed in Christdoes not need a second bath; they were associated with “pagan” luxury not withChristian asceticism. Already in the fifth century, Constantinople had 153 privatebath houses (Dalrymple 1998, 27). Under the Christian Byzantians, things only gotworse at Scythopolis (in Palestine). Excavations have shown that while the town’sbrothels were flourishing, bathing was falling out of fashion (Dalrymple 1998, 325).It was not only baths. Chrysostom inveighed against many urban institutions,taverns, theatres, and brothels.Subsequently, the West took over the manufacture of many Eastern products,

especially in cotton and metal goods, and even high-fired pottery. In metals, she hadabundant resources, polluting the planet with the coal used to smelt the metal until

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oil and electricity largely took over. Despite the advent of plastic, the Metal Age con-tinued to develop the achievements of the Bronze, both in literacy and in materials.The two went hand-in-hand.Of critical importance to the development of the Eurasian economy, especially in

metals has been the finds of early copper mines not only in Europe but in Asia, inAfghanistan and Mongolia. The first lay in the East of the country, in Logar province,near the college of Mes Aynak. In looking for copper, a French geologist found an entireBuddhist city dating from the early centuries of our era and covering some six squarekilometres (Dalrymple 2013, 26). The site included forty-five monasteries, a Zoroas-trian fire temple and Buddhist stupas, ancient copper workings, smelting workshops,miners’ houses and a mint plus two small forts and a citadel together with statuesand some Buddhist frescoes. It was a major site on the Silk Road at a time when Bud-dhism and Sanskrit culture was spreading to China and pilgrims and scholars were tra-velling to India, especially to the University of Nalanda, a great seat of learning.The centre of the Aynak seems to have been built around the exploitation of this

copper and produced buildings of colossal grandeur which Dalrymple (2013) likensto the constructions of the theocracy of Tibet or the activities of the Cistercians inthe West. But a slow decline began in the eighth century and the site was abandoned200 years later with the rise of the Islamic Ghurid dynasty. Before that,

Buddhism was spreading over the Hindu Kush and the region was the meeting place forthe ideas and peoples of the civilisations surrounding central Asia. Its mountains andvalleys were a major intellectual crossroads where the Hellenistic, Persian, centralAsian, Tibetan, Indian and Chinese worlds met and fused. (Dalyrymple 2013, 27)

This whole area had been conquered by Alexander, who built one of his main centres atGandhara, in present-day Pakistan. When he died in 323 BCE, the Greek garrisons werecut off from their Mediterranean home but stayed on as the Bactrian Greeks and sur-vived for 1000 years after the fall of their European relations, ruling over a mixed Indo-Hellenistic civilization which left its mark on Mes Aynak. The area looks likely tobecome central to world affairs again as China has interested itself in the copper pro-duction, and is about to build a railway back along the Wakhan Corridor as well aswestwards to Iran via Herat and to Uzbekistan. This is the Taliban area, not onlywild or violent as it now appears to the West, but with a fascinating technologicalhistory.There was, then, no justification for assuming a perpetual or even a temporary super-

iority in one part of the European continent but this theme nonetheless became a con-stant one in European history after the Industrial Revolution. How did Europe accountfor its supposed achievement? The most widespread investigation of the trajectories ofEast and West was that made by Max Weber who attributed this superiority to the reli-gious differences that emerged with the rise of Protestantism in the sixteenth century.That conclusion influenced a whole series of books and papers and has been widelyaccepted in the West for the social sciences within the rubric of the Protestant ethic.But the thesis relates primarily to the countries of Northern Europe, not even to theSouth where it is generally agreed that modernization in the form of the Renaissance

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and the growth of its commerce really began to take off; that is, in a Catholic milieuwhich flourished in the South and East of the continent where exchange with Asiahad some continuity. Secondly, there seem to have been a number of other metal-using societies that developed a form of “capitalism”, especially China (where evenlocal Marxists write of “sprouts of capitalism”). Nor does there seem to be a satisfac-tory, alternative way to describe the much earlier activity here in the Ancient Near Eastor in the further East; then Roman and earlier bankers were certainly “capitalists”. If weenquire about the attitudes that inevitably accompanied such activity, we find parallelsto Protestantism in the Chettiars of South India observed by Rudner (1994), as well asamong Near Eastern and Chinese merchants generally. The West was by no meansalone in promoting a trading mentality; in China the system has been referred to aspetty capitalism but it was no less capitalist in spirit. And a significant feature of itswidespread nature is the speed and ease with which such activity has now beentaken up throughout the modern world. “Capitalism” did not have to wait to beinvented only by the West.Bankers existed in Rome (they appeared in the towns around the first century BCE)

and perhaps before, less formally, even in Mesopotamia (Bezbakh 2013, 10), they werenot always the richest persons in Rome but mostly freed slaves, living on commissions.Their members included various specialities, the argentarius (an exchanger), the num-mularius (similarly involved) and the coactor (a cashier). They lent at interest, usuallyon a short term. All transactions had to be recorded (ratios) chronologically or nom-inally for the benefit of the taxman. The results were inscribed on wax tablets, some ofwhich belonging to the first century banker Lucius Jocund have been found at Pompeii;he was the son of a freed man, yet lived in a splendid home.

Domestic Groups and Culinary Stratification

Despite this earlier appearance of capitalists in China and elsewhere, a great “scholastic”industry has been built up around the notion of the Uniqueness of the West in respectof the genesis and growth of capitalism leading directly to its recent “superiority”. Thisidea has taken a variety of forms that have influenced the whole production of history,especially in relation to the kinship system, particularly regarding family and marriage,changes which occurred later in theWest than elsewhere. Much has been written in thiscontext arguing that the European continent, especially in the West, had a kind ofkinship system which with late marriage was “more compatible” with “capitalism”

and with economic activity generally. Emphasis has also been placed upon a smallerfamily size, supposedly associated with this late marriage. With S. J. Tambiah, I havetried to show that the whole of Europe and Asia, not just the West, was characterizedat marriage by similar dowry systems (rather than by bridewealth) which was found inits well-stratified societies. Bridewealth on the other hand tends to even out the wealththat changes hands at marriage; it constitutes a fixed sum that goes from the bride tothe groom’s family. Dowry however is variable and is transferred usually to the brideherself although it may effectively be controlled by others; the amount is not fixedbut takes account of the birth status of the woman and her family of origin and also

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of the fact that she may have accumulated some wealth in her own right. And if she isan heiress, that is a woman who has no male siblings with whom she had to share whathad been accumulated by her parents, she could be a rich bride who would attract amale to come and live on her property in an unusual type of uxorilocal marriage.This type of occasional union is a phenomenon we find in each of the major societiesof Europe and Asia but not, I think, in Africa. In referring to Europe and Asia, I amtalking of the major societies in those continents that have passed through theBronze Age of urban societies (and in agriculture of the plough). In other groups,with hoe farming, we still find bridewealth systems of the African kind, thoughsome may have been influenced by contact with more complex societies, for therewas always an interaction between those with different “modes of production”.There is thus a more or less direct relationship between the economy and the type of

marriage system. In complex, differentiated societies, traditional marriage tries tomaintain or increase the wealth of the children, females as well as males, and this isdone by allocating both of them a portion of the family estate after the death oftheir parents or the dissolution of the marriage. In other words, the woman’s“portion” was passed down to a daughter as an individual (though her husbandmight well have been guardian) and served to maintain her natal standard of living.In all the major societies of Europe and Asia, this was an important aspect of marriagein stratified societies. In most of these, we find the marital union taking place within thesame circle, sometimes endogamously (into the same group), so that a wife automati-cally maintained her earlier standard of living. This arrangement has always seemed tome more important than features like early or late marriage; it is the characteristic ofclass society in the major societies of Asia and Europe and represented the fact that bothsides of the continent had reached parallel levels of economic development, at leastuntil the Industrial Revolution, and that to divide them on the basis of supposedfamily structure in earlier times was unjustified.An important aspect of these marriages was that they sometimes took place in a

circle, thereby maintaining not only the inheritable wealth of individuals but alsothe wider class system. They were sometimes made among kin and neighbours,and even among close kin, occasionally very close as generally in the Near East.There in Egypt we find that brother–sister unions were common enough in Cleopa-tra’s reign, for example, thus allowing the transmission of status and property amonga restricted group, even among farmers. The same was true for others in Israel,Greece, and among Arabs where marriage to the father’s brother’s daughter was pre-ferred. This whole process was critical in establishing or preserving a differential classor status system, although this was clearest in an urban context where stratificationwas more visible.One feature of the family life of Eastern societies that has drawn much attention in

the West has been the practice of polygyny, which has been seen as a threat to conjugalrelations and a factor in higher fertility. However polygny was always subject to econ-omic considerations and was more or less confined to the better off. The poor and thegenerality of people generally lived in monogamous unions.

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Polygamy is also seen as running contrary to the supposedly “individual” relationscharacteristic of Western society and which is thought to be intrinsic to the growthof capitalism. The argument is contradicted, in at least present times, by the growthof “capitalism” in many other parts of the world, including Communist China. But,except in rare “harem” situations, polygynous marriages are individual, in my experi-ence, even when they are not single-stranded. Moreover, the members of monogamouscouples may well have a fantasy life which does not observe the same limits as ordinarylife but in any case they increasingly engage, legitimately, in what has been called “serialpolygyny”. It has to be remembered that monotheistic religions were not necessarilymonogamous and only became so, or tended to, later on, even in Christianity. Inany case, the relationship between economic activity and monogamy is not straightfor-ward and far from clear. We do not observe Mormons being less industrious as entre-preneurs than the rest of the population in America. Indeed, the opposite has beenmaintained.If we go back to the beginnings of the Bronze Age, there was little differentiation in

the earlier Neolithic societies. Resources were broadly the same for each individual.Land was rarely in short supply; one could only farm so much with a hoe or diggingstick, and the tools for exploiting it, stone or wood, were generally available to oneand all, though some land was certainly better than others. Of course, skills too differedand not everyone was equally successful in farming; so there was normally somedifferentiation.Stratification increased dramatically with the coming of metals, and of course as we

have seen with the plough, which was the Neolithic hoe turned on its side and pulled byanimal traction. The plough meant that one man could cultivate much more land thananother; and again, the use of rare metals meant that some could acquire more thanothers, especially when these were used as weapons to dominate those who did nothave them. That obviously was not the beginning of unequal relationships, but thecoming of metals gave these a new twist; stratification took on a further dimensionand became one of groups, of class, which had a profound effect on the socialsystem and its differentiation into “cultures”, high and low.Such differentiation would immediately become visible in the area of food. A meal

involved sharing among close kin (and occasionally neighbours) several times a day andsharing was unavoidable. This sharing was critical in the development of cultural pre-ferences. Any slight difference in the question of taste tended to get incorporated by afamily or clan into a group idiosyncrasy; this would apply, for example, to the amountof meat used for the stew, the well-off would obviously do better. The initial attainmentof such inequality or even of such difference largely depends upon economic perform-ance though other factors such as religion may also be relevant, the priest receiving hispreferential share. However this may be, the transmission of “privilege” tends to be per-petuated by the marriage system, since neither the parents nor the wedded couplewants to change their standard of living.Among the “better off”, whether in Europe or in Asia, we find a special form of meal

in stratified societies, a high cuisine, one that is prepared by, but more frequently for,the elite. This special cuisine consisted of more meat, but also some imported

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ingredients, condiments such as pepper, as well as prepared drinks such as wine. Someof these preparations may even be formally reserved for the upper group, as with honeywine (tej) in Ethiopia. Their upper diet was an offshoot of stratified Mediterraneansociety, with the plough rather than the hoe as the basis of production. Even in sub-Saharan Africa with its hoe culture, there was a tendency to reserve portions of foodfor high-status individuals as with the offerings of meat or drinks for chiefs as partof their “right” or “privilege” to “first fruits”. This right originally entitled the chiefnot to a special diet but to greater access to common foods, not to a special (a“high”) cuisine but to more of the everyday. However the difference is clearlytending in a class direction.This stratification in consumption manifested itself in many ways, but is perhaps

most clearly seen in the contrast with productive but aesthetic agriculture. The impor-tance of the cultivation and domestication of flowers in Europe, but not or rarely inAfrica, has to do with the advent of differentiation, and especially the cultivation ofplants for the sake of “pleasure”. For me, this is typified in the attention paid in theEast to the growing and display of chrysanthemums. The plants had a significantritual role but they were also mainly used for everyday purposes, both in the gardenand in wider competition. My attention was drawn to the fundamental differencewith Africa by a Japanese ethnologist who was led to enquire about the care and culti-vation of flowers in the African tribe among which he was living. The answer was dra-matic in its refusal to recognize the flower except as a harbinger of fruit or vegetables. Ithad no value as a decorative object on its own. What would have been absent at thattime was the concept of the flower as an aesthetic object which in Europe and Asialed to flowers being specifically cultivated for that purpose.Europe and Asia were quite different from Africa. Flower gardens existed both in

India and in China. These were usually private. As Dalrymple remembers,

The gardens at Chengdu were the only place I saw that had retained some glimpse of theelegance of imperial China. They made any European garden I had ever seen seem stiffand wooden and formal: here you could understand the Chinese thinking westernerswere barbarians with no interest in her manufactures. (Dalrymple 1989, 293)

Commercial gardens were a feature of both Asia and Europe. In these countries whereflowers were so often in daily use, they also were used in particular festivals such asDiwali in India and the New Year in China. In fact, it was at New Year in SouthernChina that I encountered the most extravagant aspect of this use of flowers. When abusinessman in the Pearl River delta had had a good year, he would celebrate theoccasion by going to a nursery and purchasing a flowering peach tree which wouldlater be cut down in full bloom and placed in a vase inside his shop, or in the stairwellto his office. The tree had to flower at the time of the New Year when this displayinvolved the wilful treatment of a fruit tree. In Europe, at Christmas there is asimilar treatment of a fir tree, though not a flowering and fruiting one. Nevertheless,the challenge to the natural environment is still there in this destruction for ritualand commercial purposes.

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The use of flowers for such ends often involves the control of biological processes;there is the growing of the special flowers, for specific calendrical dates, poppies forArmistice Day, for muguets for the first day of Spring or chrysanthemums for theday of the Dead. Secondly there is the wholesale marketing at designated sites. Inaddition, there is the matter of exchange, collection for wholesale and retail purposes,to the sale or distribution of the product involving a complex organization of pro-duction and distribution. This culture of flowers, like the “culture of food”, at leastin the form of the “high cuisine”, is found throughout Eurasia, and was certainlynot confined to Europe. The distribution of this culture is typified by the example ofblackbirds baked in a pie, out of which, when it was opened, they all flew away. Thisluxury dish “fit for a king” was found not only in Europe but in Indian culture too.The “restaurant culture” of the East was also efficient in adapting itself to the market-places of theWest where it has found itself very much at home. Indeed, the food cultureof Shanghai is replicated in the restaurants and clubs of London, although in this lattercase there may also have been an element of imitation involved. But the elite differen-tiation already existed; in China, too, food was heavily stratified.However, in the East, the “restaurant culture” was more developed than in the West,

but in both areas it was associated with travel, either for voyages or for the importationof rarer delicacies. Internal travel was a phenomenon probably more widely present inthe East where literates were employed in the many different parts of China, with itssingle system of logographic writing; they consequently often found themselves in“foreign” parts lacking a taste of their homeland. Hence, the emergence in China ofimportant different “regional” styles, which in alphabetic Europe with smaller unitswould often be “national” ones. In fact, as far as food was concerned there wereneither homogenous regional nor national styles (nor in fact homogeneity in manyof the other aspects of culture) since society was divided by classes and what theupper echelon ate was different from the food of the lower strata. Culture was farless unitary than many “tribal” anthropologists assumed from, say, Africa. I recallone of the latter pointing to language and making the point about the one-ness ofspoken language, but such homogeneity (by no means always perfect, in fact) wouldnot have been the case with Britain in the Middle Ages when the upper spokeFrench and the lower a Germanic tongue.The “class” system involved differentiation at each level of society, a differentiation

that occurred throughout domestic life, especially in food—cooking, eating and in tablemanners but also in other leisure activities, which included much of what we refer tocolloquially as “culture”. What about the food of ordinary members of society? Where Iworked, in the savannah country in the North of Ghana, that always consisted of a por-ridge made from local cereal, sorghum, which was turned into flour by milling on apiece of granite or else pounded in a mortar. This dish was a regular accompanimentto every meal, zier ni saab, soup and porridge. There could be more meat in a bowl thatwas a person’s entitlement from a sacrificial or other animal, but chiefs and others ateessentially the same (though possibly mush). Not that this was so different from thediet of my Scottish ancestors, which was singularly monotonous, essentially porridge,although with more meat for the land-owners when this came to be reared or heated

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specifically for consumption. In addition, there was plenty of fish from the ocean andrivers. And of course there were later elements in the diet, like the potato from SouthAmerica. Earlier the food of ordinary folk was perhaps not as unvaried as the Ghanaianbut the difference was not that great, except among the upper class who were providedwith the meat of the hunt as well as with special drinks. Those dimensions were lackingin Northern Ghana, just as the stratification was certainly less prominent.In Eurasia, a hierarchical cuisine could demand the service of specialist cooks,

usually male rather than female, calling upon a differently stratified division oflabour than the normal domestic one. The special cuisine might take a written form,for it only really appeared in Bronze Age societies that sometimes communicated inthis way, and this led to a repertoire of recipe and cook books. Such developmenttook place in both Europe and Asia; Chinese and Indian cuisine was as stratified asMediterranean ones. There were “high” and “low” tables; people no longer usuallyate together, except virtually or commercially when money transactions were involved.“Culture” was no longer unitary.Drinks too were differentiated in the same way as food. Alcoholic ones were to be

found at both extremities of Europe, as well as in between; beer appeared both inEurope and in the East while distilled liquor and wine spread from the Near East toChina as well as throughout the Mediterranean. However, until recently this wasalways stratified and part of the cultural luxury that marked both the East and theWest but had also long been present in the Ancient Near East.The culture of luxury therefore was found throughout Eurasia, especially in the field

of connoisseurship. The collecting of valuable vases in particular was cultivated in theChinese equivalent of the Middle Ages. The headline advertising a recent exhibition inan American paper reads, “Forging an Art Market in China”, which is typical of Euro-American claims to priority. But it had long existed. So too with paintings, calligraphyand old books. The acquisition of rare objects in China even gave rise to merchantsspecialized in exchanging luxury items as well as in publishing catalogues devoted tothese objects. There was little difference in Europe from what occurred in China andJapan, although we often think that it was in the West that early museums arose; infact in South India art galleries (chitraśālās) were known “from the earliest times”(Sivaramamurti 1968, 23). Public ones were largely Western and were a much latermanifestation of this trend, though earlier on the rich had often allowed scholars toview their possessions privately.How was this related to domestic groups? Clearly they were also stratified. But in the

West they were also seen to be “individualized”, a difficult quality to specify in preciseterms. However it has frequently been maintained that it was in the West that the“nuclear family” was developed and that this type of “individualized” domesticgroup was most suited to the rise of “capitalism”. The evidence for this contentionis far from clear. Under certain circumstances, economic growth may be advancedby a smaller (“nuclear”) family that does not have to share its wealth with others;there are also conditions in which wider kin assist in the process of wealth creation.This was the case with Italian bankers in the early modern period as with the Chettiarsin South Asia. And the “family” remains important in much contemporary American

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capitalism. The myth of a solitary Robinson Crusoe remains very much a hypotheticalidea, pursued by some but certainly not by all (Goody 1996, Chapter 6).In any case, those larger housefuls found in some earlier societies, and typified by the

early European zadruga, were made up of a number of smaller domestic units (house-holds), essentially of restricted size, if not of nuclear families. What is demonstrable isthat a small domestic group is most relevant to a wage economy where it is individualswho are employed, whereas agricultural work often places more demands on jointactivity, as in hoeing and harvesting. But because they are segmented, these largergroups have no difficulty in splitting into smaller units (or at least working as such)so that the demographic argument in favour of the nuclear family, and its early appear-ance in the West, seems fragile, if not actually mistaken (Goody 1971).The related aspect of “family” difference is not in structure but in size. Demogra-

phers point to the many “traditional” societies where large numbers of relatives livetogether. It is the case that among the LoDagaa of Northern Ghana many may beliving under one roof but for some purposes a large “houseful” breaks into component“households”. In counting the size of “families”, there is all the difference between“housefuls” and “households”. The latter are economic units in the sense that theterm refers to those who cook and eat together in the course of daily life; such unitsare necessarily limited in size. A houseful on the other hand refers to the occupantsof a compound which may well contain several such units. The larger compoundsoften consist of several household units living under one roof but for most comparativedemographic purposes it is these smaller units that need to be compared rather than thewhole compound (among the Vagala of greater Gonja, for example). Of course, we stillwould like to know why some groups stick together in this way, and others do not, butthat is a different question and does not relate to household size. That is to say, it doesnot appear to relate to fertility.When I analysed the LoDagaa in terms of the size of household groups, despite the

earlier marriage I found them comparable to Western societies. The greater marital fer-tility which this type of marriage allows is balanced by the delay in the resumption ofsex after childbirth which existed in most “traditional” households and which meantthat the controls upon consecutive births were stronger than in many modern societiesso that overall fertility rates were not therefore greatly different, that is, until theimproved control given by the common use of condoms. What is clear is that theappearance of larger housefuls is no absolute indicator of higher fertility rates, sothat the arguments related to late marriage, important as this was for other reasons,have to be taken with a pinch of salt as far as fertility is concerned. That is also a ques-tion of the interval between births. There is certainly no longer the necessity for earlymarriage to be seen as leading automatically to greater fertility since one can stop whenone wishes, even in Catholic countries. However that is in general a “recent”phenomenon.One great difference between Europe and most other marriage systems is the empha-

sis on monogamy. This institution sets the continent off from much of the rest of theworld but it does not make much difference to population growth, despite popular per-ceptions. Even in societies that permit polygyny, most marriages are necessarily

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monogamous, given the sexual balance at birth, except among the rich and powerful.Moreover, plural marriages are generally less fertile than monogamous ones. In anycase the latter may practise serial polygamy, although the Christian church tried toforbid this (see Goody 1983).

Part II

Religion, Communication Technologies, and the Accumulation of Knowledge

Apart from kinship and family, the other difference that has been widely pointed tobetween the East and the West was in the religious life, especially of monotheism inits Western form in Protestantism. The written religions of Eurasia spread widely,and many monotheistic beliefs and practices went from West to East, and vice versa.There have been speculative debates about the mutual influence of the beginnings ofChristianity and Gnosticism on the one hand and the teachings of Hinduism and Bud-dhism on the other. Certainly, Buddhism seems to have spread to the West Asian area(Sunderman 1986). Conversely, in 240–242, Mani, the Aramaic-speaking prophet fromEdessa, went to India by merchant ship from the Persian Gulf and landed at Banbhore.We see this spread of religion having its basis not so much in a spread of religious ideas(though this took place) as of practices. This spread also took place in more secularcontexts; for example, to take a completely opposed sphere, that of sexual practices.It was not only Manicheanism and Christianity that condemned, at least for some,the indulgence in intercourse, but also Hindu and Buddhist doctrines. Of coursethat only applied to a minority. In a yet more practical way, the books providinginstruction in sexual techniques, aimed largely at the upper class, have much incommon throughout Eurasia, in China, India and Europe.The Manicheans, however, were a break-away creed that established a Christian

sect trying to incorporate Buddhism and other beliefs. Mani claimed to havefounded a church which recognized “as its prophets not only Jesus but alsoBuddha” (Lieu 1985, Chapter III). It was one of many “heresies” that grew up inthe Near East in the early years of the Christian era, spreading to Rome and toSpain in the West and to China in the East. This was a literate creed that acceptedelements of classical learning, as well as recognizing the visual arts; the Manicheansshowed none of the Semitic aversion to images that marked the early Romanchurch (Lieu 1985, 175). They spread to China by way of Sogdiana, as the landEast of the Oxus was known to the Greeks. Many of the Sogdians (Iranians) weretraders who profitably exchanged silks for the “blood horses” (Lieu 1985, 179)needed by the Chinese to pull their chariots. In addition, they were influenced bylocal Buddhist thought; there were some similarities between Manichean and Bud-dhist writings. The Manichean sect took hold in China.

In the same way that a syncretistic form of Christianity can be shown to have influencedthe T’ai-p’ing rebels of more modern times, Manichaeism is commonly seen as an earlierexample of a foreign religion being transformed by the Chinese into “a rebel ideology”.(Lieu 1985, 240)

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Religion was certainly not the only import to China from the West. Lieu writes of theMongol campaign in China when many historians see them as having a distinct disad-vantage as horsemen, interested in the fluidity of movement. Urban developments onlyimpeded this, and mobility was useless in the static warfare involved in besiegingtowns. The generals of Kubla Khan brought in Muslim engineers from Mesopotamiato attack the strongly defended cities of China (Lieu 1985, 255). Eventually, after aten-year war, the forces of Kubla Khan became the masters of the whole of theMiddle Kingdom. They re-established active relations with the West, opening up thenaval routes to Persia as well as the overland Silk Road by which Marco Polo cameto the East and along which William of Rubruck travelled to the Mongols. KublaKhan was himself the son of a Nestorian princess, and therefore had some knowledgeof Christianity and of the West. He was the product of the religious “mix” that charac-terized the whole Central Eurasian area, neither end of which was isolated from theother.Consequently, the Christian and Hebrew traditions themselves seem less unique

when we look at the history of other Near Eastern churches such as the Manichean.It should be said that even monotheism itself is less “unique” than is often supposed.In polytheism, too, one god is often given the major role and in this respect stands outahead of the others. Moreover, the recognition of many gods is not at all incompatiblewith modern, even “capitalist” developments, as we see from China and India today,perhaps even from contemporary Europe.The beliefs of Mani in the third century derived partly from the “heretical” Gnostic

form of Christianity. The beginnings of that “heresy” and its relationship with bothBuddhism and Hinduism have been much discussed (Sunderman 1986, 11). Manihimself was possibly influenced by reports of an Indian delegation visiting the courtof the Roman emperor, Heliogabalus (CE 218–222). But it was not the Romanchurch that spread the Christian doctrine eastwards; that was mainly the Nestorianswho had been declared heretical at the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon but estab-lished themselves in Mesopotamia and Persia. Nestorius of Constantinople had himselfstudied at Antioch but his teachings on the nature of Christ and the Virgin Mary werenevertheless declared heretical at the council of Ephesus in 431. After this many of hissupporters fled to Persia where they were freer from restrictions to acquire “pagan”knowledge and later contributed to the Muslim interest in Islamic science; their tra-dition continued at the interesting centre at Gondeshapur and elsewhere. (On the Nes-torian translation of classical and other works, see Bailey 1971, 80–81.)Though banished from Byzantine territory, the Nestorian Christian Church moved

eastwards and established itself in China in 644 BCE. In the Middle East, it was thischurch that was responsible for translating so much Greek science into Syriac andfor establishing the texts that lay behind the Arab Renaissance. That preserved somuch ancient learning; this knowledge was initially spurned by the Roman churchas “pagan”, for the coming of Christianity had destroyed the temples of Greek learningas “pagan”. However, much was kept alive in Syriac and eventually by the Arabs of theAbbasid dynasty. Neither group had the negative reaction to such learning that waspresent in the Roman West. And the Nestorian church continued to survive in

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Gondeshapur in modern South-west Iran, bordering on India, where the tradition ofboth the classical world and the Hindu continued to flourish, developing into whatbecame Arab and Jewish medicine. To this end, the Persians gathered informationfrom India, from Rome and elsewhere (Bailey 1971, 81). Indeed, the influence of Aris-totelian thought on Zoroaster himself is very clear (Bailey 1971, 80) and he himself wasstrongly praised for his knowledge of medicine, physics (Bailey 1971, 120) and otherprofessional arts. So Greek astrological and agricultural books were known there, aswell as Indian texts on astronomical tables. Again the mix was important.Many other religions developed in the Near East, especially in what became Persia,

and early on these spread out in both directions. In the pre-Islamic period, Persia wasfirst associated with Zoroastrianism, many practitioners of which fled to India underpressure from the Muslims where they became known as Parsees, disposing of thedead through exposure in the Towers of Silence in Bombay. There they also continuedtheir earlier tradition of trading and later became successful manufacturers under theBritish. In the early part of the nineteenth century, they brought used textile machineryfrom Europe and mechanized the export trade in cloth. Soon India was sending toBritain more machine-made cotton goods than she was importing, as she had earlierdone with the hand-woven variety.That whole central area of the Near East has to be considered as one of the fountain-

heads of our civilization. Non-Christian Mesopotamia became Persia when the Ira-nians took over the region that had earlier been at the origin of our written cultureas well as of our modern urban and rural life, both in the complex cities of a developedtown life and in the fruitful plough agriculture of the rural areas that supported them.This Bronze Age society subsequently developed into the Iron Age especially in theWest with its abundance of cheap metals. This could not happen in the Middle Eastwhich had few metals to be exploited. It had some of the other features required todevelop industrial capitalism but it had a paucity of metals, especially iron, whichwas so fundamental in the Iron Age on which so much depended. Iron was toobulky and too costly to import. Without this supply, which became so valuable withthe invention of the petrol engine, the Near East could not fully participate in large-scale industrial production. Indeed in the earlier period, the area was often seen asbackward and even later with petrol from the desert, this was mainly as a source ofpower for the industry of others although that led to its own development.For the written culture that lay behind these changes required schools, that is, edu-

cational institutions which were also the centres of religious life. You had to know howto read the texts that were the foundation of the written religion. Reading was essentialto learn from the Bible, the Koran, the Hindu or the Buddhist works, not for secularknowledge about this world, which was usually passed down by word of mouth, butfor the religious account of the other. Education meant school education, literate edu-cation, teaching children how to read and write, especially the religious text. Work onecould learn at home, by participation; “learning” was about the other world. In non-literate societies you of course find a process of socialization but not the segregationof some children to learn the specialist skills, obviously not those that are necessaryto acquire the three “rs”, writing, reading and arithmetic. In such a situation, culture

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is transmitted orally, by some kind of apprenticeship, rather than being learnt, from abook.Education, then, involves special schools and colleges, which are found in all the lit-

erate societies of the continent; and among the pupils taught, some of them are chosenso that later on they can teach others their skills. Only in exceptional circumstanceswere all children educated in this comprehensive way, and that was when the religionrequired literacy to enable them to read the Word of God individually and not relyupon the interpretation of others, as was the case with Protestantism in the West.Nevertheless in Islam and Judaism, reading was also very much taken up with religion,as indeed it was in Hinduism too; the madrasa and the yeshiva were there for all,although not everyone wished subsequently to pursue the religious path; othersmight make use of literacy for administration or for trade, some for relaxation oreven for entertainment.Not only was such education in schools a widespread feature of both East and later of

the West, although in neither case was it universal until very recently, but the structureis similar. The students were set apart, sometimes only males (who transmitted religionin a formal context), and they traditionally employed a master (very occasionally, afemale) to teach and supervise the children (usually boys). The teacher was regardedas a father figure and played a similar disciplinary role. Schoolwork involved memor-izing not only the letters or signs of the script but also the contents of books (usuallyreligious, or “ethical”, even in China and in classical Europe), which were oftenrepeated either out loud, as in the madrasa or internally, with a swaying motion, asin a yeshiva. And sometimes directly to the master.This concentration on repeated information manifested itself in the focus on “lists”

which I have discussed in earlier work (Goody 1977) and which were prominent in allearly literate systems. But these listings were not simply repetitive but also opened up anavenue to discovery since they might raise questions of classification, for example,whether a tomato is a fruit or vegetable (and is then allocated to the appropriatelist). That listing may open up interesting botanical problems; it may on the otherhand lead to the splitting of hairs. In this way, all the literate societies of Eurasia devel-oped some form of this “higher education”, which was not merely repetitive. “Furthereducation” had to exist since primary or secondary schools—schools at the first level—had to have trained teachers to staff them. So special colleges were developed to do justthis. In the Sunni Near East, these were the madrasas which have long been recognizedas influencing the growth of higher education in Europe.It is sometimes thought that not only colleges for further education but universities

themselves were a Western invention, but that is not so. In India, one found theirgrowth, especially Buddhist colleges like the one at Nalanda, which was so importantfor the Northern version of that faith. In China, one had a similar hierarchy of edu-cational institutions, more secular than these others, but built up in a parallel way.The Confucian classics might be repeated much as the religious text, but at least thecontext was somewhat more pluralistic, more open, less hegemonic, than with a mono-theistic religion that restricted the expansion of so much knowledge in the EuropeanMiddle Ages (and elsewhere). But with the Italian Renaissance what happened was

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the effective splitting of much secular and religious knowledge, as had already beenlargely the case in China in earlier times and goes some way to accounting for thepre-eminence of that country in the early sciences. Activity based on “scientific”enquiry rather than religious speculation existed before literacy but it was the organiz-ing power of writing that did so much to advance the scientific field. For example, ithelped by putting the material in a better order, a process which writing so enhanced,mainly because one could now inspect that knowledge visually and order it, forexample, alphabetically, not just rely upon the oral version, which was often hard topin down.The Chinese later used their invention of printing to duplicate copies of scientific

texts so they could be diffused to the various administrative districts of that vastcountry. In Europe at this time texts had to be copied laboriously by hand in scriptoria,usually monastic and subject to ecclesiastical supervision. In China distribution ofduplicated texts was done by the government (the “bureaucracy”), whereas inEurope it was rather subject to selection by the church (leading to “censorship”),and indeed some form of more individual “selection” took place even as late as thetime of Darwin—and in some places later. Freedom-of-information was not a charac-teristic of monotheistic religious systems, or of monolithic ones more generally. Whenthe Renaissance came in Europe, it looked back to the classical period (previouslyregarded as “pagan”) which was more diverse and polytheistic in many ways. The uni-versities are rightly praised for leading to the expansion of knowledge but it has to beremembered that most were founded as ecclesiastical institutions, to pass on only theknowledge of the one creed believed to be “true”, and to exclude others that were notso, by definition. In the West, the universities were not invented to distribute newknowledge about the world, but to spread the old. This was partly the case with any“canonized” belief, such as Confucianism, even if the supernatural element therewas missing, or weakened. Looking back to a fixed text had something of the same inhi-biting result in both cases. Institutions of higher learning were not therefore confined tothe West and existed in all literate societies throughout the continent, even thoughinhibited by the fixed text. But this confinement was a prelude to the more secularforms of today which usually practice and circulate knowledge virtually independentof religious or other restraints.Education then involved learning a new way of communication with the written

word, which began with the classics but eventually developed a more open end.Both the West and the East were fully literate societies from early times, as was Indiain the middle. They used different types of script; the East logographic where eachspoken word was represented by a distinct sign (hence its name); the Ancient NearEast started with a similar system but the West, or rather Syria, later developed analphabet, a much more economic series of signs, based on sound rather than onmeaning, which it exported to Greece and elsewhere. The difference has been seizedupon by European scholars who often thought of the alphabet as necessarily givingrise to a wider literacy, since learning to read now became easier, and resulted in awider mastery of the written word. That thought was at the root of many claims tothe greater or earlier modernization of the West, as in the work of Diringer (1948)

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on the alphabet, and in that of many classical scholars like Havelock, as well as in that ofothers like Watt and myself in earlier times (1963), which contrasted the advantages ofthe Western (or Near Eastern) alphabet with the Chinese logographic system of “char-acters” in relation to the ability to read and write. It is a contrast that requires somequalification, for the East of the continent certainly acquired writing before Europe.It is certainly true that in the West the writing system was easier to learn (as a

system), but that did not mean that it was necessarily more widely learnt, except ina few particular cases. The bulk of the modern European population remained illiterateuntil almost towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the establishment of uni-versal education in schools, largely set up by the Church with the aim of enablingpeople to read the Christian Bible (in Protestant countries). In Europe before theReformation when the Bible was translated into the local tongue, the Holy text hadbeen in Latin or Greek. With the adoption of national languages the reading publicnow became wider, but not for the classical languages. With a few exceptions only aminority could still read or write anything in local languages except their namesuntil all were made to attend school later in the nineteenth century.It was rather different with a logographic script. Not only did some have fewer pro-

blems in learning to read, since dyslexia did not appear in the same way, but if onelearnt to read a script such as Chinese, the skill acquired was not confined to thatlanguage since the system was not phonetic. That advantage was most helpful in a“country” the size and diversity of China where there were a number of oral languageswith different roots, but all of which could be represented by similar signs. So thatChinese script could also be read by those Japanese and Vietnamese who had masteredthat system. In such a huge and variegated country that was very useful as the writingsof the sages, the orders of the rulers, or new agricultural methods could be understoodby “readers” throughout the whole multi-lingual population. That ability was of thegreatest importance politically and led to considerable solidarity across the wholerealm, whereas alphabetic Europe was divided into a multitude of independentnation states, each with their own phonetic language and working within themselves;there was little inter-literate communication except through the heavy work of trans-lation. In China, too, many people can know a few words of a written language withoutbeing masters of the whole in a wider sense. One can see this in any urban street inChina; it is flooded with bits of writing, some of which many people can understandwithout being able to read a whole Confucian text. Nevertheless in terms of thewritten word, except for relatively short periods, China has kept up with the West interms of modernization. For it cannot be said too often that while literacy was impor-tant until recently, universal literacy was less so. Most of the major scientific work inearlier Europe was made under conditions of limited literacy. For some purposesthat was not the important point. Both in science and in the arts, the developmentsin manufacture of Iron Age Britain, for example, took place when only a minoritycould read and write. Until the time of the Reformation only a relative few haddirect access to God’s word. It is not clear that this limited literacy necessarily had adragging influence on the culture at the time, when fully fledged reading coulddevelop as minority activity; many more perhaps could decipher a little. The visual

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arts themselves were rather different for they were generally open to all. Hence, theimportance in the medieval church not only of the oral sermon in the local tonguebut of the visual arts, the painting, the architecture and the “Bible of the Poor”.Access was universal, whereas reading had to have an intermediary.The written culture of China spread over time, and the unified regime of the Qin saw

a clear rise in the number of literati, many of whom took part in the unifying processitself. The Sinologist, Balazs, reckons as many as 10% of the population were employedto run this vast (literate) empire. The following dynasty was even yet more literate andtexts were no longer confined to the imperial library. Others too possessed them. Thechildren of the rich were taught to read by private tutors while some of the poorattended Government schools to get their literate education. That education centredupon the Chinese classics, which had to be memorized. After taking a primary exam-ination, students going into public service attended college in the county town, fromthere they took another open examination to enter government service.This advent of writing has been seen as one of the great transformations of mankind,

leading straight to the modern world with its dependency on written communicationtechnology. But this great transformation to modernity has been mainly viewed inrelation to “modes of production”, that is, the move from “the slave mode” to the“feudal” to the “capitalist”, which was said to have happened in Europe alone, andnot in Asia. However, this latter was a distinctly Eurocentric idea, literacy was certainlynot confined to the West. As for other developments, slaves appeared in both parts ofEurasia (and elsewhere), as did “feudal” systems; it seems preferable, particularly inview of the great strides in “capitalist” success made by China and India in recentyears, both early literate societies, to concentrate upon other factors such as the useof literacy and of metals for the reproduction of writing in both areas, especiallynoting the importance of both in China. This similarity between East and Westarose essentially from the fact that the Bronze Age spread to both areas, to the IndusValley, and all literate “civilizations”, in the sense of urban societies, had roughlysimilar technologies, at least until the Industrial Revolution when the West acquireda distinct advantage over the rest in mass production and the use of metals; at thesame time gunpowder emerged from the East which had also preceded the West inthe large-scale smelting.One main difficulty with attempts to sharply differentiate East and West is that it

leads to a biased view of human history. India was no less a trading nation in theMiddle Ages than Europe; China more so. It is a very nineteenth-century stance thatsees them as permanently backward, which is made clear by current events. It issurely better to dispense with Eurocentric terms that have given rise to so much con-troversy, and to discuss worldwide development in a more contained and concrete aframe.In China, there was in fact a steady increase in the complexity of social life through-

out the Iron Age, without the dramatic setbacks of the kind that followed the fall of theRoman Empire in the West. The East had a different trajectory which began earlier.Even the Shang dynasty of the sixteenth–eleventh centuries, BCE had an advancedmetal technology and used high heat to make pottery, a technique possibly derived

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from the steppes together with the employment of wheeled chariots (probably from theCaucasus) and an elementary system of writing on oracle bones. The Shang were fol-lowed by the “feudal” Zhou (1046–256 BCE) who unified the country, developedwriting and the bureaucracy and made advances in agriculture, under the leadershipof local authorities. Trade expanded, as did metallurgy too, producing steel, blast fur-naces, and the large-scale production of iron. The period of the Warring States (475–221 BCE) saw not only the rise of the military but in education also the importance ofthe Five Classics which had such a long-lasting cultural influence in China, and wasassociated with the work of Confucius and of Mencius. China greatly profited fromthis iron technology, which marked an important step to modernization, giving riseto a vigorous merchant class, a member of which became the prime minister of thefirst Emperor under the new regime of the Qin, in which education and the literatiflourished; at this time, a series of massive earthworks were built and a communicationsystem emerged. Starting off about 206 BCE, the Han dynasty had its court at theNorthern town of Xian which attracted intellectuals from all over and encouragedscientific as well as activity aimed at educating officials. Nor were the arts forgotten.At the same time, the Emperor created an Office of Music which generated theBook of Odes and other written works, leading to the adoption of paper in 105 CE.With this the Chinese compiled a bibliography, a dictionary and wrote important his-torical works. In other fields, water clocks were developed (to time tasks), while theiron and gold industries both made advances. The regime also installed waterwheelswhich were used in forges to work the piston bellows (to raise heat), and the wheelitself appeared in the third century.After many years, the capital itself was raided and sacked by rebel forces but mean-

while trade flourished and the India-Iranian route opened up, eventually bringing theHan in touch with the Roman Empire through initiatives of both a private and a publickind. The great period for the culture, both in the arts and for the sciences, occurredaround the year 1000 but there was no sudden turn-around unlike the Renaissancein Europe, rather a consistent looking back to past achievements which resulted in aseries of subsequent spurts forward. This process continued even after the Song rightup until modern times, though “modernization” never became a dominating issueuntil recently when the Confucians got a bad name in some circles for backwardness,at least in the industrial sphere.

Literacy and Renaissances: East and West

I have argued earlier (Goody 2010) that all the major written societies of Eurasia hadthe equivalent of rebirths of culture (a renaissance), India in the Maurya and Guptaperiods, China most notably in the Song. In fact, that rebirth was not confined tothe West but in a general way existed in all literate societies. By virtue of the writtenword, they looked back and on that they built up something new. In China, thoseperiods combined a looking back to Confucius, for example, with a plethora of newinitiatives. These included activities in the fine arts, such as painting, but there wasalso a general renewal of culture. The point about writing is that this made it possible

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for mankind to look back to something solid and to build upon past achievements in afirmer and more productive way than could happen in a purely oral society. Gernet([1982] 2002, 298) writes of the “return to the classical tradition”, the “diffusion ofknowledge, the upsurge of science and technology (printing, explosives, advance in sea-faring techniques, the clock with escapement, and so on), a new philosophy, and a newview of the world”. With regard to Europe, he writes of “the very general parallelism ofthe history of civilizations” (Gernet [1982] 2002, 298). Except that China never adopteda hegemonic written religion (although it did have a universal system of writing); evenBuddhism, which does proclaim itself the one true faith, was deliberately held in checkby the regime when it seemed to be getting too strong and creeds like Taoism andancestor worship were encouraged as alternatives.Elsewhere too we can often see the advances of humanity in modes of knowledge as a

more continuous process, not without its important breakthroughs, as in the coming ofliteracy, then the printed word or indeed the earlier control of fire, the smelting ofmetals, later the possibility of flying through the air. Writing itself was one of themost fundamental of these features, as along with Ian Watt I have long tried to main-tain (Goody 1986) its advent created the difference between literate and illiteratesocieties and opened up a whole new way of storing, accumulating and transmittingknowledge. Subsequently, printing carried the process further forward, both in theEast and especially in the West with the addition of the press, leading eventually tothe computer. We often look back to Guttenberg and South Germany, and the greatinfluence that printing had, but the process of duplicating this information existedyet earlier in China.It was this process that enabled the country to establish early libraries, beginning

with the Shang dynasty (sixteenth–eleventh centuries BCE). At first, these were deposi-tories for state documents but soon scholars went on to produce their own private col-lections and subsequently there was a lively exchange of such materials both betweenindividuals and between libraries. Westerners have a tendency to trace the developmentof the written word back to this part of the world. That leads us to overvalue the con-tribution of Western scholars and to undervalue those of Eastern ones. So libraries areseen as first appearing in the West like scholarship in general. Universities are thoughtin the same way to be European phenomena. Of course, there were features of suchknowledge systems that were limited to Western societies, but neither the library northe university were among these. The library obviously followed the acquisition of lit-eracy. Its products had to be stored somewhere and kept in a certain order so thatretrieval was possible with limited effort. That universal aspect has not stopped theWest from claiming priority. And this possibility was extended to the publicdomain. It has been suggested that “the Romans may have been the first to have enter-tained the notion of creating libraries for public usage” at Ephesus (with the Library ofCelsus) (Campbell 2013, 47). However, this facility was certainly not confined to theWest.In Europe from Rome libraries developed in subsequent cultures, although this

process was often hampered by religious factors. Even so the library culture grew inother writing systems. The existence and contribution of Islamic libraries has been

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celebrated in two important contributions by Mackensen (1935a, 1935b). These collec-tions of course depended upon the paper derived from China, being made in the NearEast, and later still in Europe. With paper rather than parchment, many more manu-scripts could then be duplicated. But that dissemination did not at all suit some Chris-tians and the famous Cardinal Ximenez complained of the interest shown in otherduplicated books to the exclusion of the sacred writings and he had eighty thousandvolumes of these burned in the public square at Granada (Mackensen 1935b, 83–84). There were many other examples of such destruction; the reason being thatlibraries throughout were often “institutions of religious propaganda”, as they werein Christianity.I first tried to make the case for a rough equality between East andWest when I came

to reject the argument about the great advantages of alphabetic literacy put forward bymyself and Watt (1963) to account for the advances made in Europe since the ItalianRenaissance. This earlier position was also that of Eric Havelock and members of theToronto school such as McLuhan, though the latter put more emphasis on the printingprocess rather than literacy itself. The Western advantage in the respect of the alphabetwas the implicit assumption of most European scholars and not a few others. But thisquite failed to recognize the capacity of the logographic script which had made possiblethe contributions that Chinese literacy made to growth in so many spheres and was notsomething to be set aside with the growth of the alphabet. I later tried to remedy thislacuna in my book The Logic of Writing (1986) which drew attention to the wider impli-cations of literacy, not only the alphabetic variety.But possibly the most prominent feature of the difference between East and West, in

most people’s eyes, was not literacy but rather the political. The West was characterizedas the home of democracy. So in a limited sense it was in Ancient Greece, which gavethe written vote to its male citizens (by no means all its residents). But as I have arguedelsewhere, democracy was not the only form of government in Greece or in the West.Tyranny, absolute rule, was also frequent. And, apart from the “primitive democracy”of some tribal societies, consultation processes were certainly known in the AncientNear East, for example, at Carthage and at its home town of Tyre in the Lebanon.China however was seen as marked by despotic rule which Wittfogel thought its irri-

gation economy promoted. The thesis of the hydraulic society was especially associatedwith his name, but the idea of autocratic government had long been linked to the East,although in fact China was the home of a highly bureaucratic state which made enor-mous use of the written word, and of written information. The West was supposed tobe less ritualized than China. But court life in the East was only slightly more formal-ized than in the West, where people moved backwards out of the monarch’s presence,and there was a special role for women, a special dress for men. Nevertheless, this sup-posed difference became a focus for claims to national superiority. And as far as theEast was concerned the notion was bolstered by the hypothesis in which the centralcontrol of water for irrigation required the central control of men. But the concrete evi-dence for this difference is slight. As in the West rulers had to take account of theopinions of their advisors and the wishes of their people; if not revolts occurred andthe regime was in danger.

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One special aspect of the East that always brings me up against my more Western-oriented interlocutors, as they see the tumbrils roll through the streets of Guangzhou,is the so-called rule of law. A great change in this was created by the invention ofwriting, with the coming of records, providing texts for lawyers and books of conductfor the mankind in general. There had of course been “law” before writing and therewere also courts, often regal courts (and moots too), where dispute cases were heardand judgements given. An important account of such a situation and its rules of rightdoing has been given by Gluckman for the Barotse kingdom of Southern Africa, butof course that had no body of written law as its basis, all had to be held in oralmemory. “Precedent” was therefore somewhat limited but the idea of lawful behaviourwas nevertheless present; all human societies have norms of conduct but law in the strictsense of “courts, codes and constables” had in effect to await the coming of writing.Associated with this development of written law was the growth of the legal pro-

fession, which now intervened in business, in government (especially local), and inmany other related spheres of activity. Literacy in turn led to specialist libraries inwhich to store records of cases and of judgements as well as to specialist intermediaries,agents who were now required for many daily activities, for example, filling in forms forhouse extensions that in earlier times anyone could carry out for themselves. This allinvolved a growth in paper-work, in representation, and even in public debate.Nevertheless, the Chinese legal profession is often considered inadequate, even

absent, by contemporary westerners, as not providing the rule of law. What theymean is that Chinese commercial law is not identical to theirs. But it existed, asanyone familiar with the tales of Judge Dee as presented by Robert van Gulik canattest. The yamen was the centre for the administration and for the judicial process,and cases were judged by a local standard of right doing, which obviously differedfrom Western procedures. Law existed as an essential human process, and wasespecially prominent in all literate societies where, as in China from the time of theHan, a written code was found and was supported by sanctions in a number ofways. What the West meant by the absence of law, was the absence of a law (often com-mercial) identical to its own, a very different matter indeed.In discussing the comparisons of literate societies in Europe and Asia, I have often

found it most difficult to talk about the Renaissance and the arts in general. Therebirth and renewal of themes from earlier societies was a dramatic feature ofEurope, a process which had its birth in Italy at the end of the Middle Ages. In this,the Renaissance was marked not so much by the rejection of religious dominancebut by its re-contextualization. In the Middle Ages, the hegemonic position of thechurch led to the abandonment of some of the secular activity that had prevailed inthe classical period, in particular in the visual arts but also in music, dance and litera-ture. These are fields which came to be dominated by Christian theology and practice.By the time of Augustine there had been a virtual rejection of the secular tradition;everything, at least in the scholarly field (not necessarily with the folk) had to be pre-sented in Christian terms as this religion had seized total hegemonic control and vir-tually eliminated the earlier secular forms from learned considerations. In religiousmatters, as in much else, the written reigned supreme. Yet it was this secular tradition

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that had contributed so much to the Greeks and Romans in both science and the arts.Of course, some contributions to the arts continued under Christianity and wereresponsible for the fine paintings of the Middle Ages, but the subject matter was prac-tically restricted to religious themes until the coming of the Renaissance. The Christiantradition had otherwise been anti-iconic, as with Judaism and Islam; the inspiration forearlier Hiberno-Saxon art seems also to have come from the East (Dalrymple 1998,105). So too drama and literature had been restricted in similar ways. Drama wasbased on religious topics, until eventually in EnglandMarlowe and other contemporarydramatists broke out of that mould. It was the same with literature, with story-telling,fields in which a distinct breakthrough to secularity was made. Some religious themesof course continued, as they did in art. But they were no longer exclusive in the waythey had been in the earlier Middle Ages; others were now permissible, indeedsought after. The Christian hegemony was fragmented; alternative visions were poss-ible, the religious not abandoned, but was compartmentalized, it was no longer alone.Nowhere is this process clearer than in the field of painting. China too had adopted a

tradition of religious (Buddhist) art, largely of monks. But there was also a lively secularschool of court painters, mainly running in families. In addition, one finds a wide-spread attention paid to calligraphy, especially by the many scholars who resolutely cul-tivated the abstract art.But it should be added that all these activities were heavily stratified. Not only do we

have the “high” tradition of court, religion or bourgeoisie, but there was everywhere avigorous “folk” tradition. In Europe such secular dramatic activities at this level tookthe shape of “mummings” which the Church tried unsuccessfully to suppress.People also sang their own folk songs, some of the tunes of which made their wayinto court and even into religious music, as we see even today.This “high” tradition, being written, was clearer to discern and therefore to judge its

contribution to developments between East and West; scientific writers like JosephNeedham have made a successful attempt to do just this. But in the arts it is more pro-blematic.However, the East did develop its ragas in India, its court and religiousmusic inChina. Literature too was comparable, especially in respect of the novel, looked upon bymany in the West as essentially European. It was not, and we find a series of importantChinese works dating from roughly the same period as in Europe. Theatre too was welldeveloped both in India and in China. So too were the visual arts. Inevitably, we considerour own achievements as superior when compared to those of others. But in fact thesejudgements are difficult or impossible tomake in any roundly “objective”way as the cri-teria of excellence are too vague. What we can say with certainty is that these other cul-tures had artistic achievements that were comparable to our own; that wewere not alone.

Science, Rationalization and “Rationality”

In the long term, that breakthrough was yet more important in science. It was in thatsphere that in the West no deviation had earlier been allowed from the view laid downin the Bible concerning the origin of the world which had been made by God. To thosewho accepted this view, as today in some orthodox, fundamentalist circles, so there was

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little for the scientist to say, uncontroversially, as Galileo, and later Darwin, found out.What the Renaissance did was to restore the freedom of enquiry that had existed earlier,so Europe could now take up that route once more without being constrained in thatfield by the heavy hand of religious opinion. Technology on the other hand involvedsmall-scale improvements without calling into question any general framework. Thatprocess had continued to make some progress throughout the Middle Ages althoughrarely using the systematic procedures of science; for the latter a degree of conceptualfreedom was essential. This freedom of thought was however lacking in the EuropeanMiddle Ages when scientific, or even objective, thinking about the “world” wasminimal.In this connection, one of the persistent claims to major differences that have been

deemed to exist between the mentalities of East andWest has been in “rationality”. Thissupposed difference lay at the basis of Weber’s analysis of modern double-entry book-keeping, which he saw as part of “rational” accounting. But he was mistaken in thinkingthat only in the West this form of recording financial transactions had emerged, for wehave subsequent evidence of it in South China (Gardella 1992; Goody 1996). And wellbefore that, some form of accounting had existed, as the many early clay tablets andother written records bear witness; improvements on these were a constant preoccupa-tion of technology, in the East and the West. Even in this limited sense of rationality,this was not a feature confined to the West. China’s trading (like India’s) was a complexaffair, possibly not as complex as that in the West after the Industrial Revolution, but ithad come to be highly complex, as Ledderose (2000) has shown, for the manufacture ofporcelain, which was required to supply a worldwide trading network. There wasnothing pre-capitalist about this activity nor was it in any sense petty capitalism as com-pared with the later Western enterprise; it required complex recording.It should be clear that the process of rationalization occurred both in theWest and in

the East, and that encouraged enquiry into the universe and led to more immediateimprovements, for example, in the form of accounts. One offshoot of this activity,and an early aspect of that process, was the alchemists’ “magic” in the shape of thesearch for long life or a means to change “base” into valuable metals; that was foundin both East and West, and pointed the way to other achievements. Leaving asidethese “magical” aspects, which often continued to be expressed in a religious context(as at Lourdes), the emphasis was increasingly placed on obtaining earthly results,leading to a questioning of supernatural explanations and a concentration upon the“natural”, resulting in the conquests of “science”. That led to a greater tempo ofsocial change in material welfare, and the complexity of the arts and entertainmentgrew in tandem with these other activities.The growth was of course not only the result of “science” in a formal sense but also

inter alia of the practical activity (“technology”) that gave rise to improvements ininstruments and in various other ways of doing things. But advances in the more delib-erate process of literate enquiry involved in “science” nevertheless greatly speeded upthe rhythm of change. This process occurred both in the East and in the West andthere was little to choose in that respect between the two. China was certainly morepluralistic, several “belief” systems co-existed. The West had experienced Antiquity,

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which was hardly secular but nevertheless was dominated by a hegemonic, monotheis-tic creed. As later in the West freedom of enquiry partly returned with the ItalianRenaissance when knowledge there really took off. It was the case that in most fieldachievements in Chinese science and technology had largely preceded those elsewherebefore this time, which only began to dominate the industrial processes of mass man-ufacture after the Renaissance. But it is essential to recall that earlier the transforming ofiron ore into steel and of clay into porcelain, both central to the Industrial Revolution,had first taken place in the East, where the basis of modern warfare, gunpowder, wasalso developed. The idea that the Chinese only used powder for fireworks is a typicalperception of the West; powder was of course employed in early warfare in much ofSouth-east Asia. So the Chinese export of arms is nothing new. The country wasalso important in early developments with metals and its remarkable achievementsin bronze castings are on display in many museums. That experience with high heatled to it being so outstanding in pottery-making and in iron-working. In pottery, thecountry had the right clay to make stoneware and later porcelain, but above all thiswas possible because their ovens could produce the necessary heat the process required.Although Europeans tried for many centuries to reproduce this ware (a much valuedimport), they could not do so until Meissen succeeded at the beginning of the eight-eenth century. Before that there was only trencher ware, but no local production ofchina. Nor, except exceptionally, could they regularly produce the high heat requiredto make cast iron, that is, not until the beginning of the nineteenth century and thestart of the Industrial Revolution. It was then that both the steam engine and therailway, the introduction of which transformed British society, were invented byBritish mining engineers. But both were also reliant upon earlier achievements andwere later central to the growth of industrial “capitalism”.This has resulted from a long process of evolution in the East as in the West. This

evolution has involved a growth of the economy which has followed alongside thetrail of innovation. It required the inversion of the digging stick and its haulage byanimal rather than by human energy to establish the plough agriculture of theBronze Age. In both areas that increased production supported the growth of specialistactivity in the towns, where the inhabitants no longer had to feed themselves directlyfrom their own labour in the fields (though in some African agrotowns they latercould). This was the agricultural revolution of the Bronze Age which permitted thedevelopment of urban specialisms, including metallurgy, literacy and written learningmore generally.The wheel and the wheeled carriage were also present in both areas. The chariot

seems to have appeared first of all in the Ancient Near East whence it spread to the Cau-casus and then to Central Asia and to China, where it was a prominent feature of earlyburials of royalty with this wheel. Rapid movement was then possible in the steppes andthat mobility also became a feature of Ancient Persia, which came to occupy the centreof the Ancient Near East. Roman roads, remarkable as they were, were preceded byothers that allowed wheeled transport to proceed more rapidly with the aid of theanimals otherwise used for plough agriculture. It was by harnessing the pullingpower of these animals that man was able to increase the production of grain by

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means of the plough and thus maintain specialist workers with the surplus. So muchmore would this produce that wheeled carts were also sometimes needed to bringthe larger harvest back from the fields.Of course, there were many differences between the East and the West but the fact

with the industrialization of China and India that we have arrived at similar points castsmuch of the argument about the difference in their developmental potential in somedoubt. Philosophically, writers point to a number of varying modes of thought, butthey omit to pay attention to many similarities. Much of their discussion has centredon the characteristics of the Greek mentality and has turned around the concept of“rationality” which was especially associated with the existence of the syllogism. Thisvery formal type of reasoning appears to be tied to the written mode (the word itselfis associated with book-keeping), rather than with the oral. As such it has importantsimilarities to procedures found in other literate societies. Indeed, Bottéro, theFrench ancient historian, saw this resemblance even in the earliest Mesopotamian writ-ings (Goody 1996, 22). Rationality was effectively tied up with literacy and basic to thenotion of “science”. Indeed, some writers have seen it as limited to a certain language,which is a most restrictive and Eurocentric idea (that nobody has rationality except weIndo-Europeans!). We need to look much more widely.It is a similar story with “individualism”. These “psychological”, value-laden epithets

are too general, too all-embracing, to be of much use as analytical tools. The adoptionof the term, and its identification with Western capitalism, is an unacceptable denigra-tion of the activity of others which comes to be seen as the actions of a crowd, con-ducted by a mass, of “coolies” rather than of human beings. The whole basis for thischaracterization is highly doubtful for the many anthropologists who have written oftheir (pre-literate) societies as individualistic, even as rational. Any general differencesof this kind that exist can be better explained in terms of communication. The earlierthesis represents a profoundly Europe-centred perspective which sought to account forthat continent’s later, temporary superiority in various cultural spheres by mistakenlypointing to permanent features, which only encouraged their ethnocentrism.Finally, in my discussions about the East and the West, I have often been met with

the objection that in the modern arts, Europe has always been the leader. That has beengenerally the case in recent times, since the advent of the mass media in the shape ofcolour printing, films, TV, etc. (Benjamin 1968). Recent inventions in this spherehave been largely Western, following the Industrial Revolution. However that is theresult of this Revolution and for earlier periods the claim seems doubtful. “Primitiveart” came from many parts of the world, as the Parisian collection at Quai Branlyreminds us. However with the advent of writing, the literary arts became muchmore “ethnocentric”, or limited to one language alone (except in China, with its logo-graphic system of writing). Now, the problem became much more complex. Who arewe to judge the translated work of the “Chinese Shakespeare” when it is difficultenough to assess the comparative worth even of a European author when they arewriting in a foreign tongue? Fiction may well present a particular problem for itoffers the “invented” as a kind of reality and “lies” of that kind were not greatly appreci-ated in medieval Europe. Literary production of this variety was virtually put in

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abeyance. That is to say, the form of the novel hardly existed after the classical perioduntil the largely female romance writers of the early Renaissance. And it was only withDefoe that one again found the emergence of the “realistic” tradition of novelisticwriting in England (Watt 1957; Goody and Watt 1963). But the literary arts alwayshad particular problems, tied to the distribution and nature of a language.Music is less problematic, for there was no language problem; but without a training

in Japanese ritual, for example, what are we to make of the Noh plays? These verbal artsare deeply embedded within a specific linguistic tradition, even when they do notdepend directly upon language itself. In this respect, they are quite unlike the otherforms of activity with which we have hitherto been dealing, like painting. Herecolour printing added another dimension, for now painting could easily be reproduced.Because of various technical developments in colour reproduction, in film and in mar-keting, Western art has now come to be accepted as a standard worldwide so that allothers seem inferior to some. But this was not the case before the Renaissance.Then, China and Japan both had strong theatrical traditions. In Japan, one found not

only the ritualized Noh plays, but also the commercial Kabuki tradition. In China, therewas an important operatic genre as well as a commercial theatrical form which is wellillustrated in the film Farewell My Concubine. There did not seem to be the same com-bination of theatre and poetry as in the West, but poetry itself was nevertheless veryimportant as an art form from an early period when it was recorded in the Book ofOdes. There is even talk, as I have said, of a Chinese Shakespeare. In the realm ofthe visual arts, there was the active representation of senior members of the communityin memorial portrait painting, including of ancestral figures, but little genre paintinguntil much later. In Europe too, this form only made a relatively late appearance inHolland. Secular painting had existed in Rome but it was virtually absent in theMiddle Ages during the long domination of the Christian Church.This hiatus reminds us that there has not been a straightforward development of

“civilized” life since early times. But what movements have taken place seem to havedone so in the same manner as other significant changes in the history of early man,such as the shift from hand-axes to flake tools, and they should be treated in asimilar way. To discuss these changes in terms of general concepts like “feudalism”

and the like seem to make them depend too much on specific European experiences,so that the dominance of that continent in world affairs is quietly assumed. The useof these terms gives all “history” a distinctly eurocentric slant. “Feudalism” isthought to be a necessary stage in the move from slave-owning Antiquity to “capital-ism” and much has been written questioning whether this institution has been found inother parts of the world. The answer clearly depends on how narrowly one defines thepractice. That was also the case with slave production. Slaves appeared in many partsbut the attribution of a special status to the slave mode of production in a Europeancontext entailed a characterization of other similar forms of dependence as “secondary”and their characterization as not “true” examples of a development which in its classicform could progress to feudalism or later to capitalism (modernity). The analysis ofrelated forms of dependence was not unprofitable as part of a comparative investi-gation, but it was always predicated on the belief that it was the West, and only the

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Christian West (occasionally the Judaic), that led the world on the road to modernity.This has been the assumption of writers including Marxists as of many others whichhas seriously hampered the study of world history. That is why I have chosen amore “objective” archaeological (and cultural) method of looking at human develop-ment in a broader sense. At least, the approach avoids some of the highly contentiousEurocentrism that has characterized much “recent” history and leaves us with a morelevel playing field.

Metallurgy, Trade and the Industrial Revolution

The many similarities between the East and the West of Eurasia have their roots in thecommon developments in the area of the Bronze Age of the Ancient Near East, ana-lysed by the prehistorian, Gordon Childe. I want here to briefly summarize my ownrecent attempt to bring that study up to the present day and trace the historical con-tinuity, in the West and more sketchily in the East, in the human story up until theIndustrial Revolution and the birth of the modern world (which in the early nineteenthcentury, some came to refer to as “capitalism”).What I tried to do in my account was to explain not only the similarities of East and

West in their development from the Near Eastern Bronze Age, but also the way inwhich the West only gained a comparative advantage after the Industrial Revolution,which it initiated, although at least the basis of much of this development had beenlaid long before. The confluence between East and West has to do with the comingof the Age of Metals together with that of writing, both of which advanced hand inhand.The Bronze Age which was so critical in the history of Eurasia—and indeed of the

whole world, initiated our civilization in the sense of the culture of cities and wasdependent not only on the use of copper and bronze but also upon the work of theplough and of animal traction in the fields. Those inventions not only broughtabout a much larger production of cereals which was able to sustain non-farmingspecialists in the towns and elsewhere, it also resulted in the recording of thoseexchanges between town and country on clay tablets, eventually leading to the inven-tion of a fully fledged writing system. In this way, “history” in the restricted sense of thewritten version was born, and social change, which had already speeded up with themuch earlier development of human speech, now became faster still and effectivelyintroduced us to the modern world.All this first happened in the fertile river valleys of the Ancient Near East, and from

there the practice spread to similar valleys in India and in China. Some aspects werealso adopted by the surrounding countries, by the inhabitants of the hills eastwardsand even by some in Europe since the valleys of the Bronze Age in the Near East didnot have the metal needed to produce the goods required or only in small quantities.This material had to come largely from the mountainous regions and to be exchanged(or fought for) with the new urban populations, which meant traders (or warriors) hadto travel some distance to find these goods and other prized possessions. Of course,there was nothing new about long-distance exchange but it now took on a more

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central role in providing the basic raw materials that were needed for crucial aspects ofthe new way of life.This search meant moving among “barbarians”, that is, among Neolithic cultivators,

and inevitably introducing them to some elements of “civilization”. Similar expeditionsalso led to the founding of Bronze Age societies in the fertile valleys of India and of theYellow River in China, in passing along the Eurasian corridor or round the Arabian Sea.“Civilization” also went northward to Anatolia, to Troy and across the narrow straits ofthe Aegean to Greece and the Balkans, reaching up around the Black Sea as well as tra-velling to the South, to the Lebanon and to Egypt. In this way, aspects of the UrbanRevolution spread to Europe, to Asia and to North Africa. But in fact it was the sub-sequent Iron Age, probably originating in the Hittite empire of Anatolia, that had agreater impact on these “barbarian” cultures since as a metal iron was more widelyavailable and cheaper compared to copper and tin and so was more “democratic”,and less easily monopolized by elites. It was the Iron Age that “made” Greece andRome, with all their well-equipped military as well as their many peaceful uses,drawing their metals from the ample resources of “barbaric” Europe.The Ancient Near East may have initiated the Age of Metals, but it itself had few of

them (anyhow in the valleys). Both bronze and iron had largely to be sought else-where. Nevertheless, the area developed trade and an urban civilization. It collectedits metals from “barbarian” societies like those in Europe where even the importantcity of Troy went to seek copper. But that connection of the search for resources withthe Near East, epitomized in the exploitation of Carthaginian mines of SouthernSpain and in Hannibal’s subsequent invasion of Rome, largely ceased with the fallof the Western Roman empire and the later advent to its border of the Muslimsfrom the East. Europe was then largely cut off from communication with that partof the world and its valuable trade in luxuries as well as its advances in knowledgesystems that had taken place, especially in China with its development of newmodes of circulating written information, using paper and printing (but not thepress which Europeans later introduced). Paper spread first to the Near East, butnot yet to Europe, leading to the creation of large libraries, at Baghdad (the Houseof Wisdom), at Cairo (in the Al-Azhar), in Cordoba (at the Alcazar), libraries thatcould increasingly be consulted by a variety of scholars, and were not simply“royal”. This consultation had happened earlier at the town of Gondeshapur inPersia but the whole area now experienced the vigorous collection of written texts,including scientific works from Greece and Rome, which were little valued in Chris-tian Europe, indeed often actively rejected by the religious establishment of the med-ieval world. This collection was made possible in translations by Syrian-speakingChristians, by the “heretic” Nestorians, a number of whom had taken refuge inthat town and were not affected by Western taboos. Their effort not only preservedthe classical texts for later resurrection in Renaissance Europe when scientific activityreturned to examine the “pagan” achievements of the classics, but also helped spur onthe activity of Persian and Arabian science.The medieval Near East continued to develop an urban culture, following that of

Rome and Persia. This has later been compared by the Israeli historian, Ashtor, to

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that of the Italian city states. As then, the flourishing bourgeoisie sometimes even tookover the governance of the towns. But despite its many exports and great activity, theNear East never produced an Industrial Revolution based on easy access to metals, ofwhich it had but few, although it had not only elaborate exchange, extensive libraries,but also the manufacture of textiles, silks, cottons and wool in addition to ceramics,soap, carpets and many other items. It was in the Near East that accountancy firstdeveloped, much earlier in connection with the exchange and early writing haseven been described as “an accountant’s script”. The region then engaged in processesof exchange and finance such as the commenda and in banking itself, neither insti-tution to be seen as an invention of the later Europeans. And above all, the regionpossessed an important bourgeoisie in the towns that was often politically significant.The bases of modern capitalism were thus not absent from the earlier Near East. But itnevertheless had little metal and the Mediterranean itself had no coal to smelt it whenthe wood was exhausted. It was this absence of resources, rather than the lack of a“Protestant Ethic”, that held the area back, at least until the emergence of oil in thetwentieth century—that and the virtual absence of mining technology and thepaucity of metal working since the Bronze Age. This paucity became especiallyevident later on during the Iron Age, making use of the more abundant metal,which flourished in Southern Germany and in Austria, above all around Hallstadt.The Ancient and the contemporary Near East was short of metals (except in Anato-

lia) and just as Troy had to search for them in Central Europe and the Phoenicians inSouthern Spain, so the transfer of metals from the West to the East continued. The col-lapse of the Western Roman empire and the build-up of Islam led to a drastic decline inthat exchange, which also included the acquisition of the more developed Easternknowledge. But gradually Europe restarted its trade with the East through the Mediter-ranean towns of Italy, the South of which was much influenced by the Muslim occu-pation of Sicily. The revitalization of trade was especially associated with the port ofVenice (and earlier that of Amalfi, with its olive oil) that drew upon exports of themuch-prized English wool from Florence but above all of metals from Germany andthe Tyrol, where the Serenissima had its own mines, sending this material down theriver Adige, as well as along the Canale di Ferro further East. In the course of thistrade the Germans came down to Venice with their metals and later carried outforging activity there in the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, for they themselves did not tradein the Mediterranean; they exchanged their goods with the Muslims from there whoused the Fondaco dei Turchi in the same city as a base. Businessmen like the Fuggerfrom Augsburg, artists like Dürer from Vienna, gathered there where the Northernmetals were worked in the Ghetto, so named before the Jewish workers fromAncona took up their residence in that quarter. It was this exchange that led to the dif-fusion southward not only of German metals but of the associated techniques in print-ing and guns as well as the countervailing spread northwards of Renaissance art andideas, some of which had themselves already been influenced by the Near andFurther East. This trade led to the growth of both wealth and of “culture” amongthe inhabitants not only of Venice but of Istanbul in the East as well.

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The trade brought riches and luxury to both sides. In Turkey, the Ottoman empire,ruled over by a dynasty from Central Asia, had its capital at the end of the Silk Road andthus became a huge attraction for Europeans who went there to buy the goods comingfrom the East. Under this dynasty, the empire was ruled for some six hundred years andextended into Europe itself, especially to Greece, supposedly the cultural home ofWestern civilization. In the West, we often think of Turkey as “the sick man ofEurope” as it had perhaps become in the nineteenth century but previous to the Indus-trial Revolution it had been very healthy indeed. Istanbul was the location of a largearsenal that produced both cannons and hand guns for export with a technologythat came mostly from the East. It had also been the centre (as well as the Near Eastgenerally) for many manufacturers, for carpets, for silks, as well as for paper andother Eastern goods.Before Venice, European trade with the East had continued at a reduced level but

really began to grow again with Amalfi, a Mediterranean town of fisher folk andtraders, especially noted for its olive oil. That trade did not disappear; olive oil wasneeded not only for cooking but also for lighting, especially for reading manuscriptsat night. Amalfi itself became an important republic in 839 when it broke away fromthe Byzantine Duchy of Naples and grew into the great merchant city of SouthernItaly, dominated by its cathedral with its doors fabricated in Constantinople, thecapital of Christian Byzantium. There it developed partnerships between land-basedand sea-based markets as well as producing the Amalfi tables, the “first maritimecode in history” (the first should be understood in a purely European sense, forsuch understandings had existed before writing and were long in practice elsewhere).The fleet had a market and a base in Constantinople (whence the Cathedral doors),and indeed it even aided the Muslim Fatimids in their conquest of Egypt in 869; aswell as having establishments in Antioch and Jerusalem, where they founded ahospice for pilgrims. They may also have made some important contributions to thenaval construction and had an arsenal before Venice where the vessels were built tocarry on this trade (Chalmin 2013, 7). For when they arrived the Muslims had littlein the form of a fleet in the Mediterranean.Amalfi had strong connections (and agreements) with the Near East, while at home

they oriented imports from there to the important markets of Pavia and Lombardy inthe North. But its supremacy did not last long. The town itself was conquered by theNormans and Venice then became more important commercially, the great centre forcommerce with the East especially after the Turkish conquests and the end ofByzantium.The earlier German expertize in metalwork around Hallstatt, which went back at

least to Roman times, was developed locally and they took this skill elsewhere, toEastern Europe and to the Russians and Mongols as well as to the West. It was thisability in metallurgy that led them to take up the manufacture of the barrels neededto contain and explode the new powder arriving from China. So they became gun-smiths as well as metalwrights. In China, powder was also used in warfare, and notjust for fireworks as some Europeans have supposed. In Europe, these skills latermade the Germans much in demand by many including by Peter the Great of

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Russia, where they constructed the factories behind the Urals that eventually producedthe equipment to defeat the Nazis in the Second World War. Meanwhile in England,the Tudors drew considerably on their help which Queen Elizabeth called for in mod-ernizing the mining industry (they had already helped the earlier Tudors). Under Eli-zabeth a Royal Company of miners was founded largely as the result of her need forarmaments to fight the war against Spain, which was then successfully bringing pre-cious metals to Europe from South America in order to finance war, the church,and in a few areas, the growth of industrial activities. It was in this context thatEngland produced the cheaper cast iron cannon for its ships (instead of employingthe bronze variety), thus being able to mount many more weapons than with theexpensive copper, an advantage that served the navy well for some years.With German help, England and British metallurgy took off since the sources of both

iron and coal lay conveniently close to one another in that country. Technology in thisfield had earlier been led by Germany whose great achievement was celebrated in thevolume published by Agricola (Georg Bauer) in 1556 (Agricola 1950). Now, it wasEnglish miners and technologists that took over the lead, especially at Coalbrookdalefrom 1709, for they had all the materials close to hand. And it was their mining engin-eers who made possible the Industrial Revolution, Watt with his steam engine fordrawing water from the mines, Stephenson with his railway using metal to make thetrack that already existed (in wooden forms) to transport heavy loads. Now that theheat needed for the casting process was readily available, the tracks themselves andthe engine parts could be cast and thus traded all around the globe. The IndustrialRevolution had arrived, “modern” society was born and the railway and the steamengine went on to conquer not only Europe, but America, India and the rest of theworld.

Conclusion

What I have tried to do in this summary is to suggest a history less biased, based notupon the vague “uniqueness of Europe” hypothesis. Of course, that continent had itseconomic “uniqueness” in the nineteenth century and much of European-madehistory has been based upon its pre-eminence at that particular time. But this supre-macy was in fact temporary. Before the Italian Renaissance, China had been the fore-most figure in science and in most technology, including printing and metals. It had theblast furnaces to make cast iron and so it had high heat ovens long before the West; thisadvantage enabled it to export high-fired ceramics, porcelain, to Europe and elsewhere,changing our tableware and eating patterns in the process. At the end of the eighteenthcentury, China established itself as the greatest exporting nation until the IndustrialRevolution; in England the pottery they made is still called by that name. And thatcountry looks like regaining some of the earlier position today that she lost in the nine-teenth century, not just adopting “capitalism” from the West but taking up where theyhad earlier left off. The different explanations of Marx andWeber about the uniquenessof the West need to be seen in the light of the current situation and of the historical roleof the Age of Metals.

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However, one constant theme of European writers has been the way that the rest ofthe world, but especially China and India, have “imitated” Western cultures in estab-lishing their own brand of capitalism. But “capitalism”, if linked to the ProtestantChurch as many have claimed, could not simply be transferred from one area toanother. “Capitalism” might possibly have been taken to Japan, or to China, but avariety of Protestantism was never there. The “infection” of the former would havetaken place without the main “cause” being present; the theoretical implications ofsuch a process are profound. An alternative view is called for. Commodore Perry cer-tainly went to Japan in 1852 to “open it up” to modern Western influences. Thiscould not happen without an existing foundation. Japan already had a relativelyadvanced iron and steel industry, ultimately derived from China, which could bebuilt on.At this time, the Western world did have a technological advantage which meant that

it had something to offer to others, but it would be quite wrong to regard Japan andChina as having made no steps towards what we see as a modern way of living, evento “capitalism”. Look at the speed with which Japan became an important navalpower, or China an aerial one. They had much to learn in detail—so did we all—but this involved building on expertize in metals which already existed in thosecountries. It is this aspect that is frequently ignored in Western accounts of theseseminal events, especially the considerable part the East had to play in the earlierprocess of the modernization of the West. It is true that recent events have forcedthe West to reconsider its supposedly advanced position, especially in naval andaerial activity but also in terms of manufacture and export. But the intellectualworld in the West has still not caught up with all the implications of this activity.It may reasonably be objected that in this day and age, with the economy and the

polity being in effect worldwide, we do not need to be told of the fact that recenthistory was not the preserve of Europe alone. That may be so. But in the popularimagination, Europe has taken for a long time the lead in economic and culturalmatters. However such a standpoint is not confined to peoples’ personal opinion; itaffects much current thinking in the social sciences. In history, for example, some ofthe popular version of recent times is based on the Malthusian proposition thatsingles out the West as developing a family more in tune with “capitalism” than thatin the East. Again in Moretti’s interesting account of the “bourgeoisie” (Moretti2013), the treatment of this phenomenon is confined to Europe, giving the impressionthat it was only there that capitalism developed and neglecting the existence of a strong“middle-class” in China and the East generally. This is curious because Moretti’s analy-sis of the novel includes forms from China and the Ancient world, whereas in theearlier thesis of Watt (accepted at the time by me) the novel was European andlinked to the rise of the bourgeoisie, a thesis obviously in line with the idea of theunique development of capitalism and modernity in the West. Even in highly presti-gious circles there, these ideas persist, despite the world view which many profess. Itis a point that even anthropologists have neglected.All the essential attributes of the bourgeoisie were present in the East, most even in

the Near East. While there were certainly some differences, on which many

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commentators have dwelt, the similarities were yet more significant from a develop-mental angle, and it is on these that one should concentrate, which is what I haveattempted to do in this essay.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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