A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

by Nicholas Wade

  Those who favor institutions as the key to the Industrial Revolution have emphasized England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, which placed the sovereign firmly under the control of Parliament and rationalized economic incentives. But both the Glorious Revolution and the Industrial Revolution that followed it were late developments in the rise of the West, the foundations of which historians believe were laid much earlier.

  In a recent essay seeking to explain the rise of the West, the historian Niall Ferguson cited six institutions, the first of which he calls competition. By competition he means “a decentralization of political life, which created the launch-pad for both nation-states and capitalism.” 11 This is another way of saying that the West, broadly speaking, enjoyed open societies with competing institutions, as opposed to the unrelieved despotism of the East.

  The open society made possible the other institutions Ferguson deems critical to the rise of the West, such as the rule of law, including private property rights and the representation of property owners in a legislature; advances in science and medicine; and a growing economy fueled by technology and consumer demand.

  “In the course of roughly 500 years,” Ferguson writes, “Western civilization rose to a position of extraordinary dominance in the world. . . . Western science shifted the paradigms; others either followed or were left behind. Western systems of law and the political models derived from them, including democracy, displaced or defeated the non-Western alternatives. . . . Above all, the Western model of industrial production and mass consumption left all alternative models of economic organization floundering in its wake.” 12

  A society with several different power centers is less likely than an autocracy to suppress new ideas or to thwart innovation and entrepreneurship. Europe thus provided a more favorable environment than China for the emergence of science and medicine, and for the rise of capitalism. But Ferguson’s analysis boils down to the assertion that the West succeeded because it was an open society. This is true so far as it goes, but why did the West alone develop a society of this nature? “This openness of society, together with its inventiveness, becomes what is to be explained,” writes the economic historian Eric Jones.13

  How the West Arose

  Some 50,000 years ago, a vast natural experiment was set in motion when modern humans dispersed across the globe from their ancestral African homeland. In Africa, Australasia, East Asia, Europe and the Americas, people developed very different kinds of society depending on the various challenges they faced. For at least the past 500 years, for which detailed records exist, and probably for far longer, these differences have been of an enduring nature.

  Nature’s experiment, with at least five versions running in parallel for much of the time, has had a complex outcome. What is clear is that from the same human clay, a wide variety of societies can be molded. Australia serves as a kind of baseline. It was inhabited by immigrants from the African homeland some 46,000 years ago. The descendants of these first inhabitants, according to the evidence of their DNA, managed to fend off all outsiders until the arrival of Europeans in the 17th century. At that time, their way of life had changed little. Australian aborigines still lived in tribal societies without towns or cities. Their technology differed little from that of the Paleolithic hunters who reached Europe at the same time their ancestors arrived in Australia. During the 46,000 years of their isolation, they had invented neither the wheel nor the bow and arrow. They lived in a state of perpetual warfare between neighboring tribes. Their most conspicuous cultural achievement was an intense religion, some of whose rituals lasted through day and night for months at a time. The leisure to pursue these elaborate devotions was earned by the aborigines’ ability to flourish in a near desert environment in which newcomers would have perished. But for lack of population growth and demographic pressure, aboriginal tribes were never forced into the intense process of state formation and empire building that shaped other civilizations.

  In Africa, population numbers were higher than in Australia, agriculture was quickly adopted and settled societies developed. From these gradually emerged more complex societies, including primitive states. But because of low population density, these primitive states did not enter the phase of political rivalry and sustained warfare from which empires emerged in Mesopotamia, the Yellow River valley and, much later, in the Andean highlands. The population of Africa in 1500 was only 46 million. The soil being mostly poor, there were few agricultural surpluses and so no incentive to develop property rights. For lack of the wheel and navigable rivers, transport within Africa was difficult and trade was small scale. For lack of demographic pressure, African societies had little incentive to develop the skills that trade stimulates, to accumulate capital, to develop occupational specialties or to generate modern societies. The phase of state and empire building had only just begun when it was cut short by European colonization.

  History in the Americas began only 15,000 years ago, when the first immigrants from Siberia trekked across the then extant land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. Significant empires arose in Mexico, Central America and the Andes. But the populations took many years to attain the critical density for state formation. The Aztecs and Incas had made only a late and uncertain start toward modern states and were already debilitated by internal weaknesses when the conquistadores arrived on their doorstep.

  Only in Eurasia did substantial states and empires emerge. More favorable climate and geography allowed larger populations to develop. Under the transforming influences of trade and warfare, empires arose in China, India, the Near East and Europe.

  It is hard to identify the influences that may have shaped the European population before about the 5th century AD, when civil authority in the western half of the Roman empire collapsed. In geographical terms, Europe then consisted of a patchwork of cleared regions separated by forests, mountains or marshes. These cleared arable regions became the nucleus of new polities that began to emerge into states around 900 AD. But this defragmentation was a slow process. There were still around 1,000 political units in Europe by the 14th century. Nation-states began to develop in the 15th century. By 1900, Europe consisted of 25 states.14

  China’s geography, by contrast, channeled the social behavior of its population in a very different direction. In the fertile plain between the Yangtze and Yellow rivers, population steadily grew and at an early date was forced into the usual winner-take-all competition between states. China was unified by 221 BC and remained an autocracy, subject to periodic raids from the powerful nomadic peoples along its northern borders.

  “Any objective survey of the past 10,000 years of human history,” writes the anthropologist Peter Farb, “would show that during almost all of it, northern Europeans were an inferior barbarian race, living in squalor and ignorance, producing few cultural innovations.” 15 But during the early Middle Ages, a favorable combination of factors set the stage for Europeans to develop a particularly successful form of social organization. These included a geography that favored the existence of a number of independent states and made it hard for one to dominate all the rest; a population dense enough to encourage social stratification and trade; and an independent center of influence in the form of the church, which set limits on the power of local rulers. By 1200, Europe was still backward compared to China and the Islamic world, but it had institutions in place that were about to foster an unparalleled burst of innovation accompanied by the rise of science.

  Origins of Modern Science

  A distinctive feature of Western civilization is its creation of modern science. By delving into the roots of modern science, might one discover the essential factors that nudged European societies onto their special track?

  A careful comparison of early science in Europe, the Islamic world and China has been made by the science historian Toby Huff, whose telescope experiment is recounted above. To anyone who might have surveyed the world in 1200 AD, modern science
would have seemed most likely to arise not in Europe but in the Islamic world or in China. The scientific works of ancient Greece were translated into Arabic in the 12th and 13th centuries. People writing in Arabic—who included Jews, Christians and Iranians as well as Arabs—made Arab science the most advanced in the world from the 8th until the 14th century. Scientists writing in Arabic led their fields in mathematics, astronomy, physics, optics and medicine. Arabs perfected trigonometry and spherical geometry.

  China too would have seemed fertile ground for science. The three inventions cited by Francis Bacon in 1620 as the greatest known to man—the compass, gunpowder and the printing press—were all Chinese in origin. Besides its technological inventiveness, China had a long history of astronomical observation, a necessary base for understanding the mechanics of the sun’s planetary system.

  Yet both Arab and Chinese science faltered for essentially similar reasons. Science is not the independent action of lone individuals but a social activity, the work of a community of scholars who check, challenge and build on one another’s work. Science therefore needs social institutions, like universities or research institutes, in which to thrive, and these have to be reasonably free of intellectual constraints imposed by religious authorities or government.

  In both the Islamic world and China, there proved to be no room for independent institutions. In Islam, there were madrasas, institutes for religious education, attached to mosques. But their prime purpose was to inculcate what were called Islamic sciences, the study of the Qur’an and Islamic law, and not foreign sciences, as the natural sciences were known. Much of ancient Greek philosophy conflicted with Qur’anic teaching and was excluded from study. Scholars who displeased religious authorities could find themselves abruptly silenced by a fatwa. The intellectual tradition of Islam, that the Qur’an and the sayings of Muhammad contained all science and law, created a hostile environment for all independent lines of thought.

  Islamic rulers long kept challenges away by forbidding the printing press and squelching troublesome lines of inquiry. In Europe, interest in new knowledge was not confined to an elite but pervaded societies in which literacy was becoming more widespread. By 1500 there were 1,700 printing presses distributed in 300 European cities in every country except Russia.16 In the Ottoman empire, a decree of Sultan Selim I specified the death penalty for anyone who even used a printing press. Istanbul did not acquire a printing press until 1726 and the owners were allowed to publish only a few titles before being closed down.

  Religious authorities in Islamic countries disdained any source of knowledge other than the Qur’an, and frequently exercised their power to suppress it. Institutes like the distinguished Maragha observatory in Iran, founded in 1259 AD, enjoyed only a brief lifetime. As late as 1580, an observatory being built in Istanbul was torn down for religious reasons before it was even completed.17

  The economist Timur Kuran has recently argued that the Islamic world was held back economically largely because of rigidities in Islamic law regarding commerce. Corporations, for instance, could be dissolved on the death of any partner if his heirs wanted immediate payment. “In sum, several self-enforcing elements of Islamic law—contracting provisions, inheritance system, marriage regulations—jointly contributed to the stagnation of the Middle East’s commercial infrastructure,” he writes.18 But it is unconvincing to blame Islamic law; Europeans were faced with similar theologically based laws, such as those against usury, but they made the law accommodate itself to society’s larger purposes. In Islam the forces of modernity did not compel the Ottoman state to modernize its legal system until the 19th century.

  How is it, then, that Arabic science was so good in the 8th to 14th centuries, despite such inhospitable conditions? The reason, Huff believes, is that in the early centuries of Muslim rule few people had in fact converted to Islam. It was only when the pace of conversion picked up in the 10th century that Muslim majorities became commonplace, a dynamic “which probably had negative consequences for the pursuit of the natural sciences and intellectual life in general.” 19

  China, though for different reasons, developed the same antipathy to modern science as did the Islamic world. One problem in China was the absence of any institutions independent of the emperor. There were no universities. Such academies as existed were essentially crammers for the imperial examination system. Independent thinkers were not encouraged. When Hung-wu, the first emperor of the Ming dynasty, decided that scholars had let things get out of hand, he ordered the death penalty for 68 degree holders and 2 students, and penal servitude for 70 degree holders and 12 students. The problem with Chinese science, Huff writes, was not that it was technically flawed, “but that Chinese authorities neither created or tolerated independent institutions of higher learning within which disinterested scholars could pursue their insights.” 20 China, unlike the Islamic world, did not ban printing presses, but the books they produced were only for the elite.

  Another impediment to independent thought was the stultifying education system, which consisted of rote memorization of the more than 500,000 characters that comprised the Confucian classics, and the ability to write a stylized commentary on them. The imperial examination system, which began in 124 BC, took its final form in 1368 AD and remained unchanged until 1905, deterring intellectual innovation for a further five centuries.

  That modern science was for centuries suppressed both in China and in the Islamic world means that its rise in Europe should in no way be taken for granted. Europe too had vested interests resistant to technological change and its attendant disruptions. European religious authorities, just as in Islam, were quick to deter challenges to church doctrine. The bishop of Paris, Étienne Tempier, in 1270 condemned 13 doctrines held by followers of Aristotle, whose philosophy had gained substantial influence in Europe’s universities. The bishop followed up in 1277 by prohibiting 219 philosophical and theological theses being discussed at the University of Paris.

  But Europe differed from China and the Islamic world in that its educational institutes had considerable independence. The European concept of the corporation as a legal person conferred a certain freedom of thought and action on bodies like guilds and universities. Church authorities could object to what was being taught or discussed, but they could not permanently suppress scientific ideas.

  Though Europe’s universities started by teaching theology, like the madrasas, they soon moved on to the philosophy of Aristotle, and from philosophy to physics and astronomy. Within these institutions, scientists were able to begin the systematic investigation of nature, thus laying the basis for modern science.

  The existence of universities explains how science was able to thrive in Europe though not in China or the Islamic world, but does not explain how science got started in Europe in the first place. What were the preexisting, nonscientific sources from which the scientific enterprise arose?

  Huff presents an interesting idea of where to find them. “The riddle of the success of modern science in the West—and its failure in non-Western civilizations—is to be solved by studying the non-scientific domains of culture, that is, religion, philosophy, theology, and the like,” he writes.21

  Christian theology had a rich history of argumentation about fine matters of doctrine, many of them stemming from the complex dogma of the Trinity. These disputes shaped in Europeans’ minds the idea of reason as a human attribute. It was reason that separated man from animal. Helped by the rediscovery of Roman civil law toward the end of the 11th century, Europe developed the concept of a legal system. Reason and conscience were adopted as the criteria for deciding legal practice. So it was from there a stone’s throw to the concept of laws of nature, to assuming that there existed a Book of Nature and a World Machine that could be comprehended by human reason. It was the revolution in legal thought of the 12th and 13th centuries, in Huff’s view, that transformed medieval society in Europe and made it receptive ground for the gro
wth of modern science.

  The Rewards of Openness

  The concepts of law and reason in Europe that were the wellsprings of modern science served also as the basis for an open society. Trade and exploration, which Chinese emperors were able to suppress when it suited them, became central forces in Europe’s expansion.

  Between intermittent bouts of warfare, there was vigorous trade between Europe’s various regions. Trade was one of the forces behind the European exploration of the world. The 1490s saw Vasco da Gama’s visit to India and Columbus’s to the Americas. These voyages also marked a distinctly European curiosity about the world. The exploration was allied with a flood of new technical inventions, the beginnings of modern science and the emergence of capitalism.

  It was Europe that discovered the world, not the other way around. The Chinese admiral Zheng He mounted several voyages to Southeast Asia and Africa in the early 15th century, but these were not sustained. Having discovered the rest of the world, Europeans set up trading routes, followed in many instances by conquest. Europeans brushed aside tribal societies almost at will, dispatching settlers to occupy the Americas, Australia and large tracts of Africa.

  The roots of European distinctiveness may have been laid as early as the 11th century, if not before, yet even by 1500 Europe’s impending rise was far from evident. The Ottoman empire at that time was still expanding. China was enjoying a period of stability under the Ming dynasty. The Mughal empire was about to rise in India. All three powers were more substantial than any in Europe.