cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/5962668
This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/kalni on 2025-05-31 20:36:01+00:00.
cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/5962668
This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/todayilearned by /u/kalni on 2025-05-31 20:36:01+00:00.
Sure. I’ll add one guess that I’ve had for a long time as to one substantial factor in what helped start things get going in Europe relative to East Asia: moveable type. That drastically brought down the cost of written works, which acted as an enabler for subsequent social and technological changes, and happened towards the beginning of that “early divergence” period.
Why didn’t it take off in East Asia?
East Asia had had block printing, even moveable type, for a long time before Europe. However, it did not use alphabetic systems of writing, and if you have thousands of logograms, the kind of practical “I have a small number of bins of identical characters” thing doesn’t work nearly as well.
https://ca.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/moveable-type-story-of-china/moveable-type-story-of-china/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_Asia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press#Gutenberg.27s_press
https://www.taiwan-panorama.com/Articles/Details?Guid=09433229-1971-44c8-a7fe-0193be415fbc&langId=3&CatId=11
So that would have been a technological window running from in the 1400s to something like the 1970s where it was cheaper to do production of written works in (alphabet-based) European languages than in (logogram-based) major East Asian languages.
EDIT: On another interesting note, the Soviets tried to promote an alphabet-based writing system for Chinese some time back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Chinese
What about the Indian subcontinent? Aren’t their alphabets also easily adaptable to moveable type?
Sure, it’s not only Europe that used a alphabetic writing system; wouldn’t have been purely determined by the writing system. Someone was going to be first, though. But I think that anyone using a logographic system with a huge number of logograms faced a substantial barrier with moveable type—they either had to recreate their system of writing or come up with a different system of inexpensive dissemination of information. East Asia had that barrier in front of it.
Absolutely, i believe you’re correct. Excellent writeup!
Another factor would be higher population and the ability of that population to have time to think and work on ideas other than survival. Which i think, and could be wrong about but it seems right, would have started around the European Renaissance and really boomed during the industrial revolution. At least for western civilizations.
why should i believe any of this is important compared to the manifest looting of the americas