Deeply Blasphemous

Most people will just assume that the West has been the technologically dominate force forever – after all, didn't “we” invent science? Most of the rest will realize that during the Middle Ages that technological development was stagnant compared to a lot of the people around them and will generally say that it was the Renaissance when European technology shot ahead of the rest of the world – after all, what else could really explain the European dominance of the world that followed the Renaissance?

Mostly, that's nonsense, however. Europeans achieved clear technological supremacy, globally, only in the 19th century – and by the 21st century, it's been lost, already, as Japan and South Korea have both eclipsed Western nations in terms of technological development (and China is fixing to do so).

I'm going to talk about ships and then metal. I could keep talking about issues like agriculture (in many ways, 20th century agriculture is a step back from 19th century Indian and Chinese techniques because of the consequences of mechanization and fertilization insofar as erosion and soil damage, but it wasn't until the 20th century, really, that Western farmers could claim to have any edge on South and East Asian farmers and even that might be illusionary as the world fuel situation changes).

European ships and exploration

One of the key areas that we believe the West has always had a clear advantage is ships and navigational techniques. That is not, actually, true. Western sailing ships until the 19th century were technologically inferior in most ways to Asian ships, particularly the junk. We see the junk and we think it is a comical ship, but the truth is that it is easier to sail because it has a less complex rigging and holds closer to the wind. This is primarily due to the semi-rigid sail it uses, with horizontal slats with bits of cloth sail between them – this creates a light, stiff sail. All that billowing that Western sails do? That's inefficiency. The Chinese junks quite likely circumnavigated the world in the 1420s as part of the exploration of for trade imperialism. The great Chinese admiral Zheng He is believed by basically everyone to have traveled from at least Egypt to Mozambique to Taiwan to Sumatra. A small, but apparently growing, group of people have followed Gavin Menzies in believing that Zheng He effectively circumnavigated the globe, and traveled to both North and South America, Australia, Greenland, you name it. Paul Chiasson believes that the Mi'kmaq people in eastern Canada are genetic descendants of Chinese sailors. Chinese imperial brass has been found in an archaeological site 250 miles inland in America. At the bare minimum, in the 15th century the Chinese naval prowess was superior to Europeans. If Menzies is right, then the Chinese naval prowess was superior to what Europeans would see until at least the 18th century.

So successful is the junk rig – the way that a sail is made and controlled aboard a ship – that the rig is still being used today. Indeed, some competitive sailors use paneled sails not very different from the ones used by Chinese sailors for most of Chinese history, and paneled sails are indisputably Chinese technology, originally. In contrast, most modern sailing boats use a Bermuda rig, which was developed in the 17th century – and it is largely tradition that keeps the Bermuda rig alive. All said and done, it is impossible to say that European sailing techniques ever exceeded Chinese sailing techniques until the Age of Steam.

Then, as so often happens, luck ruled the destiny of humans. A change in rulers in China put an end to Chinese exploration. The Mings had decided that rather than pursue expensive foreign exploration they would focus on a policy of inward development and cultural isolation. This ruinous policy would, in time, lead to China's domination by Europeans, especially the British, but at the time it looked pretty sensible, I suppose, as China was the richest country in the world. Why did they need anywhere else? So the fleet of Zheng He was destroyed. The Chinese would continue to be active merchants all through East, Southeast and South Asia, but there would be no more coordinated efforts to explore the world. It was into this vacuum of exploration that the Europeans would step.

You might notice I'm explaining Europe's success in exploration in cultural and political, not technological, terms. I am. That's because Chinese ships and navigation techniques were demonstrably at least as good as European ones.

European metallurgy

Europeans also believe that they have held the grip on metallurgy since at last the Renaissance. This is one of the more interesting technological stories.

Since time out of mind, the country that was traditionally regarded as having the finest metallurgy in the world was India. Indian metallurgy was just head and shoulders above everyone else's. Right now, to this day, in Delhi, there is an iron pillar that is 1600 years old that has never taken with rust. They are outdoors where they have been exposed to centuries worth of Indian monsoons. India also developed wootz steel, which was what the legendary “Damascus steel” blades really were (the term Damascus steel is often conflated with pattern welding forge techniques, I should add, so there is ambiguity to the term). Wootz steel was destroyed, along with the rest of the Indian steel industry, in the 19th century. It has only been recently that it has been rediscovered.

Even in the 19th century, while European cannons were made of bronze because steel ones would burst, the largest guns in the world were in the hands of northern Indian warlords, made out of steel that did not burst.

However, by the early 19th century, steel production and export was a big deal to European economies. The British steel manufacturers coveted the Indian market. But they had themselves a pretty big problem. Indians wouldn't buy European steel because it was inferior in quality to locally produced metals. Indian steel output, at this time, was also roughly equal to Britain. British steel makers sent people to India to find out what made Indian so good. They didn't have a lot of luck, though, because Indian steel was made in a distributed system of a lot of small mills with a lot of individualization of techniques. Furthermore, the steel making castes weren't willing to show their trade secrets to the English. Stymied because of the secretiveness of the Indian metallurgists and not able to replicate the economy of Indian metallurgists, and also wishing to disarm the Indians, they decided to handle things the old fashioned way and lean on the British Raj to force the Indian metallurgists to sell their mills, which were then closed down. Having no other option, the Indians started using the lower quality and more expensive British steel.

(The British did the same thing to Indian shipping. They didn't want the Indians to build ships because, y'know, they wanted to maintain India's dependence on England.)

Conclusion

Since I don't want to go on forever about this, I'm going to sum up, here.

None of this is to doubt the intellectual contributions of the West. That'd be absurd. However, Europeans have really undertaken a massive project of cultural imperialism and have stricken out the rest of the world's contributions to the arts and sciences, and ignored or trivialized the debt that Western science owes to other people and other cultures. Most people don't realize the vast debt that the world owes to Chinese and Indian science, including their mathematical advances that were further streamlined and improved by the Muslims before being absorbed into the West during the Enlightenment. When Europeans learn about scientific progress, it's almost inevitably as if Europeans did it all. If people from other cultures are mentioned, it's as a footnote or, perhaps, a sidebar. This is pure racism. When one looks at the actual technological development of non-Western societies it's actually pretty easy to find areas where those societies matched or exceeded the West (and, obviously, are doing so, again). I have given only a few examples but the list goes on and on, especially once you start bringing agriculture into it.

I hope that people will start to more seriously consider non-Western contributions to the sciences as a way of overcoming the continuing racism that the world suffers – I hope that people, when they understand how much we've been dependent on each other for learning and progress rather than seeing other people in other places as an impediment to progress they'll see them as partners in progress.

Labels: china, history, india, racism, technology