The Mechanical East

About two weeks ago, I think I made a bad mistake. I was reading Cyril Aydon's A Brief History of Mankind and I looked at his comments about how the Industrial Revolution never came to China, and I said that it sounded right to me. That's what I posted, because that's what I thought.

But as my readers know, I've never been one to leave stuff like that alone. Something didn't seem right, because I knew that China had all the ingredients for an Industrial Revolution, and in fact had invented all those things centuries before the western barbarian tribes could even think of such things as non-magical.

So I dug around, dutifully and assiduously, for old books and newer ones. I found Arthur Cotterell's Western Power in Asia: Its Slow Rise and Swift Fall (1415-1999), Simon Winchester's Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China, and John M Hobson's The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, among others. After digesting about a dozen books on related material, and re-reading what Fernand Braudel and Felipe Fernandez-Armesto had to say about it (often in contrast with other scholars such as J M Roberts) I came to a new conclusion.

The past is a world too tangled to be disentangled. But the same methodology that tells us who King Arthur must have been also tells us that China's influence on the past of the world is a lot more significant than most historians (especially those of the Anglo-American sphere) would have us believe. The artifacts and the documents, the weight of commercial and technological history, all point us to the fact that the Chinese were innovators, that the world's first major industrial revolution was that of the Song Dynasty, and that the Chinese fell upon hard times through terrible mismanagement on the part of the Manchus.

The view in 1975 was already turning against the colonial views of the preceding century. Documents from that time, such as this one, point out (although in Western terms) the things which led to China's debasement and which were leading to its resurrection.

(It's also interesting to see what they had to say about a certain 'Prime Minister Yew' of a tiny city-state further south. Spiro Agnew found in Singapore "one of the most advanced societies on earth," and John Connolly called the city-state "the best-run country in the world." Prime Minister Yew's formula was simple: "Nothing is free.")

As China completes its rise to great power, perhaps the words of John Hay, US Secretary of State in 1899, will be remembered: "The storm center of the world has gradually shifted to China... whoever understands that mighty Empire... has a key to world politics for the next five hundred years."

China's Hidden History

I am taking a break from my usual work to read through recent issues of my long-neglected core journal, Science. As a member of the AAAS, I get this huge journal every week, 52 weeks a year. It's full of stuff I can't digest, but it also contains stuff I can either digest profitably and with relative ease, as well as stuff I can digest if I work hard.

However, my historical instincts were hooked by pp 930-940 of the 21 Aug 2009 issue. In those pages, a summary of the findings about Chinese civilisation is presented, with nice charts and pictures.

Well well well, as the farmer said, looking at the three holes in the ground.

What we call 'Chinese civilisation' is widely supposed to have erupted from the Yellow River region and spread inland. At least, that's what most of us learnt. But the evidence shows multiple high-level cultures all over that part of the world. In fact, for the last 30 years, people have been setting out the idea that this civilisation 'grew out of a complex interweaving of many regional cultures' (p 932).

In 1987, archaeologists at a site called Sanxingdui, north of Chengdu, found traces of a previously unknown civilisation. Gold, jade and huge bronze statues were found. The site was not even hinted at in texts or myths. Later, a culture that appears to be the predecessor of that civilisation was discovered by people digging elsewhere on the Chengdu plain. The history of the Sichuan region is now not the same anymore. That's on p 935.

And so on, and so on. If this sort of discovery can still be made, what else is there to be found in the hidden history of mankind? Stuff like this keeps my sense of wonder alive. I am happy just to read about it; I would be overjoyed to someday have a part to play in it.