Europe's rise to world supremacy began with the Renaissance,1 which helped to change the course of European art, music, literature, architecture, politics, religion, education, commerce, and science and technology. It was one of those widespread, deep cultural changes that take place every now and again (such as the spread of Christianity and Islam in earlier times, or the imposition of communist rule and its eventual unravelling in the twentieth century), concerning the world and humanity. The focus of that change, whether we are dealing with the art forms of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) or Michelangelo (1475-1564), or the political writings of Niccolo Machiavelli, or the scholarly works of Desiderius Erasmus in Holland, or the writings of William Shakespeare (1564-1616) in England, or Francois Rabelais (1494-1553) in France, was on the human and the secular.
With the Renaissance a new emphasis was placed on the dynamic; the air became charged with the excitement of experimentation; accepted norms came to be questioned. It is not surprising that the Protestant Reformation, with its triumph of conscience over dogma, came when it did. In placing a new stress on individual judgment, the Reformation provided a tremendous spur to action and change. It is also understandable that the astronomers Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) and Galileo Galilei (15641642) should have clashed with Church authorities when they did. Their challenge was worldly; Luther's challenge - 'Only faith can gain salvation' - was spiritual. Both challenged existing authority.
Thus were sown the seeds of modern science - of what later was called the Scientific Revolution. By the late sixteenth century, pragmatic, creative scientists coming from all over Europe had turned the Italian cities of Padua, Ferrara, Florence and Bologna - heirs to the much earlier Greek heritage of rational thought - into the foremost institutions of science and technology of their
Day.2 These cities were free of the constricting feudalism of other parts of Europe, and in Bologna's case, also free of papal influence.
From this scientific ferment emerged a new rational spirit based on mathematics and logic, which sought reasoned truth in contrast to revealed truth: 'I believe because I know', rather than 'I know because I believe', without which there would have been no modern science, no capitalist spirit of enterprise, no Industrial Revolution and no western idea of progress.3 The idea that man could independently improve his lot, that he (not God, or the hidden forces of nature) was the originator and the measure of all things (something which many westerners never stop to question), was perhaps the most profound revolution that western thought had undergone. Increasingly, the concern became not for man to adjust himself to the inherently incalculable vicissitudes of life, but to control life. There was a gradual shift from the perfection of the spirit to the perfection of matter.
The new stress placed upon man, rather than God, the new questioning of religion and spiritual authority, the new emphasis placed upon the individual, rather than the family, tribe or state, the new insistence placed upon the growing freedom to make individual choice and individual decisions, the new desire to change for change's sake (curiously enough art, music and religion are immune from such desires), the new disregard of the traditional sanctity of nature - all these things helped to release a veritable torrent of explosive energy upon society. Even the texture of time was changed. The 'timeless, perpetual present', as portrayed in the work of fifteenth-century artists like Fra Angelico (c.1400-55), gave way to linear, goal-oriented progress. Like his contemporaries, Angelico was primarily concerned with redemption, which was not linked to time, and for which goal-oriented 'time', as we know it, had no meaning. For him all time was uniform: 'Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come' (Matt. 24: 42). Henceforth, especially after the Reformation, emphasis was placed not on timeless redemption, but on progressive, worldly, tempestuous, volcanic, demoniac action. Time, purposive time, came to play a new role in the West. With the growth of a money economy, time became money; the market became supreme. Increasingly, nothing was permanent, fixed, stable or immutable.
This shift in emphasis during the Renaissance towards the secular, towards science, towards action, towards constant change,
Towards the quest, expresses the genius of European civilization. In contrast to the doctrinal unity of the medieval Church, in postReformation Europe a new stress came to be placed on individual judgment, which helps to explain the source of Europe's supremacy in the world. The Asian empires that preceded the rise of the West were probably more glorious than anything that Europe subsequently achieved. China in the thirteenth century was undoubtedly the most technically advanced and economically powerful state in the world. Yet, being more despotic, these states provided less scope for individual action, and hence were less dynamic.
The growing role of secularism in the Renaissance, as well as the ever-growing competitiveness among Europeans in commerce, technology and arms, should not lead us to underestimate the role of the spiritual factor in the rise and expansion of Europe. In post-Reformation Europe it is often difficult to separate the political from the religious factors. The Christian Cross bore the sign 'In Hoc Signe Vinces' (In this sign [that is, the sign of the Cross] shall we conquer). Not until the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648 does national rivalry (especially between Spain and France) take precedence over religious disputes. Christianity combined a material with a spiritual role; it is not only concerned with the resurrection of the spirit, but of the body as well. Portugal's Henry the Navigator (1394-1460) was not only a man of worldly activity, he was also a religious ascetic. Leonhard Euler (1707-83) was not only the leading mathematician of eighteenth-century Europe, he was also the leader for the revival of piety in the Lutheran Church. Christianity's spiritual dynamism invaded the temporal sphere and helped to provide the basis underlying the rise of the West.
It was Christianity's certainty, righteousness and messianic outlook, coupled with its domination complex, which compelled it to go out into the world in search of souls. Christianity, like Buddhism, but unlike Hinduism or Judaism, was a universal religion. It was founded not on birth but on faith. Unlike Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism and Judaism, Christianity was also a missionary religion. Without the messianic and evangelizing aspects of its beliefs (not to say its aggressiveness and, thanks to St Paul, its intolerance of other religions), it is doubtful if Christian Europe could have come to dominate the world.
No other European country demonstrates the importance of the spiritual factor in history as well as Spain. Its Reconquista and its spilling into the world are not to be understood outside the crusade-like religious fervour and missionary zeal of Spanish Catholicism. The Spaniards, like the Portuguese, keenly felt the biblical injunction to convert mankind to Christianity before the onset of the Apocalypse and the end of the world. Sheltered from the rest of Europe by the Pyrenees, the Spaniards never really accepted the secularism of the Renaissance, the pluralism of the Reformation or the demand for change. The great commercial, scientific and industrial revolutions taking root in sixteenth-century Europe left Spain largely undisturbed. The Spaniards took little part in the expansion of commerce from the seventeenth century onwards. Money and the values of the marketplace - however stimulating to the development of the nation-state - were never allowed to play a dominant role. Unlike their commercial rivals, Britain and the Netherlands, Spain did not develop a middle class. Spain's spurning of commerce meant that much of the wealth of its majestic empire ended up in British and Dutch hands. Wealth to the British and Dutch Protestants was a sign of God's providence as well as a reward for their own industry.
Heeding the warning of the Spanish philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c.4 BC-AD 65), 'From the time money came to be regarded with honour, the real value of things was forgotten',4 the Spaniards seem to have disregarded the loss of money as they disregarded the loss of blood. Like Don Quixote, they pointed and fought in all directions at once. Between 1500 and 1659 they fought in every dynastic and religious struggle they could find. With brief interludes, they fought France for 50 and the Dutch for 80 years. Endlessly, they fought the Turks. Peace with England when it came was always forced. They remained deaf to the warnings of contemporaries that endless war - with its staggering costs and its run-away inflation (1500-1630) - would undo them. For a hundred years, in a great and prolonged drama, Spain also fought those who were trying to tear its empire apart. Well might Philip Il's emblem be Nec Pluribus Impar (A Match for Many).
Spain showed no enthusiasm for the patient, organized work that modern science and industry demanded. Its wealth came from other sources. In addition to windfall gains in precious metals from South America, it was able to draw upon the income obtained from Castile taxes, and the growing mercantile wealth of Italy and the Lowlands. Before the inroads made by the British and the Dutch, it had a virtual monopoly of the slave, spice (mainly pepper, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg) and sugar trades. Yet, although nominally the richest state in Europe, it became bankrupt with astonishing regularity. Charles V (1500-58), the Holy Roman Emperor (1519-56), whose revenues were consumed by interest payments on past debts, had insufficient funds to bury his mother, Joan the Mad. In 1556 Philip II (1527-98) inherited an empty treasury and a bankrupt state. Three times in the reign of Philip II, five times between 1557 and 1627, Spain was bankrupt. When Philip died in 1598, the official debt of 20 million ducats, which he had inherited, had risen to 100 million; the bulk of his revenues were being consumed by debt payments.5 Said Spain's Don Francisco de Quevedo y Villegas (1580-1645): 'As poor men we conquered the riches of others; as rich men these same riches are conquering us.'
After the defeat of the Armada by England in 1588, Spain, its crusading spirit spent, its earlier vigour and vitality lost, preferred to withdraw from the centre of the European stage and sleep. In the material, though not in the religious realm, it passed from 'wanting to be too much, to too much wanting not to be'.
In terms of territorial aggrandizement, Spain achieved what it did not only because of the material and spiritual elements of Christianity but also because it exercised the power of a nation.6 European expansion and the system of national states were born at the same time. The rise of nations such as Spain and their continual struggle for power, heightened western energies and provided an immeasurable impetus to western expansion. Political diversity and political fragmentation stimulated the expansion of European states. For a period - perhaps until 1914 - European national states and European nationalism were the engine of change in the world. The so-called 'discoveries' - which were preceded by long rivalries between Spain and Portugal in the Atlantic - stemmed directly from the growth of central government in these newly founded rival nations.
An important factor in Europe's rise to greatness was Europe's supremacy in weapons.7 Underpinning all European efforts from the seventeenth century onwards was Europe's overwhelming military and naval power. 'They have found out Artillery', wrote the English poet John Donne in 1621, 'by which warres come to quicker ends than heretofore, and the great expense of bloud is avoyded.' Donne, of course, was proved wrong. In the development of superior weapons,8 on land and sea, these improvements in artillery (some of which the West had gleaned from the East) were only the beginning. The improvement of arms since the sixteenth century is a field of activity in which the West excelled - not least because developments were too widespread, and too competitive, for any one European country to be able to establish a monopoly (as the government did in China) or a lasting superiority in armaments manufacture. The exceptional progress made by Europeans in the science and technology of navigation, weapons and military organization ensured their superiority.
Geography also favoured the maritime nations of Europe. The trade monopoly of the Italians and the Arabs in the Levant was broken by da Gama, who returned to Portugal in 1499 with pepper, cinnamon and cloves. He had sailed in a single, unbroken voyage from southern India to Lisbon, bypassing Venice, the entrepot for the European spice trade. It took about 20 years for the Muslim merchants who controlled the shorter route to Europe through the Red Sea to partly reassert their control of the eastern trade. By the opening of new sea routes around Africa, the shift from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic provided a spur first to Spain and Portugal, and later to France, Britain and the Netherlands. The grip of the Muslim empires (Ottoman, Persian and Mogul) on land and sea routes was broken.
World-wide commerce became the source of much of Europe's strength, which it mobilized and deployed with great skill. Development of mercantilist regulations of trade became a system of power in themselves. The western merchant and capitalist had far more freedom of action than his Chinese counterpart. The West was more producer-oriented. In the nineteenth century western merchants and manufacturers established an almost complete control of Ottoman markets and manufactures. Superior business organizations, such as the joint stock company, were devised to exploit the growing trade. Shares could be bought and sold on the newly-founded stock exchange of Amsterdam. Marine, life and fire insurance reduced the risks of trade. Doubleentry book-keeping, of the highest importance in the development of capitalism, became widespread. Private property rights were protected under a rule of law. The medieval restrictions on usury were revoked. Western capital became free of religious authority.
The western Europeans enjoyed a degree of personal security which sprang not only from important legal documents, such as the Magna Carta (1215), and the gradual acceptance of the rule of law, but also from the fact that the West was safe from the incursions of Mongols and Turks. Had the Byzantines (before the fall of Constantinople in 1453), the Poles and the Russians not provided a bulwark which kept the Mongols and later the Turks at bay, western Europe might not have experienced the Renaissance or the scientific and industrial revolutions. In 1238 the Russian city of Vladimir was razed by the Mongols. Today the city commemorates the heroic people of Vladimir who 'by their self-sacrifice.. . saved western Europe from suffering the same fate, and saved European civilization from extinction'.
All in all, Europe faced less despoliation, fewer hindrances than Asia. Europeans were never beset to the same extent as, say, India or China by natural calamities. They never depended upon the coming of the monsoon, as did India, or the vagaries of the Yellow and the Yangtze rivers, known as 'China's sorrows'.9 (The age-old need for social conformity in China cannot be separated from the control of water, both for irrigation as well as to prevent flooding.) There also was a better relation in the West between human and material resources. While Europe displayed demographic vigour, no European country was as overwhelmed with numbers as China. Population pressure in China often led to the collapse of a dynasty. One can understand why the idea of progress originated in the more stable West rather than in the more convulsive East.
Perhaps the explanations of Europe's rise were human qualities and human toil, coupled with Europe's resources. It was a matter of success breeding success. Not least important was the self-transformation that Europe underwent as a result of the discovery and colonization of the New World, and the discovery of new sea routes to Asia. Europe could not embrace the whole world without being profoundly affected by it. However we explain the rise of the West10 - and we cannot account for it if we ignore the fortuitous conjunction of circumstances of the time, such as the relative decline of Asian empires and the narrow margin by which the Christian armies triumphed over their Muslim opponents before Vienna in 1529 - we do know that Europe's success bred a sense of superiority and illusions of grandeur, from which stemmed its megalomania and the will to power.
Europe's uniqueness lies in its willingness to accept change. 'Im Anfang war die Tat' (In the beginning was action), says Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)11 in explaining the genius of western civilization. (In contrast, the genius of Greek culture was its capacity to be diverted from action to the study of action.) One of the most powerful instincts that man possesses is the instinct to resist change. More than any other civilization it is the West that made change part of a common process of thought. Only in the acceptance of change has the West excelled. The maxims 'What is not can be', and 'Resources are not, they become', are purely western. Compare these with the maxim of Chinese Taoism,12 which is 'Do nothing so that it might be done.' European man's desire to mould the world to his will was in contrast to the Buddhist's desire to escape from worldly strivings, or the Hindu's sense of illusion when speaking of the actual world and of individual man, or the stress placed by Confucius on the need for harmony and stability. The emphasis in the Orient in earlier centuries, if not today, was upon age-old tradition, upon conformity, upon letting things take their course. Fatalism predominated; change was feared. The Chinese vision of life encompassed a perfect, changeless world. In contrast to the idea of a western quest - to the idea of reaching out purposefully for some distant goal - the East, even allowing for the stress Confucius placed on self-cultivation, was relatively static.
Even greater contrast exists between the importance placed by the West upon the role of the individual (especially in the postProtestant period of European history) and that placed by the East on the collective. The Protestant Reformation stressed the direct contact of the individual soul with God the Father. Although it is very difficult to isolate the ideas of one civilization from another, it was the West which first elevated man to a dominating position in nature. While western Renaissance art delights in expressing the individual - think of Michelangelo's 'David' or the portraits of Diego Velazquez (1599-1660) - Eastern art13 makes the individual part of the whole. While the Orient is conscious of individualism, it tends to stress the idea of a common destiny, of harmony and of a central authority. One of the great problems of the early Christian missionaries was to establish individual guilt. Family or tribal shame was understood, but not individual guilt. One of the important questions asked of any traveller in China is: 'To which group do you belong?' Finally, it was the West that developed and adhered to the rule of law. Legalism in China is as old as China's first emperor, the Emperor Ch'in (third century BC), but too often Chinese law has been used by its rulers as an instrument of convenience. Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung, 1893-1976) himself explicitly admitted this.
Whereas the stress in the Occident came to be placed upon action, tension and change, upon increased social mobility, upon reason, logic and linear progress, the emphasis in the Orient remained upon the collective, upon harmony, stability and continuity. The Orient has never separated itself from the past. It does not make such fine distinctions as the West between past, present and future. Its world view was the antithesis of western Cartesian rationality.14
World History
