Why the West Rules--For Now (153 page)

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Hairsplitters might argue that this was not really the end of the Roman Empire: the last Byzantine outpost, at Trabzon, hung on until 1461, and the Holy Roman Empire founded by Charlemagne lingered on, in theory at least, until Napoleon disbanded it in 1806. But most historians follow Gibbon in drawing a line under the Roman Empire in 1453.

^*
Zheng was from the far southwest of China, where Arab merchants had converted many people to Islam. Captured as a boy in 1381 during the Ming dynasty’s wars to pacify the region, he was enlisted in the emperor’s service and castrated. He seems to have taken all this in his enormous stride.

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The crew survived, though they had to be hospitalized for hypothermia after spending hours in the water.

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Known in Britain as John Cabot.

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Erasmus was then fifty-one, a ripe old age in the sixteenth century.

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There were also a few, but only a very few, Renaissance women.

^*
Not everyone agrees. In his most recent book,
1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance
, Gavin Menzies claims that part of Zheng He’s fleet visited Venice in 1434, setting off the Italian Renaissance by teaching Alberti and others the secrets of the earlier Chinese Renaissance. The reason Leonardo’s inventiveness seems so like Shen Kuo’s, Menzies argues, is that Italians were working from Chinese prototypes, particularly Wang Zhen’s
Treatise on Agriculture
, mentioned in
Chapter 7
—which would also explain why eighteenth-century European spinning machines looked so much like earlier Chinese ones! Menzies’s
1434
calls for even more suspension of disbelief than his
1421
(most obviously, we have to wonder why the abundant sources from fifteenth-century Italy never mention the magnificent Chinese fleet), and once again I must confess that this is more suspension than I can muster.

^*
Some historians believe that Xu Fu, the emissary sent by the Qin First Emperor to find the herbs of immortality, reached America’s west coast in the 210s
BCE
. There is, however, no actual evidence, and Tim Severin’s bold attempt to repeat Xu’s voyage in 1993 was not encouraging—despite having many modern advantages, he had to abandon ship a good thousand miles shy of America. Nor does Thor Heyerdahl’s famous balsa raft
Kon-Tiki
inspire confidence. Heyerdahl crossed only half the Pacific, from Peru to Polynesia, and in only one direction, carried by the Equatorial Current. The voyage from Asia to Peru is much longer and tougher.

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Whatever his faults, Mao Zedong banned footbinding immediately on assuming power in 1949.

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Even in backward Europe, informed opinion had recognized since the twelfth century that the world was round. (The classical Greeks had already known this.)

^*
This is the background to Akira Kurosawa’s classic film
The Seven Samurai
(1954) and—with a little historical and geographical license—John Sturges’s almost-as-classic adaptation
The Magnificent Seven
(1960).

^*
If you brave the crowds and peddlers and visit the Great Wall today, the massive stone carapace you will see snaking across the mountains near Beijing is largely the work of Qi and his contemporaries.

^*
So called because of their tall red hats with twelve folds, symbolizing the twelve imams whose reigns would culminate in the millennium.

^*
Skipping over various complexities, we can say that they jointly reigned from 1516 through 1598.

^*
They did a good job; the border is still where they set it, on the Amur River. The latest negotiations, in July 2008, moved the line just a mile or two across an island within the river.

^*
See p. 396 above.

^*
Unless, that is, the German thinker Gottfried Leibniz, who was working on similar mathematical methods in the 1670s, in fact developed calculus first and Newton just stole the credit. Most likely the two thinkers invented calculus independently, but mutual accusations of plagiarism eventually poisoned their relationship.

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In 1707 the Act of Union linked England, Wales, and Scotland into a single kingdom of Great Britain; a separate act added Ireland in 1800.

^*
The director, Chen Zilong, took inspiration from the arguments of Wang Yangming, mentioned on p. 426 above.

^*
Its successor,
The Complete Library of the Four Treasuries
, completed in 1782, filled a staggering 36,000 volumes.

^*
In the East, Beijing had about 650,000 residents in 1722 and Edo (modern Tokyo) probably had slightly more; in the West, London may have had 600,000 people and Istanbul/Constantinople perhaps 700,000.

^*
Spinning wheels reached Europe in the twelfth century; without a wheel, it took a spinster about five hundred hours to spin a pound of yarn.

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Workers in Tokyo, Suzhou, Shanghai, and Guangzhou all earned slightly less than Beijingers through most of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

^*
Marx and Engels of course used a different terminology, that the shift from a feudal to a capitalist mode of production increased the extraction of surplus labor but heightened the contradictions between base and superstructure.

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Not, though, on balloons. That detail was added only in 1956, for the wonderful film version starring David Niven.

^†
Modern Mumbai and Kolkata.

^*
Admittedly this was when empty; with a full thirteen-ton load it managed a statelier twelve mph.

^*
Now probably best known from Marlon Brando’s delivery in
Apocalypse Now!
, Francis Ford Coppola’s re-creation of
Heart of Darkness
in 1960s Vietnam.

^*
Steffens visited the Soviet Union in 1919, but apparently composed this endorsement before his trip. Unconcerned by such details, Communists in 1930s Europe and America made it their mantra.

^*
Other than the attack on Pearl Harbor, the only destruction on American soil came from a single Japanese plane (launched from a submarine) that bombed Brookings, Oregon, in 1942.

^†
This began with the Organization for European Economic Cooperation, founded in 1948, and the 1952 European Coal and Steel Community. These were refounded in 1958 as the European Economic Community and transformed into the European Union by the 1993 Maastricht Treaty.

^*
Popsicles.

^*
It is not clear how much impact this actually had. In 1974, the average birth rate had been 4.2 children per woman. By 1980, when the policy got properly established, this had fallen to 2.2. The decline then slowed, taking another fifteen years to fall to 1.0 per woman. China’s population will probably peak around 2015.

^*
A Soviet car.

^*
All figures are in US dollars at 2000 values, adjusted to reflect purchasing power parity.

^*
If we assume instead that the balance will shift, positing less dramatic changes in one trait of course just means imagining even more breathtaking transformations in another.

^*
In the end, Pistorius missed qualifying by seven-tenths of a second.

^*
Named after the geneticist Robert Carlson.

^*
The obvious example is the United States’ rise to power, fueled by moving millions of Europeans and enslaved Africans across the Atlantic and smaller but significant numbers of Chinese and Japanese across the Pacific.

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Most likely Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.

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Formed by China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan in 2001 out of a 1996 “Shanghai Five” that did not include Uzbekistan. Pakistan has also expressed interest in joining.

^†
Assuming, that is, that Russia’s missiles still work. The commander of its strategic nuclear-missile force was sacked in 2009 after a series of missiles failed to take off.

^*
The International Astronomical Union reported in August 2009 that since the first discovery in 1995 we have now found 360 planets outside our own solar system. None seems likely to support life, but the director of the French Space Agency’s planet-hunting program told the Union, “I am really confident that we have an Earth-like planet coming in the next two years.”

^*
Fermi’s paradox assumes, of course, that neither von Däniken’s spacemen nor the UFO sightings, alien abductions, and so on, that fill certain newspapers are reality-based.

^†
N
=
R
^*
x
f
_p
x
n
_e
x
f
_l
x
f
_i
x
f
_c
x
L
, where:
N
is the number of civilizations in the galaxy with which communication might be possible,
R
* is the average rate of star formation in the galaxy,

f
_p
is the fraction of those stars with planets,

n
_e
is the average number of habitable planets per star that has planets,

f
_l
is the fraction of those planets where life actually does evolve,

f
_i
is the fraction of life-forms that evolve intelligence,

f
_c
is the fraction of those civilizations that develop technologies that produce detectable signs of their existence, and
L
is the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space.

^*
Following the “Big Five” events—the end-Ordovician (about 440 million years ago), Late Devonian (365 million years ago), end-Permian (225 million years ago), end-Triassic (210 million years ago), and end-Cretaceous (65 million years ago) extinctions. Each of these wiped out at least 65 percent of the species on earth.

^*
The “East” in Kipling’s poem was actually India; he drew no fine distinctions between South Asia and East Asia. They were all east of England.

^*
Seminomadic conquerors such as the Parthians, Xianbei, Ottoman Turks, and Manchus have flourished as imperial rulers, but full nomads such as the Xiongnu, Huns, and Seljuk Turks have not. The closest thing to an exception is the fully nomadic Mongols, but even their record as imperial rulers was decidedly patchy.