Unity vs Disunity

Hence the real problem in understanding China's loss of political and technological preeminence to Europe is to understand China's chronic unity and Europe's chronic disunity.

The answer is again suggested by maps. Europe has a highly indented coastline, with five large peninsulas that app...

Europe is carved up into' independent linguistic, ethnic, and politi­cal units by high mountains (the Alps, Pyrenees, Carpathians, and Norwe­gian border mountains), while China's mountains east of the Tibetan plateau are much less formidable barriers.

China's heartland is bound together fr...

In contrast, Europe has never come remotely close to political unification: it was still splintered into 1,000 independent statelets in the 14th century, into 500 statelets in A.D. 1500, got down to a minimum of 25 states in the 1980s, and is now up again to nearly 40 at the moment that I write t...

Europe has two islands (Britain and Ireland) sufficiently big to assert their political independence and to maintain their own languages and eth­nicities, and one of them (Britain) big and close enough to become a major independent European power.

But even China's two largest islands, Tai­...

As a result, China very early became domi­nated by two huge geographic core areas of high productivity, themselves only weakly separated from each other and eventually fused into a single core.

Europe's two biggest rivers, the Rhine and Danube, are smaller and connect much less of Europe. ...

There has never been one despot who could turn off the tap for all of Europe, as of China.

These comparisons suggest that geographic connectedness has exerted both positive and negative effects on the evolution of technology.

As a result, in the very long run, technology may have dev...

The positives and negatives of geographic unity and disunity for nation states:

"China's frequent unity and Europe's perpetual disunity both have a long history. The most productive areas of modern China were politically joined for the first time in 221 B.C. and have remained so for most of...

But China's connectedness eventually became a disadvantage, because a decision by one despot could and repeat­edly did halt innovation.

In contrast, Europe's geographic balkanization resulted in dozens or hundreds of independent, competing statelets and centers of innovation.

If one...