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Time was when the East was synonymous with opulence and culture, and the West was in the backwaters of the world. Then the equations changed. Some west European kingdoms led humankind to unbelievable progress. Historians have debated for long what caused the rise of the West and the emergence of the modern world. There’s no final word, but a popular historian has offered a new answer. In a new book, Patrick Wyman [https://twitter.com/patrick_wyman] says it was the time between 1490 and 1530 – the four decades between Christopher Columbus’s explorations and the sacking of Rome – that defined the world we live.
Watch: A chat with Wyman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuRiFxJhWt0
Podcast: ‘Tides of History’
https://wondery.com/shows/tides-of-history/
His new book, ‘Verge’: https://www.twelvebooks.com/titles/patrick-wyman/the-verge/9781538701171/
Wyman argues that most historians are looking for one event, parameter or quality that caused all change, whereas his approach is to look for a confluence of a variety of incidents and trends, small and big, which dramatically altered the world.
Many experts argue it was the “cultural genius” of Europe that led to its rise. Wyman, instead, sees “economic institutions” that existed then in the continent as a springboard. “There were particular sets of these assumptions that were present all over the continent, from the wealthiest bankers making loans to kings and popes, all the way down to peasants buying beer and day-to-day necessaries. Everybody owed somebody else, and everybody trusted in the basic assumption that they’d get paid back. That same assumption applied whether we’re talking about financing a voyage of exploration, hiring an army of mercenaries or printing a thousand copies of Martin Luther’s latest work. They all relied on the same mechanisms, and that’s the uniting thing that binds this period together,” he says in an interview. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/21/four-decades-patrick-wyman/]
Moreover, he sees parallels between that period and the past decade or so. The internet, the rise of ventures like Uber, the possibility of making or breaking whole industries overnight and – importantly – everybody’s lack of concern about the great disruption are very similar to what the world saw in those four decades, he says.
Also read:
Jared Diamond’s take: Geographical Determinism
www.jareddiamond.org/Jared_Diamond/Geographic_determinism.html
Resources from Harvard:
https://earlymodernworld.fas.harvard.edu/