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Civilisation - Channel 4
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Message 1.Μύ
Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Sunday, 6th March 2011
New series on Channel 4 seeking to explain why the West became dominant about 500 years ago, when the Chinese were ostensibly the most advanced.
The series has just started, but I really like it. First, there is no PC nonesense seeking to avoid reality, the reality being that the West did advance, in virtually every measure, ahead of other cultures. Secondly, the reasons why the West began to dominate, seem rational to me (and I have been doing a lot of thinking on the issue for years),
The way it was put in the program, the initial reason for the rise of the West was economic competition among the states of Christendom. This competition occured because the West was NOT an empire, but a collection of hundreds of states. In China there was an empire, which produced amazing things like clocks and gunpowder well before the West, but the commercial potential of these things was not realised, because the economic conditions did not give rise to competing entrepreneurs. In the West, it seems, people would seize on such innovations and try to sell them, in competition with others. This gave the impulse to improve the goods, so that more could be sold, thus was sown the seeds of technological revolution.
Mostly I agree with this interpretation, but I look at it from a different angle. Once humans had got to the stage of inventing agriculture and money, they would naturally try to make as much product as they could to sell as much they could, so there would be an impetus to keep improving things. I suppose this did happen, though very slowly, and its real effect was to enable the population to rise, as more food was produced. At the same time, what we seem to see, in those areas where agriculture was quite well developed, was the building up, and crashing down, of a series of great empires. These empires, run by brutal elites that would have sucked up valuable resources and imposed arbitrary economic regulations, would, in my opinion, have stalled development, by making economic competition unfree.
I would also state that innovation seems to require a quite large population, across a range of conditions, which will spawn new ideas.
It seems to me that the Greek city states provided conditions in which considerable innovation could occur. Their total population was only a few million, but they did trade extensively, and that must have been what enabled the intake of new ways of thinking. Those ways of thinking were not just crushed out, as they would be in imperial conditions, they were allowed to gain seed.
Along came the Roman Empire which took over Greece, then innovation and economic development seems to have died away. The program mentions the Chinese empire suffering a decline in populatioin of 40% and a loss of power after some 300 years after its peek, the last emperor hanging himself in shame; that broadly mirrors the Western Roman Empire's course, where there was also a big drop in population, and the last emperor threw away the imperial cloak.
The chaos that ensued for the next few hundred years resulted in the rise of the European states in various shapes and sizes. Real innovation was a long time coming, but the point is that Europe had just enough education and development (it knew things like agriculture, writing and money, unlike many other civilisations such as the Incas) to operate economies that could, if their governments could refrain from interfering, allow economic growth (expressed as increase in population). New goods, and with goods, ideas, were taken from afar, for example spices from the East, and works of Arabic scholars. I must add that the ideas from history, I mean the retrieval of literature from the classical period, was also important. Anyway, the fact was that the European economy became of such a size that certain individuals had the wherewithal to speculatively seek new markets outside of Europe. Sailing away to unknown lands (after reading Ptolemy's Digest from the Roman period which showed the scale of the world) was surely a pivotal step in Europe's development. The fact that they took guns with them would be extremely decisive, but what needs to be explained is why Europe had well-developed arms and other cultures did not. Anyway the very fact of trying to build and sail a ship across the world (with a view to going back again and doing the journey repeatedly) makes it virtually a necessity to have a scientific understanding of the world and its movements with respect to sun and stars, an important step in focussing on science as the way to properly understand nature. All this time, China was in sclerotic decline. -
Message 2
Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Tuesday, 8th March 2011
Yes, it was a very thought-provoking programme, and I must admit, I never thought about it from that angle either....
Of course, the first programme was about 'Competition'. He has a few more programmes to go, when he will be looking at different angles, so maybe he will address the area that I thought he missed out in this programme.
The same 'competition' that created the dominance of Western Europe also destroyed it. It was that 'competition' which led to the First World War, which ended Europe's dominance of the world, and the baton passed to former colony United States, who smiled inwardly to itself as the European competitors destroyed each other in the Great War.... -
Message 3
Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Tuesday, 8th March 2011
By 'competition' I am sure he means of the commercial kind, not war. The US did not just stand aside and smirk while the Europeans tore each other apart, it got seriously involved and was pivotal in maintaining European freedom. Twice.
War was, to put it mildly, not unknown in other parts of the world.
My main point about competition is that, given the freedom, people will seek to improve their situation. There is no reason, in theory, why any person should lose by another person's gain. In a society that is basically free but has laws to prevent people hurting each other, competition manifests itself as producers trying to put forward the product that everybody will want. Thus it is a benign force that, ideally, causes constant increase in the quality of goods and services, at the cost of thousands of entrepreneurs going bankrupt because the product that they made was not good enough.
Presumably societies such as Imperial China did not provide the conditions for free enterprise. -
Message 4
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 8th March 2011
fascinating and shivfan
Actually I still believe that the key to this question was revealed in a book called "Before Philosophy" that tried to detect the emerging cosmologies of the Ancient Near East as revealed by their myths and art.. I was totally persuaded by the way that the authors detected crucial East/West divide between Egypt and Mesopotamia.
For various reasons Egypt created the idea of a reality that humankind could master and run, not least because of the Nile, whose waters could be managed, apart from the usually predictable flood. And in any case the flood was a blessing to those who cultivated the land, bringing water and rich new soil. And in addition to the blessing of navigation thousands of miles up the Nile, with portage for "paper-weight" boats past the cataracts etc, out from the mouth of the Nile there was the Sea in the Middle of Land which with human intelligence could be used as highway making Egyptian ports and their navigational aids the wonder of the Ancient World.
This was the kind of world that people could imagine a good God creating. The kind of God whose works and intentions were sometimes upset by the Devil and the forces of Evil. The outreach of this world extended to the Holy Land and to Greece, and thus produced three great religions each believing in one true God, and good and evil- and the idea that the role of Humankind is to do this God's will and fight and eventually exterminate the forces of Evil.
At the outset of the Modern Age the peak of Ottoman Power resulted in the capture of Constantinople and for the next two hundred years a very real risk and an even more real fear that Islam might over-run Europe. Meanwhile questions that had been raised in Medieval Christendom over God's attitude to Western Christendom, in the light of the Black Death, had resulted in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation with a resultant focus on expansion of European wealth and power, with a great emphasis on the ability of Europeans to "Fight the Good Fight".. Of course in many ways the first triumph of the new age was the triumph of Christianity in Iberia, the subsequent purging of that region from Muslim and Jewish contamination, and then the embracing of a Holy Mission, blessed by the Pope to claim the whole world , its people and its wealth for Christ their God.
Such was the mindset that has made it possible for Western Cultures to claim the right to asset strip the Earth and use its wealth and resources for finally goals which have lost much of their initial spirituality and are essentially mere short-termism. Christian Aid now says "We believe in life before death" and dedicates itself to what can be done with money, as long as the money system works.
The Ancient Mesopotamian mindset was very different, as was reflected in the inability of "the West" to understand how Saddam Hussein could claim vivtory after the First Gulf War. The Mesopotamian Cosmology recognised a great God of the Heavens, Anu, but the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates, like all the lands around the great rivers that flow down from the mountain ranges of from Asia Minor to China, were often lands of chaos, great storms and floods. It is commonly believed that the Gilgamesh Epic is related to the Noah story. Obviously Anu was busily and serenely looking after the greatness of the Heavens and had no time for the affairs of man. The city of Ur, so involved with the tides, did believe that the Moon Goddess might be a modest enough little deity to look kindly upon its people from time to time.
In this pantheon Enlil the God of power, force and storm was very much to be feared when he turned on you, and launched a "Desert Storm" with "Overwhelming Force".. At such time the best that humankind could do- like Gilgamesh like Noah- was to live to strive another day. As Saddam Hussein had done. But like the Hindu God Shiva a God of force and destruction was also a God of change and construction, and the God that you wanted to have on your side when your enemy tried to get him on theirs.
This whole approach to how Humanbeings can live successfully in this world was most famously summed up in the Chinese idea of Yin and Yang, which rejected the idea of good and evil and a struggle between the two. Both are necessary and essential to reality, and the task of Humankind is to create a harmonious balance between the two halves of reality. Hence China was content to have as much of the world in its Empire as it could manage harmoniously, and resisted the input and intrusion of Foreign Devils who came from outside their cosmic concept.
In fact the West ended up so incensed at the fact that the Chinese Emperor lived far away in a Heavenly City unapproachable to Western diplomats and their representatives who expected an emperor to exercise force and control that in the 1860's the French and British send a military expedition right up to Beijing, which captured the Emperor and the Heavenly City in with the intention just of dragging China into the Modern World. They had no idea that in Chinese thinking the most powerful Emperor is the one who needs to do nothing, since the job of the Emperor was to keep his power in reserve so that he could use it as required to restore the balance betweeb Yin and Yang and restore harmony.
The signs are, however, that Modern China has lost touch with its spiritiual basis just as much as the West. It always seemed likely that such an intelligent and wise people would not destroy Hong Kong, the most valuable real-estate in the World, once it returned to China with a Chinese population that had lived across two cultures for many generations.
The hope for the World is that the Chinese will not finish the asset stripping of the Earth that has been the dominant feature of Western Civilization for the last couple of centuries at least, and threatens us with global catastrophe, but will look forward and face the challenge of balancing their 5000 year Past against a 5000 year Future.
Cass -
Message 5
Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Tuesday, 8th March 2011
I think you have gone off on a few tangents there, and I am not grasping what you say. The question being addressed is: how did the Western way of life become so dominant? Calling Egypt the West and Mesopotamia the East is a little parochial, they are only about 700 miles apart, a distance much smaller than the breadth of China.
I don't know what you mean by asset stripping. All areas of the world have built up economic assets, so that there are more assets than ever. The assets may be unfairly distributed among individuals, granted, but that is not the matter here. How come there are so many assets now? Because the West discovered how more assets could be produced more easily and other countries copied. How come the West was the first to discover how to do this? That is the question we are considering. -
Message 6
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 8th March 2011
Fascinating
The establishment Western History by the end of the Nineteenth Century and the Age of Imperialism- a history that justified a European domination/leadership of the World- believed in a model of History in which the "torch of Civilzation" spread as in some kind of marathon race from Egypt, through Crete, to Greece, to Rome and eventually to Western Europe..
As the World History book that I was given in 1955 (having been printed in 1951) explained it, various races had been graced with this torch and had carried it until they could advance no further, then at best they became moribund like Ancient India and China- incapable of the kind of advance that had become possible in the Europe of the State that had emerged at the age of competing States.
One of many concepts and novelties that came in at this time was the idea that people, either individually or collectively owned things: that in effect the Earth and its life belonged to people, and not people to the Earth. This was a great advantage because ownership came with the right to dispose at will with no greater responsibility or duty, except to act like "Prodigal Sons". There was that poster "Here is the Earth,! Do not spend it all at once." It meant of course that the whole Earth was up for sale to those who grabbed it with this idea of ownership first, because most peoples of the Earth believed that they belonged to or with people or places dear to them, or to whom or which they were bound by duties of respect.
But of course onwership made possible wealth and finance: one of the things that was really pioneered by England/Britain, and why Britain was able to beome the greastest power on Earth was because, as Gordon Brown's Government was able to show, it has been possible for Western States to have access to credit. This has meant that from c1700 Great Britain and its allies, whose war effort it has frequently subisidised, could outspend any enemy. And this has been faciltated by the close inter-realtionship between science, technology and military development with the Western State leading to military prominence- and therefore dominant influence.
After Britain lost world leadership this role was taken up by the USA, and the ability to outspend and outdevelop worked against the USSR in the Cold War, as it had worked for Britain in Hot Wars.
The reason why Western States could so successfully get the backing of this kind of Finance was because they provided safe havens for their concept of ownership free from any real obligations to the Past or the Future. And the last UK Labour Government was able to increase the National Debt in a few years by the full amount that it had taken three hundred years to accumulate.
But the danger signs are that, having spent so long helping to Finance wars and struggles, against the kind of philosophies that offered effective resistance to the kind of one that money, science and technology favoured, since the final apparent triumph of Western Capitalism there has been the normal situation of "to the victor the spoils".. Pay back time. We now need the banks more than they need us.
For some time the West has not been the best place to make money through "venture capitalism"- hence the grab for viirgin lands at the end of the Nineteenth Century and Hitler's concern for Germany's lack of "living space".
Now that global Capitalism is welcome in the vastness of the old USSR, India and China that is where the money to promote cutting edge science and technology is likely to go, for it is now people in the West who have become moribund, obese and incapable of facing the kind of competition for exclusivity and exploitation that has made financial, commercial, scientific and technological development possible within the West over the last five hundred years.
By the way of asset stripping I do not necessary agree with that interpretion of the force migration of Labour from Africa to the Americas- though many do take the view that Africa was stripped of the Labour that it needed for its proper development. A similar case can be made for Irish Labour.
But much closer to home when the Duke of Bridgewater built his pioneer canal c 1760 he was able to sell the coal that was mined on his land -and therefore in the millions of years involved in its past and its future he had a total and unrestricted right to sell this unrenewable Earth asset at his will- the price in Machester was less than 2p per ton!!
A more flexible kind of power, vital for lighting up Western homes for a couple of centuries, came from whale oil. From the Seventeenth Century European whalers were roaming the oceans of the world harvesting a free bounty of whales, and leaving Darby iron- cast cooking pots all over the places where they settled down to boil the whale blubber down into oil that could be brought home in barrels. The cargo was more valuable than the pots. They could always buy new pots back home.
Spain, of course, ruined itself in fact by stripping Latin America of its gold and silver between about 1520 and 1800, creating "price inflation" in Europe, as everyone just put their prices up for the Spaniards, who thought that they could live by gold and silver alone.
North America, however, was a great help to England and France, not so much yet from timber, though cutting down the forests of North America soon began to compete with timber imports from the Baltic, but Amerindians were soon equiipped with better means, and greater motive, to use their knowledge of the local wildlife to hunt for the fur-bearing animals that were so prized in Europe when used as raw-materials and turned into beaver hats and such..
The fur-trails snaked right out across Canada to modern British Columbia. There the Haida Indians way of life was it seems totally disrupted. They lived amid natural abundance, and one of the few things that was not abundant was the blankets that the women wove. Through hunting and trading furs they could very easily aquire blankets through the European trading posts. Blankets were soon no longer a sign of wealth. Presumably in the past in "potlatch" ceremonies" rich families had given blankets away as gifts to those less well off. Now they made bonfires of the blankets to show off their wealth.
As blankets were no longer a sign of wealth, they took to acquiring copper plates, this being a metal that Amerindians could work to some degree. As the wealth continued and they kept decimating the wild life for the sake of "the white man", in their Potlatch ceremonies they would take to sea and, in sight of the shore- since this had to be done "for show", they would throw a quantity of these special copper plates into the ocean.
Down south from there near Antartica the fur seal was nearly hunted to extinction, while the Dodo was famously such a convenient bird for the ship's cooking pot that it was.
Just some advantages of a culture of people believing that they could reap where they did not sow because it was their God's Earth that God had provided for those worthy of his bounty and able to see its God-given potential. Hence people from these cultures- fulifilling God's plan for the World could claim ownership of things because they had discovered or invented them first. Others may have seen them first, but they could not "see" and understand God's purpose.
Ownership was extended to intellectual property too so that the person who finds the final piece of the puzzle was able to claim the whole picture. Bad luck to those who were left with a worthless 98% of the picture. Winner takes all. That is competition. It often needs "the killer ttouch".
Cass -
Message 7
Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Tuesday, 8th March 2011
When I look at 2 birds fighting over a scrap of food, I consider that the idea of ownership (or at least 'having') is a natural part of life. Think of a bird guarding its nest of eggs from predators. If a predator comes and takes the eggs, I can imagine that the bird, though of course unable to form the thought into words, will be left painfully thinking "my eggs gone".
In hunter-gatherer communities, in a land of plenty, the idea of owneship might well have been quite fuzzy. Groups of women (typically) would have gone out among the bushes and, with their children on their backs and around their feet, gathered fruit and nuts, and they would have brought the whole lot back to the village to be eaten together in a feast. The men (typically) would have worked together in groups to bring down a meaty mammal, and they would haul that back for sharing among all. If anybody needed a house, the whole village would help him build it. The whole of this way of life rests on plenty. If, like the air around us, everything is plentiful, nobody wastes time thinking who owns what, because there is enough of everything go round. However I am not convinced that there was no concept of ownership there. Tribes would have come into conflict, probably over land, ie which tribe has rights to use (read: own) a certain land area.
At any rate, what we are consdering here is the development of Western and non-Western societies, and I feel sure that the Chinese had a fully developed idea of ownership of land and goods. Both cultures having that idea,, proves that this is not an explanation of the differences between the two, ie the developement of the West and the stagnation of the East.
I would say that your focus on finance is influenced by the baggage we are carrying in our minds today due to the world financial crisis. Finance is about the provision of money.
I am unconvinced that Spain was 'ruined', but the mention of New World gold and silver does interest me, because I think that could have been pivotal in Europe's economic development. Keynesian economics favours increasing the money supply to stimulate the economy. The economy becomes stimulated because business people, sensing that price are rising, become confident that they can, in a couple of years, get back any money they invest. Thus thousands of more businesses are created, and more people are employed, and more goods are made, in otehr words real prosperity is engendered. In a world where people only trusted good coin of gold and silver, the money supply could not be increased, unless somebody found a new gold/silver mine, and this was done, big time, in the 16th century, when the New World mines were opened. So I think this might have stimulated the European economy, but on the other hand this occured relatively late. The question remains, why was it the West which found and conquered the New World, and not China?
I have wrtiten on these boards before that, to me, the most important invention was printing by moveable type. Again, the Chinese invented printing first, and it could actually be that the West got the idea from China, somehow, but it was only in Europe that the technology was seized on, developed, and put to use by the production of thousands of books. I rack my brain to explain why the Chinese did not do the same. I think there are 2 reasons.
First, what I surmise about imperial China was that the vast mass of people were grindingly poor, and only the topmost 0.1% of people really had money to spare. We see huge famines recorded in China in the 19th century, carrying away millions of people. That implies to me that the ordinary people were malnourished, such that they had no stores of grain, and virtually no property of any kind worth selling, so that one year of poor harvest would be a total disaster for them. As I have written previously, this huge difference between rich and poor occurs as a result of property and inheritance laws, such that the property of the rich goes to the sons of the rich, and over centuries wealth naturally becomes concentrated more and more into the hands of the rich. I think this happened in the later Roman Empire. The system became broken with the fall of Empire, and with the coming of invaders, the slate was wiped clean again. There was enough land for every man to take as much land as he could cultivate. OK the distribution was not even, but even in the 13th century there were many free farmers (not serfs) who could independently farm a small but substantial parcel. But what has all this got to do with printing? Well, a book produced in Europe (written in Latin) would have had a ready market of millions of people. In China, there were only a relatively few mandarins who were interested in books. That's the difference.
The second reason was that Europeans were Christians, and that there was a lot of demand for religious texts. The demand for books was there.
This point about there being a substantial amount of people in Europe with money to spare, could be the reason why goods could be developed further and sold, whereas in China the ideas fell on stony soil. For example clocks seem to have been invented in China, but it was only in Europe, apparently, that people took on the task of making better and better clocks, confident that they could sell them.
The development of firearms in Europe is quite remarkable. You would have thought that China, an imperial power that first came up with rockets, would have taken to developing amaments with gusto. I cannot for the life of me understand how they lost interest in making ever better weapons, and let the Europeans do it and take over the world! -
Message 8
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 8th March 2011
fascinating
The examples that you give of examples of "ownership" are not valid..
They are expressions of a sense of being bound to something as a matter of life and death.. Eating food is a matter of life and death. Not ownership. "You can not have your cake and eat it".
Defending territory similarly is not an example of your thinking that it belongs to you, but that you belong to it and it helps to define who you are. You are prepared to die rather than be separated from it. Hence across the world there are people who feel that their identity is very much dependent upon their ability to stay connected with the place where they belong, whether they own it or not.
A place that people do not own can still feel like their home. Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ is where the heart is and this applied to most of the world before the European State system spread around the World and provided for the dividing up of the land into spaces that had a legal title that could be defended by the State, and which of course ultimately had "its price" and owners are usually prepared to sell if people offer them enough money.
If what you possess is priceless to you, it owns you, you do not own it.
It was the extension of this idea that everythying could be bought and sold that helped to make the West so rich and helped economic expansion..
As you say, and I quoted, the influx of bullion from the Americas did create an inflation effect, and Spanish gold and silver did encourage its neighbours to engage in economic activity in order to trade with Spain.. But actually I saw in a National Geographical and estimate of how many tons of gold had been mined since prehistoric times and the sum total was amazingly small.
Most of Britain's finance i n fact was, and is, based upon what is now called Big Money, that is things that are legally owned and have a market price. The freedom to either sell these assets, borrow money on the strength of them, or underwrite projects or insurance on the basis of your ownership was fundamental to the world's first economic take off that happened in England and then Britain in the Eighteenth Century.
The crucial factor in this was the fact that in 1660, when Charles II was restored to the throne, the feudal dues owed to the King in return for landholding were not restored.. The aristocracy could now pass the family holding down as an act of will, without the previous practice of the lands reverting to the King and the eldest son applying for the right to take his father's place on the same terms. Gradually the aristocrats were able to negotiate the end of the feudal dues that tied them to those below them, and finally achieved that position of holding their lands "freehold".Then they- and the small landowners that many of even the peasants became- were free to sell up, borrow, or improve on their own account.
In China however though there had been a successful economy for thousands of years, and a Chinese mercantile diaspora that went all the way as a settled popopulation to the Malay Peninsular in order to guarantee the supplies that it needed. A great fleet of junks had sailed around the time of the European explorations as far as the coast of East Africa, and studies of pre-European Central America suggest Chinese trade relations got that far. But the invasions of the Khans after Genghis Khan turned back from the possible conquest of Europe, and decided that China would be a better prize, clearly impacted on Chinese development, as the Moghul invasion of India impacted on that subcontinent. No-one knows better than an invader the threat from the outside world, and both were more than happy with what they appropriated, two of the richest places on Earth.
But a US Professor of Chinese studies explained on an old educational film that I used to show, that the Chinese have no word for freedom. The closest they can get to the concept of freedom would be "wilfulness", because a Chinese person was not taught to think in terms of freedom of thought and action- but an appreciation of the correct way of behaving and doing things in order to promote harmony.
A few years ago I read a fascinating History of European relationship with the Far East written by a London Professor of Oriental Studies around 1905.
This was a time when the kind of ambtions that had led the British and French to hope that China actually was much better equipped than India to come to terms with the wider world could still be cherished. At that time Japan seemed to have made an amazing transformation, modelling its new consitution on that of the new German Empire.
The point was that the Chinese had known a great deal about what was happening elsewhere, but did not really think that the West had anything to offer- so that, for example, the China trade, which was where so much British gold and silver ended up, was flourishing in the Eighteenth Century.
According to "bullion theory" (perhaps inspired by Spanish experience) the inistence of the Chinese that they had nothing to gain from trade with Europe apart from gold and silver was almost like a hostile act. But the aristocrats creating beautiful Georgian mansions wanted to fill them with appropraite China ware and laquerware, unrivalled anywhere in the world, and tea drinking preceded coffee.
It is not apparent , however, that the ordinary people were not catered for in China. It was not ruled by the Emperor but by a very highly qualified class of Mandarin's who were the first educated Meritocracy in history, achieving their positions only after long and arduous study particularly of Confucionism: and there workd was tied to the ancient document "The Institutes of Government" that laid down exaclty how the affairs of each province were to be run.
And the first duty of a governor was to make sure that his province ran with harmonious relations between all sectors of society right down to the peasants without whom China was nothing. When there were things that began to create disharmony it was the duty of the administration to restore harmony, and the right of the people to pin point the danger. Ideas like "Feng Shui" for example became a basis for the discussion of proposed railway lines in the late nineteenth century, where British protestors talk about the planning blight on their property!
A total break down of harmony might result in the use of extreme force, because it was viewed with allarm, involving disrespect and failure to behave properly. But in the aftermath the Mandarin would be removed whether a cause or not. He was associated with the disharmony and might get another chance elsewhere.
In fact the Mandarin's were never allowed to stay in one place and develop a sense of either belonging or of property. They lived in premises that went with the job, and were moved around in order to keep their government "pure" and uncorrupted. And the respect that they were accorded was based upon their wisdom, scholarship and their prowess in art and poetry.
Perhaps one of the interesting things about ownership and dutiful conduct within Chinese culture was that if someone called at your home and expressed admiration for something like a vase or a piece of furniture, your duty as the perect host was to offer it to your guest, where a Westerner might show off their latest purchase to a visitor creating the "keeping up with the Joneses" dynamic that powers our consumer society. This creates disharmony that need to another fix of shopping/buying that is the essence of our present Civilization. of thrills spills, sex drugs and rock and roll etc,
But the tradition means that a Chinese person must normally be totally in control of what is conveyed in word or by facial gesture. It is a very bad guest who goes around giving vent to a "wow" factor at everything he/ she sees.
I thought of that when the newspapers over here quite ignorantly reacted to Prince Charles' "wax-work dummies" diary entry concerning the conduct of the Chinese offiicials at the hand-over of Hong Kong. They must have regarded that as a very high complement. After 150 years the British were being obliged to abide by the terms of their lease on Hong Kong. It would have been inappropriate and rude to have been all happy and smiling at the British having to sail off into the sunset. At the start of the lease 150 years probably seemed a long time to the British,: but not to the Chinese with their 5000 year history.
So the question you are posing is a bit like that song from "My Fair Lady" "Why can't a woman be more like a man". Why should they be? And why should the Chinese think that the Civilization that has brought them through 5000 years should by all ditched for a Western one that really has only in effect lasted 300 years and does not seem to have much of a future since the Earth is going to run out of the assets on which it was built, even faster now that China and India are making sure that they get some before it runs out.
Cass -
Message 9
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 9th March 2011
Civilisation- the word and the concept- come from Ancient Greece and their division of the world between places where Humanbeings combined their intelligence with collective power in order to create an environment largely controlled and managed by human intelligence..
This was in opposition to barbaric societies where lives were shaped by the way that people interracted with a potentially savage and unpredictable environment.
The idea of a History of Civilisation therefore was closely bound up with this Western idea of Humankind largely taking control over the Earth, and it his hardly surprising that the West has been better at it than other places.
But no Western State came anyway near the population size, and therefore the potential might, of the Asian Empires: nor did Europe suffer from the same scale of natural disaster- especially the British Isles, where, for example, Irish and Irish- descended people still resent the time that it took for food supplies to be got to the victims in the Great Famines because by then almost the whole of the UK was fairly accessible, especially by sea.
The claims of science and technology amidst the ashes of the Second World War that Humankind was now ready to take control of Nature on Earth now looks laughable. And climate change research suggests that the Chinese were always right. As was Malthus.
The secret of harmonious Human Life on Earth is moral restraint for the common good. But the modern/European age of World History has been based upon the principle on individualism and lack of restraint..as advertising and entertainment sells the "You can have it all" message.
Cass -
Message 10
Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Wednesday, 9th March 2011
You are saying that no culture, apart from Ancient Greece, had a concept of civilisation, right? Are you saying that the Chinese did not use intelligence and collective power to create a controlled and managed environment?
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Message 11
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 9th March 2011
fascinating
As I explained before the Chinese did not think that they could control the environment.
And this often leads Westerners into error when the see inconsistency within Chinese behaviour, for the idea of human control is that it should be consistent.
A classic case to my mind was the "top" Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ reporter Kate Adie reporting on the Tienneman Square massacre. I was astonished to hear her say "Who would have thought that the Chinese People's Army would turn on the students in such a way?".. As she said it I thought of the answer "Anyone who has studied Chinese History".
I have become increasingly aware over recent years of the degree of empathy between France and China.. Much less so, but France is a country of great rivers and river valleys, where population is mostly concentrated, rivers that come down from a mountain chain- though the Alps are not the Himalayas. But what I see in Chinese history is a very similar obsession with the fragility of the Present and the importance of the "cultural baggage" that makes it possible for France to fall into pieces- as during the German victory in 1940 and the subsequent occupation.. After such disasters France goes back to its intellectual base and just recreates itself. But Albert Camus noted in "La Peste" how the common people became obsessed with listening to the weather forecast.
It fascinated me for decades. But now that we live quite a lot of the year in France, including the stormy seasons, I can better understand why.. Our dear neighbour greeted us on our first visit in 2008 with a warning. Old peasant wisdom told that a year of 13 moons was an unpredictable and dangerous year. Well it included the worst financial crash since the early 1930's and that one led to world war.
China has managed to cope with disaster and change time and time again. Not for nothing is it a land of the Dragon. Chinese dragons are not evil things, but things that somehow embody the power of Nature that is far greater than anything that people can truly control.
But Chinese history tells that China began when God Emperors descended from the Heavens, and organised the people to tame the great rivers with dams, embankments and canals. Only such great men can make this happen. But the rivers are never tamed and every so often there are disastrous floods that kill thousands- even to this day.
In world of such potential violence it is very important not to upset the harmony and balance:, and, when things are beginning to tilt, to act swiftly and with due weight to overcome the huge imbalance that any change can bring before it brings everything to disaster. You may have seen the Chinese device for picking up Earth tremors so that people are forewarned that "the underground Dragons are stirring.
To get back to Kate Adie it was quite obvious that the students in Tienneman Square had forgotten the norms of Chinese conduct, which places a very heavy duty of respect to elders and to teachers. They seemed to think that it was appropriate for Chinese youth to behave like "Foreign Devils"
About 25 years ago there was a moment in my school in Lambeth when my two Chinese boys were quietly working away at the front of the class. The rest were being their normal boisterous selves. At one moment one of the boys turned round to look at the rest of the class with some bemusement. I said "I suppose it is not like this in Chinese school" (that he attended on Saturday mornings in order to his own culture).. He turned to me"No. Sir": and quietly got back to his studies.
Unfortunately I caused him some embarassment some decades later when I was going down some stairs in a shop, and recognised him as he walked past me. It was good to catch up with him. He had gone to University in Hong Kong and become a qualified architect. He was visiting London before planning to go back. He said nothing about it, and perhaps I imagine, but according to Chinese culture it was his duty to recognise me, for a pupil/student owes his teacher and his teacher's family all his life. Of course it would have been inappropriate for a young man passing an older man on the stairs to not have respectfully avoided eye contact. But he "should" have seen me- in his eyes.
Personal and family honour count so much. Thus the writer Han Suyin recounts in her "China. History/Autobiography" how a young woman of a respectable background found that her family could not resist the new European pressures that came with the building of the railways and the emergence of "nouveau riche" families, who such an established family could not deny their daughter's hand in marriage.
On her wedding day she dressed up in her bridal gown, and set out from her parent's house in a curtained Sedan Chair that carried her to her groom's house. There his servants drew back the curtains for her to come out, and her body fell out. She had strangled herself with her scarf as the only way that she could save the honour of her family and her ancestors.
I don't know Chinese, and I do not know what word would be closest to the Greek "Civilization". I know that in the West we admire Chinese "Civilization" but I remember being shown religious maps of the world as a child and being told that Confucionism was the main Chinese religion. As with Buddhism there are many Westerners, who have been put off the "one and only God" religions that have shaped our history, who thank their non-god that Buddhism and Confucionism are not relligions as they understand the term.
Cass -
Message 12
Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Wednesday, 9th March 2011
There has been a long tradition in the West, too, of respect for tradition, of parents and teachers, but that has been largely unravelled because of the permissive society and lack of discipline. The rot set in, in schools, probably about 30-35 years ago, when teachers were denied any means of imposing serious discipline. Thus we now have the ridiculous situation, in a large proportion of schools in the UK, where a significant minoriy of pupils regularly disrupt lessons for the majority.
Whatever Chinese traditions, and how laudable they might be, the fact is that China now is using Western science and technology to build up an economic powerhouse. Though they may once have believed that they could not change the environment, they have now constructed the Three Gorges dam which will generate more hydro-electric power than any other dam on Earth. Make no mistake, they want to have the products of Western technology. The question is, why did this useful and beneficial technology, which almost all societies in the world wants, arise in the West and not in the East (or for that matter, the North or the South)? -
Message 13
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Wednesday, 9th March 2011
Re: Messsage 12.
Fascinating,
have no time anymore tonight, but I think your question has also to do with the book of Pomeranz: The great divergence, China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy.
Tomorrow more and we discussed it also on a French messageboard of history:
Kind regards and with esteem,
Paul. -
Message 14
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 9th March 2011
fascinating
But I think that probably it was you who pointed out that so much of this science and technology did not "arise" in the West.
Islamic, Indian and Chinese cultures were much more advanced than the primitive and barbaric West at the dawn of the Renaissance, though it is now rercognised that some of that wider knowledge came into the West- largely from Muslim Iberia- as early as the twelfth century.
Mention has been made of clocks, but when these were shown to the Chinese as possible trade goods people could not see the utility.And as one Han Suyin novel makes very clear by the Eighteenth Century China was already producing automatons that have only it seems been equalled in the age of modern robotics.
As I have written before- the funding, that was so necessary for the Western advance by which you set such store, was very closely connected with the great wars fought by European States in the modern era..
It may seem trite- but you have asked on another thread what are the lessons of history- well in one Star Treck Captain Kirk explained history of the twentieth century as periods when the struggle of war produced an acceleration along the track of evolution so that they were in some ways "a good thing".
This of course assumes that evolution is along a pre-ordained course, which few people I think would now believe. Nature and nurture combine, and war fare has to be a distorting influence, forcing people to discover and invent means of destruction and conflict. This applied to the great technological and industrial boosts of the first great war- the Napoleonic- and it certainly applied to both the First and Second World Wars, and in fact the Cold War.
The need for scientific and technological advance was grasped most seriously by Germany in the build up to its unification in 1871, and subsequently through the IWW, the Nazi re-armament programme, and the 2WW.
In something that I have written recently I used Dr. Bronowski's account of his friend's Leo Slizard's role in working out the intellectual basis for achieving a nuclear chain reaction and bomb. At the opening of the 2ww he drafted a letter to President Roosevelt that was sent in the name of the more famous Einstein. In it he referred to recent research on the line of his idea that seemed likely to produce a super-bomb, and he understood that the Nazis were repeating experiments that were being carried out by a French scientist.
There was, therefore, a great danger that Universities in the West would not be able to afford as much research as the Nazi backed programmes, and he urged the President to put state funding in the project to build an atomic super-bomb.
Fortunately the 2WW was over in Europe before either side got the bomb to work. And then Slizard and Einstein tried to make sure that the bomb would not be used, but the scale of the bomb seemed to be appropriate to Asian conditions.
Subsequently as I am sure that you are aware, much of the modern technology that has shaped the world since 1945 has been a spin-off from advances made during the war or in pursuit of the subsequent Arms Race, with both West and East having recruited Nazi Scientists, who made the Space Race possible. The transistor, the micro-chip and small scale technology that makes desktop computers possible is a by-product of that Arms Race, as is the whole satellite system on which mobile phones, sat navs and so much else depends. Thd lucrative contracts available for military/space research offered all kinds of new techonogical benefits.
While all of this was going on China largely "kept out of it" and had no need for the kind of military and power development that you seem to think of as a badge of Civilization. In the late Nineteenth Century when it needed a better army for a crisis the Europoan merchants in the concessions paid for "General" Gordon to train and command "The Ever Victorious Army" that only lasted as long as it was needed.
As for what is happening in China now- I had cause yesterday to take down the book "China and Her Shadow" by Tibor Mende that I purchased in 1963-4. You may or may not be old enough to remember that period, but the inside flap told the reader:
"A new economic, political and military force of colossal size is being created in the Far East with amazing and frightening rapidity".
That was written in 1960, but the imagined future curve that was presented as so allarming did not materialise. Perhaps this is because China is different to the West, and the Civilization that the West believes is necessary in order to counter things that it finds "amazing and frightening.": and as a result, as Neil Ferguson explained in his book about US power, in 2008 the USA is so paranoid about the dangerous world that it would like to "manage" without resorting to Imperialism that its hi-tech military spending and "kit" establishes it as an ovewhelming force in a way that the British Empire never was.. But then the British Empire has gone.. Another lesson from history?
In fact what happened in Mende's China was that the attempt to do things on such a huge scale produced huge disasters with the death of tens of millions of people. When you do just one huge thing instead on many smaller ones, there is no chance of mistakes balancing each other out, and any miscalculation of misunderstanding becomes a catastrophe. And one may be about to happen again.
Compared with the Communist Great Leap forward I believe that what we are seeing at present is the HongKongisation of mainland China. During 150 years the Hong Kong Chinese worked out how to combine the Chinese culture with the benefits offered by the British Empire. It produced the most valuable real estate in the world, and, as the Japanese in the fifties bought British cars, took them to Japan, took them to pieces, rebuilt them and then made their own versions, the Chinese took Hong Kong back into China, studied how such a Chinese economic giant could work, tried to replicate it in Shanghai, where there were still the British foundations from the twenties, and are they are now building Hong Kongs all over China.
But there are waring voices within China. You may have seen programmes featuring Chinese environmentalists and conservationists. They already talk about the need to bring China back into harmony with itself and nature, and the two thousand year old great canal is being adapted in order to counter the impact of climate change, diverting excess water from the South of China and taking it thousands of miles to the Beijing region that is increasingly suffering from desertification.
This is not control, but helping to restore harmony so that Nature can"do its thing". And the Chinese panda has long been the emblematic animal for the World Wildlife Fund.
Cass -
Message 15
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Wednesday, 9th March 2011
fascinating
Re English/British respect for teachers perhaps that of an apprentice for his master might begin to approximate to the Chinese tradition..
I was first made aware of it, as perhaps she was, in Han Suyin's largely autobiographical novel "The Road the Chungking" which tells of how she left her medical training in Surrey to go Chungking when it was under attack from Japan in the mid-thirties.
Travelling as a lone young woman c 19 years old, and a despised Eurasian to boot, she would arrive at out of the way railway stations to find that men who had been taught by her father had heard that their old lecturer's daughter was on her way ,and just waited at the station until she arrived, made sure that she had what she needed, and made sure she was pointed in the right direction.. This was not mere respectfulness but a recognition of a debt that would never be fully repaid.
I was intrigued by a reference in Frank Chin's "Ancestors" - this American Chinese man's account of the Chin family story over the centuries- that each such family has a duty not only to know its own extended family and its story, but has to treat its own story as intertwined with another 49 families, making a block of 50 interdependent families- a real source of SOCIAL and not STATE security.
Amongst personal experiences of pupils students the closest was the message that an ex-A Level Ecomics student made sure was brought to me personally letting me know that she had gained a First Class Degree in Econometrics, and thanking me for the foundations that I had given her.. She was in fact a most able pupil.. But this Chinese girl was the only one who remembered to do so three years and a bit after leaving school. And naturally she was not one of the pupils who was effusive and emotional at our leave-taking.
Cass -
Message 16
Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Sunday, 20th March 2011
fascinating, my comments about America 'smirking' as Europeans destroyed each other in the Great War were tongue-in-cheek....
What I was saying is that the US benefitted from the Europeans destroying each other in two great conflagrations in the 20th century, even if they didn't court such a benefit.
I watched the second episode, which was about 'science', and how the Ottomans led the way before 1500, and how they lost that hegemony to western Europe after the Renaissance. I thought it was quite good, but then again, I know very little about that period of history, so I would love to hear from Nik what he thought of that programme.
I watched the third episode, which was about 'property', and I feel Niall Ferguson came to some misleading conclusions based on faulty premises. His main theory was that the reason North America succeeded, and South America didn't, boiled down to the ownership of property. He maintains that immigrants to British colonies in America could attain the dream of working hard and owning property, while those is Spanish colonies couldn't, because a rich elite controlled all the property, and stifled economic development. I find that theory very simplistic, for a number of reasons....
1) The 'American dream' only pertained to New England. The colonies in the southern US and the British Caribbean had more in common with Latin American colonies than they did with New England. In the southern US and the British Caribbean, early settlers secured large swathes of land which were then used to create huge plantations. In the US SOuth they grew tobacco and then cotton, while in the British Caribbean they grew sugar. Those British colonists who came to the island after these early settlers found land very difficult to acquire, and often became 'poor whites', who didn't own any land. That group was conveniently ignored by Ferguson, because they didn't fit into his theory.
2) Ferguson claimed that any white colonist could dream of owning his own piece of land, however small, and that led to the great prosperity of North America. But if that was the case, then Haiti would be a rich country. When it was St Domingue, it was a colony of huge sugar plantations owned by a small rich elite. It was a rich colony then, but when Petion became president, he divided up the country into small allotments, so that nearly every Haitian could own his little bit of land. Contrary to Ferguson's theory, that action by Petion condemned Haiti to inevitable poverty.
3) Ferguson just glosses over the reforms that Brazil have made, making blanket statements that because these reforms have taken place, Brazil is likely to overtake the US in terms of development. That's a hypothesis I don't necessarily buy. I'm not convinced that Brazil's destined to overtake the US on that basis.
4) It was good to see Ferguson highlighting the contradiction of America being the land of the free only for white people, while keeping black people in servitude. But I don't agree with his hypothesis that this unequal treatment of black people is one of the main reasons why Brazil will overtake the US. Ferguson seems to accept at face-value the Brazilian policy of miscegenation, while the US maintained segregation. On the contrary, now that the civil rights movement has removed barriers in the US in the 1960s, I think the two countries are on equal footing as far as race relations are concerned. For example, the US has a black president, while Brazil have never had one. Racism is still very much an issue in Brazil, but in different ways....
I feel Ferguson missed one crucial point. The reason the British colonies developed faster and better than Spanish colonies came down to one major factor, and it had very little to do with property. It had to do with economics. The British colonies established a business practice that was very much in demand by the growing economies of Europe. In the southern US, they produced tobacco and cotton, while in the British Caribbean they produced sugar. This is in contrast with the Spanish colonies, which were in the main obsessed with finding precious metals.
The contrasting approaches had significantly differing results. The Spanish found huge deposits of gold and silver in Mexico and Peru. While those discoveries made adventurers rich, it had a simple economic spinoff. Huge amounts of coins, etc, were sent back to Spain, and it resulted in much more money entering the Spanish economy, with little economic activity to back it up. Inevitably, that led to spiralling inflation in Spain in the century after the mid-1550s, and it practically weakened Spain significantly.
The Spanish authorities made little effort to develop economic activities for export in their colonies. For example, Jamaica was a trading port where Spanish colonies reared cattle and pigs for traders landing there. The Spanish colonists who lived there were extremely poor. When the British conquered Jamaica in 1655, they set up large sugar plantations owned by army officers, and the island quickly became a wealthy British colony. It was a simple story of demand and supply, which Ferguson surprisingly ignored....
Then, there were the support systems. Britain had an excellent navy and merchant shipping, which ensured that trade between the mother country and the colonies was controlled, and the wealth passed only between Britain and its colonies. As Spain went into decline, they couldn't maintain a proper merchant navy, and ended up losing out to British, French and American smugglers, who made themselves rich trading with Spanish colonies. In the end, Spain sold asientos (rights to trade with Spanish colonies) to British and French ships.
I would've like to hear Ferguson say, rather, why New England succeeded, while the southern US and the Caribbean lagged behind. I believe a lot had to do with the institutions that were set up in New England, i.e. universities, centres for thought, industrial development, private enterprise, new technologies, etc. In the southern US and the British Caribbean, there was very little of that. Plantation owners were more concerned with keeping black slaves from rebelling and cutting their throats, to be thinking about advancing themselves. In fact, Jamaica-born planters always thought of themselves as 'English', and looked forward to the day when they would 'go home'. This is in contrast with New England, where colonists had a regional pride that the whites in slave societies did not have....
All in all, I thought episode three was disappointing, because it had a faulty hypothesis that led to inaccurate conclusions. -
Message 17
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Sunday, 20th March 2011
shivfan
I have not watched the programme, but I believe that the lack of economic development with Latin America, compared to the USA, had a great to do with the great disparities of wealth within Latin America, where when I was studying LA history in the Sixties it was reckoned that 98% of the land wealth of the whole region was still in the hands of about 2% of the population- and those mostly descended from the Spanish aristocracy that acquired huge territories at the period of Conquest.
It was still the case that by far the largest proportion of the population were descended from the indigenous Amerindian populations, and African slaves were perhaps the next most important groups. In contrast to the USA where even the African slaves could hope eventually as free peoples to aspire to the standards of living enjoyed by the American "common man", creating eventually even "Black Upwardly Mobile" people, the situation in Latin America made it much easier to keep the masses in the kind of life-styles of their forefathers- almost like the Bantustan approach: and until the Liberation Theology that arrived after my student days the Roman Catholic Church- much as it did in Ireland and Italy in those days- preached about the after-life and lots of babies- and therefore the kinds of things that were going to keep peasants poor.
And in fact what you have written about Haiti and the North American states does not take into account the difference in scale. William Cobbett spend quite a lot of time in the USA and very much admired the "homesteading culture" of both New England and its neighbouring regions in Canada. In addition to plenty of land for a large family to feed itself, there was also the resource of the wilderness and the chance to make or catch goods that could be traded for the kind of goods that could be imported from Britain, and after independence could be made in the industries and enterprises that developed.
As in the UK the crucial element in economic growth was the possibility that peope had to labour to build up their own wealth, and the thriving domestic market that made it worthwhile for people to find ways to supply it.. Result increasing GDP.
In contrast, for example, after Latin America became independent British investment poured in to the continent in order to exploit its potential as a supplier of cheap commodities to Britain. And there was therefore every incentive to keep costs low.
Cass -
Message 18
Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Monday, 21st March 2011
Western civilisation has become dominant because it is the most successful civilisation in history, in virtually every aspect of human existence. Technology, founded on science, which is basically a Western invention (other civilisations had a few proto-scientific discoveries) is what has given us the food and medicine to extend healthy life to unprecedented length, and provided us with the means to have useful and nice things like electric lights, cars, personal computers and extensive high-quality education. All nations seem to seek to follow the same beneficent path that the West has laid out, and the question is, how come the West was the first to lay that path?
I thought that the episode on propery was quite convincing.
1) I don't see what you mean, because Ferguson went to Carolina, in the South, and found ample evidence of people who had begun with nothing, being indentured, and ended up being granted substantial amounts of land. He showed many documents with evidence that such grants had been made to a great many people. It is possibly true that later colonists, when they arrived in much larger numbers, found it more difficult to aquire land, but Ferguson is dealing with origins. The fact is that the US system of democracy is generally seen as better than the autocratic systems on other parts of the Americas. How was it that the US became democratic, when other states were autocratic? The answer is found by going back to the founding charters of the colonies, which gave voting rights to property owners, and since a large proportion of people could own property, a large number of people could have the vote.
2) Your example of Haiti is not really relevant I think. Haiti is a small island (in fact only a part of an island) about the size of Belgium, not comparable to continental USA where each state is about 5 times the size. Each parcel of land in Haiti would be a tiny.
3) I don't disagree with your point here.
4) This issue of racial segregation is considered obsessively by the media, but I don't think that it affects the bigger picture much. Regardless of the fact that segregation was established in the US from its foundation, that did not prevent the US developing faster than anywhere else in the world.
I am not sure what you mean about Spain.You are saying that they discovered lots of gold and silver, and that this caused inflation. How much inflation, and how was it damaging? If you say that there was lots more money but little economic activity to back it up, the question then is, why was there so little economic activity in Spain at this time? Why didn't they develop Jamaica in the same way that the British did? -
Message 19
Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Monday, 21st March 2011
My point is this - Ferguson is wrong to highlight the main difference between British and Spanish America as the ownership of property. The main difference was economic activity.
Spain was primarily concerned with mining gold and silver. What other significant exports came from their colonies aside from these metals? In contrast, North America produced tobacco and cotton, and the British Caribbean produced sugar. That is what led to the wealth of those British colonies, not ownership of land by small-holdings. In the southern US and the British Caribbean, these estates succeeded mainly because they were large plantations owned and run by a small elite. In Latin America, the haciendas were run in the same way, by a small elite, but the over-riding difference is that in the British colonies in the Americas, these colonies were feeding a market where there was a great demand, while the Spanish colonies were not.
Lest we forget, for a good hundred years after independence, the US was not particularly wealthy. But they had the institutions in place to grow their country, and that was more than just ownership of property.
Now, as to the example of Haiti....under Henri Christophe, he maintained the plantation system in the north, and as a result, his kingdom was more well-off than the south, were Petion divided up the land of the republic among newly-independent ex-slaves. Petion's Haiti was impoverished, but because the ex-slaves wanted their own plot of land, and not to work on a plantation, Petion won, and Christophe lost. So, the Haitians became more free, got their own plot of land, and their country got poorer....
With regards to Spain, they brought in a lot of gold and silver from their colonies, but little else. That was their focus in the New World, which is why they never developed islands such as Jamaica as anything more than a trading post for ships on their way to and from Mexico to pick up precious metals. The British had a different vision - they had started growing sugar with success in Barbados and St Kitts, and they wanted to do the same in Jamiaca, and any other island they captured or settled.
Spain made a simple economic mistake. A lot of money (increased gold and silver in the system) chasing fewer products, and that leads to rapid inflation. Of course, it didn't help much that Spain's economy was so much weaker than Britain and France at the time....
I'm not disputing that North America's system of democracy was much better than the autocracy that came about as a result of South America's independence. My issue is that Ferguson highlighted the ownership of property as the main factor, and that's what I disagree with.... -
Message 20
Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Monday, 21st March 2011
Gold and silver can be regarded as commodities just like other things. Many companies around today make a fortune mining these metals and selling them. Production of gold and silver can be as profitable as making sugar or cotton. If you are saying that the scale of production of the precious metals was not high in comparison with the British colonial production of sugar, then I might have some grasp of what you are saying. Do you have any figures? I also ask if you can provide data on the extent of inflation in Spain.
-
Message 21
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Monday, 21st March 2011
fascinating
The impact on the gold and silver from the Spanish Americas has been well-studied as an European-wide phenomenon. The European coinage was based almost entirely upon weight of precious metals and the credibility of the state producing the coins. Hence the gold "florins" from Florence were particularly prized.
The Quantity Theory of Money dictated that with an increase in the Supply of gold and silver its value went down, especially as Spain- in its golden age, and expecting to enjoy the riches of those other Indies- was especially dependent upon imports. And the inflation effect had an impact throughout Europe- arguably giving an extra impetus to the entrepreneurship of England, as feudal values including the revenues of the Crown lands tended to be fairly static, whereas industry and trade could expand more easily.
The inflation in the Sixteenth Century was real enough. A price index worked out in the 1950's took the price of an average English "basket" in 1451-75 as 100. Things had been stable and continued to be stable until c1510. Then there was a fast rise up to 1521 when the index rose to 167. Things settled there until the 1540's when the level stabilised around 150.
By the later 1540's, however, the index had risen rapidly to 200, to 270 in 1555, 370 in 1556, and 409 in 1557.
After this peak the price index dropped to only 230 in 1558, after which things rose steadily. By 1570 it had reached 300 again, and in the 1580's the level was around 340.
But the last decade of the century saw a violent rise:
1594 ....381
1595 ..... 515
1596 ..... 505
1597 ..... 685
1598 .... 579
1599 ..... 474
1600. .... 459
Dr. Peter Ramsey whose book supplies these figures says "The most popular and widespread explanation of the price-rise.. attributes it in the main to European imports of American silver. This is an extension to English history of the theories of Earl J. Hamilton, who found an apparently close correlation between rising prices in Spain and imports of American silver at Seville. [But he goes on] The argument that the rise was due to the silver imports is in fact only partly valid even for Spain. It is a very dangerous and misleading argument when applied to 16th century England"
For one thing the great Potosi mine was only discovered in 1545: and somewhere in my old notes I think I have figures for Spain's bulliion imports over the Spanish American period.
Spanish silver did rise quckly to a peak in the 1590's : but in this period he thinks that English price-rises owed much to rising population and demand for food, compounded by bad harvests in the 1590's, and the European-wide increase in the cost of government. Of course Henry VIII specifically impacted on English prices when he debased the coinage in the 1540's.
Nevertheless from Spain's point of view, as generally Spain failed to produce what it needed for its homeland, and signally failed to produce for its Empire (hence the granting to the British of the right of Assiento by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713) any price rise in its European trade partners also meant that they got less for their pound of silver.
After all from an English History point of view getting the Right of Assiento (to sell goods direct to the Spanish Americas) led directly to the investment mania of the South Sea Bubble.
Cass -
Message 22
Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Monday, 21st March 2011
Thank you for those figures Cass. Broadly, prices were at 150 in the 1540s and at about 500 in the last decade of the 16th century. You may call a rise of a factor of 3.3 as 'violent' but is that really so? In the past 60 years, I would say that prices have risen far more than that in Britain. I have a book that shows average wages were about Β£1000 a year in the late 1960s, now the average is at least 20 times that.
The inflation rate of the late 16th century would be average about 2% (though volatile because most of the prices would be for food which was subject to extreme price changes because of differences in harvests), which in modern terms is quite a gentle rise. -
Message 23
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Monday, 21st March 2011
fascinating
Dr. Ramsey (who was our lecturer on Tudor period) addressing the question as to what kind of impact this level of inflation had upon the emerging money economy.. What I thought was interesting with those Tudor dates was the impact of Tudor royal family business.. Particularly the minority of Edward VI, the Marian period, and the accession of Elizabeth.. I would suggest that the "kingdom effect" was still strong.
I looked up European imports of precious metals 1492-1803, when 90% of the world's precious metal supply came from Spanish and Portuguese Empires
period pesos p.a remarks
1492-1500 250,000 West Indies
1500-1545 3m spoils & early Sp mining
1545-1600 11m Potosi Zacatas & Guanjua (Bolivia&Mexico)
1601-1700 16m Potosi declines others increase
1701- 1750 22.5m Brazilian gold height. New mines Mexico
1751- 1803 35m Mexico & Peru
c1803 43.5m
The effect was to ruin Spain. In the 1740's Spanish trade was worth 38m pesos. 30 million from the export of silver and 4m from the export of gold. In other words Spain produced hardly anything for export- apart perhaps from extreme luxury goods. The bullion kept its value and did not increase much by being transported> Moreover there were heavy taxes which made smuggling and piracy very attractive. By the 17th C 90% of trade was in foreign ships- which had to be paid for. And Portuguese within the Empire became "receivers" of smuggled goods,while after its capture by England Jamaica became a centre for illicit trade.
1655-1685 piracy cost Spain and Spanish America 60m crowns.
Cass -
Message 24
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Wednesday, 23rd March 2011
Re: Message 19.
Shivfan,
I rather agree with what you say in your message.
Yes the main difference was economic activity.
You wrote:
"With regards to Spain, they brought in a lot of gold and silver from their colonies, but little else. That was their focus in the New World, which is why they never developed islands such as Jamaica as anything more than a trading post for ships on their way to and from Mexico to pick up precious metals. The British had a different vision - they had started growing sugar with success in Barbados and St Kitts, and they wanted to do the same in Jamiaca, and any other island they captured or settled.
Spain made a simple economic mistake. A lot of money (increased gold and silver in the system) chasing fewer products, and that leads to rapid inflation. Of course, it didn't help much that Spain's economy was so much weaker than Britain and France at the time...."
Agreed again as with Cass' messages 21 and 23.
I have discussed the Spanish question in the time with the Canadian Erik Lindsay on these boards and it reemerged again in message 12 of the Spanish Inquisition thread:
And further in message 14 of the thread: The gold standard. Why was it discarded? by the same Erik Lindsay:
I even read somewhere in my research that French men went to work in Spain, while there was not enough qualified personel in Spain and returning home took the gold earnings with them to consume and strengthen the French economy...
See also chapter 8 and 7 of:
And:
And:
Kind regards and with esteem,
Paul.
PS: For the other contributors of this thread: to answer to the original post as promised in message 12 I have first to read again the more than one hundred pages of the two threads I mentioned there of a French messageboard. And we discussed the question already on these boards in a thread: Why the West and not the East? Be patient with me... -
Message 25
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Wednesday, 23rd March 2011
Addendum to previous message.
Other PS:
As we are disucussing again economics and politics I hope that my Dutch friend: Poldertijger is still reading the messageboard?
Poldertijger, where are you?
Kind regards and with esteem,
Paul. -
Message 26
Posted by Minette Minor (U14272111) on Wednesday, 23rd March 2011
fascination,
I think it fair to say from what I've read that you represent what is possibly wrong with society today. You make statements with no foundation or explanation. You begin with the c17th concept of actually being able to own land. Many civilizations and I use that word advisedly, built their entire way of life on "husbandary" of the Land not ownership. Bearing in mind what has recently happened in Japan, can we ever really "own" the land, sea or sky for that matter? Simply a thought.
We can only claim "ownership" through the use of force if it is threatened. As for Technology and Science ... These are not Western inventions! They have evolved wherever people have evolved in groups to work out problems. Marco Polo was shocked by the advanced "civilization" of the Chinese and the Arabs gave us Mathmatics and the concept of O or zero without which maths of today would not be able to function, this could be continued ad infinitum.
Niall Fergusson, whom I once admired, I understand that his "period" is basically 1848 and what caused it, is proving a point rather than exploring it for which he would have know a great deal about Anthropolgy and Geography to say nothing of Philosophy. Northern Europeans ASSUME that everyone else wishes to live as they do which is blatently not so. We may all share curiosty and crave wisdom but NOT all wish to be richer, own more land and subjugate others so that we may do so. The whole premise upon which this idea of Northern European Supremacy functions boils down to the idea/concept that this is as good as it gets! It arrogant and NOT all of us subscribe to this "concept".
Your lack of understanding about the gold and silver which flooded into Spain during the c16th causing hyper inflation shows that you have not fully grasped the basics of basic economics. A man or woman works and produces something. We can barter OR use something which will represent that unit of work. In the west it was decided that we would no longer barter, mainly due to the centralization of power. It was simpler to say that this unit of work and what it produced was worth this amount of gold or silver. A (hopefully) stable currency.
When the gold and silver flooded into Spain in the c16th, in vast quantities, what did it stand for? The Moors had been booted out of Southern Spain together with their industries and the Spaniards had not replaced their lost industries. The gold and silver no longer presented a unit of work. Later on in the 1920s and 1930s the Weimar Republic in Germany would print vast amounts of Deutchmarks which presented no units of work, nothing was produced to support them. If no goods are produced what is the point of money/gold/silver? They are only a means of buying something tangable. If someone is sitting in the middle of a desert a block of gold means nothing. A gallon of water is everything.
What worries me is that seem to care little about people, only currency and at some stages in human history, currency has been people. Slavery, where people of different ethnic origins were considered to be less "human" than others. The USA was founded upon Northern European settlers who took the land fro its indiginous population. Native Americans did not believe a person could actually OWN the land. The settlers killed them off and stole the land in neat parcels to anyone who cared for it, as they went further west, the government actually gave the land away to settlers. Is this civilized behaviour? In Bosnia it was called ethnic cleansing. And yet this is how the "West was Won".
I would be interested to hear what you believe to be "civilisation" because to me it simply seems to be wealth at any cost. Money matters more than human rights. Why doesn't this worry you? If you were black then less than 200 years ago in the US you would be bought and sold like a bag of grain/cotton/sugar. This doesn't worry you? -
Message 27
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Wednesday, 23rd March 2011
Minette,
that wasn't what I wanted to say via Shivfan to my friend Fascinating. Certainly not.
Kind regards,
Paul. -
Message 28
Posted by Minette Minor (U14272111) on Wednesday, 23rd March 2011
Dear Paul,
I understand that but I don't believe fascinating has outlined what he or Neill Fergusson actually mean by "civilisation". I'm vaguely familiar with Fergusson's new block buster and quite frankly it worries me.
What is civilisation in this context and what is civilized behaviour? Fergusson appears to be attempting to join up the dots which lead us.....Where? To be able to have surplus crops so that one can stop worrying about where the next meal is coming from one has to have certain geographical and anthropological assets. For example, in northern Europe we had forms of cows, an almost predictable and usually pleasant climate therefore we could till and use the land, which is what made us in Britain attractive to the Romans for example. WE could supply them with grain.
However in Australasia, the weather was often extremely hot and they had no indiginous beasts of burden. As I've said before how could a kangaroo pull a plough across a dry plain? Much the same could be said about Africa, leaving aside the kangaroos! The climate of a country can't be left out of this debate, even Egypt was totally dependent upon the inconsistancies of the Nile.
To brag that only Northern Europe actually worked out how to have a surplus crop and so allow business to flourish is simplistic. It also only deals with the medieval to early modern period to where we are today. Other areas of the world have enjoyed vibrant and healthy civilizations, which boomed for thousands of years and then declined, as no doubt we may. We can't ignore them.
But I would still like to have some clear defintion of what is considered "civilization" today. Best wishes, Minette. -
Message 29
Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Thursday, 24th March 2011
Minette, thank you for your robust reply, and I do hope you will also be able to take criticism as well as give it. I am glad to have a good debate, as long as it is without mean-ness, but in a genuine spirit of wanting to know about history.
Before we can go any further, we need to actually get clear what we are discussing. The assertion is that Western ideas and methods have come to dominate the world, and the question is how? However, before addressing the "how?" you are questioning the primary assertion (that the Western ideas dominate). In my view, you are taking a politically-correct stance and in that way you are simply turning away from the evidence in front of you.
Across almost all parts of the world, most people have already demonstrated, by their actions, that they want to have the goods that were originally produced in the West. I have a friend from Indonesia, she and her friends want to have mobile phones (invented in the West), watch TV (invented in the WEst), watch movies (invented in the West). They travel around in motorised vehicles, mainly buses, which are powered by diesel engines invented in the West.They don't want to work in a paddy field as their forefathers did, they want to try a wide range of foods from around the world, as well as indigenous foods. The wide availability of their food is because of the techniques and tools mostly brought about through Western scientific study of agriculture. When they get ill, it is true, they often use traditional herbal remedies. But when seriously ill they pay to see a doctor who is trained in Western medicine. They will gladly take anti-biotics and anaesthetics, both developed in the West.
You might say that the growing use of cars, the smoking of cigarettes, and the over-consumption of junk food, are not good choices. I agree. But these are adults making the choices. The point is: Western inventions and ways have come to dominate, because millions of people have chosen to buy those Western goods. Regardless of whether it is good or bad, these are the facts of the case, and this is what has to be explained.
Look at it from another angle, what ideas and methods from the East are now used by us? I can only think of a few, one is acupuncture, which I think can be effective in certain ways, but, seriously, how many people actually rely on this to make them well, as opposed to going to the doctor? A good percentage yes, but not the majority. Another Eastern invention is gunpowder. Yes that has played a large part in the world, but it does not dominate the day-to-day existence of most people does it?
So, first of all, can you accept that, in most parts of the world, Western ideas/methods/inventions have come to be dominant? -
Message 30
Posted by islanddawn (U7379884) on Thursday, 24th March 2011
Look at it from another angle, what ideas and methods from the East are now used by us?Μύ
Paper and printing are Eastern inventions, can't imagine life today without either. -
Message 31
Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Thursday, 24th March 2011
Paper and printing are good examples of things from the Chinese that they failed to develop fully. Forms of paper were known in the West of course, from the papyrus plant from which paper gets its name, but it was expensive. Printing by moveable type was an extremely important invention, and the Chinese did a version of that first, but is there any evidence that was carried across to the West? Or even that they thereby were able to produce lots of books in China? The method of production of the vast majority of books across the world is via printing by moveable type as invented (apparently) by Guthenberg.
-
Message 32
Posted by islanddawn (U7379884) on Thursday, 24th March 2011
The pulp papermaking process we use was first developed in China during 2nd century AD, and the process spread to the west via the islamic world by the 13th century. It was in medieval Europe that the first water mills were used to mechanise this paper making process.
The use of woodblock printing was widely used throughout Asia by 220AD and Roman Egypt by the 4th century. By the mid 7th century paper printing was relatively common and a skilled printer could produce up to 2,000 doublesided sheets per day. It had spread to Europe via christianity by the 1300s, mainly for printing religious images on cloth. The medium was first used on paper in Europe in the 1400s, after paper became more widely available.
It was in Korea that the first moveable metal (bronze) type was invented, the Jikji published in 1377 is the first known metal printed book. Gutenburg was the first to use the alloy of lead, tin and antimony which we still use today, and he was undoubtedly the "father" of the mechanised printing process that we know. But would it have been possible without those original Asian inventions and ideas on first papermaking and then printing which had spread into Europe via the Middle East. Sorry but no, I don't think so. -
Message 33
Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Friday, 25th March 2011
Has it actually been shown that the invention of printing in Korea was transmitted to the West, and so into Germany? Is there any evidence of printing materials or manuscripts coming from there into Europe? I only ask.
The fact remains that most of the manufactured goods that people buy are made using Western methods. -
Message 34
Posted by PaulRyckier (U1753522) on Friday, 25th March 2011
Re: Message 28.
Minette,
I thank you very much for your reply.
Best wishes, your friend,
Paul. -
Message 35
Posted by Minette Minor (U14272111) on Saturday, 26th March 2011
Dear fascinating,
Meant to listen to "hey noney noney" Much Ado About nothing, love the music but have the words which distract BUT why robust! I actually don't like to cause friction. I appear to have a "reputation", of which i'm tired.
Saw Niall Fregusson on "Question Time" the other day. Bags of money but is his brain still functioning? It worries me. WHAT has the west given to the world in modern times? Obesity, fast food, plastic people, children whose only wish is to be rich and famous - they can't say what for - teenage pregnancies, drug addiction, the culture of "celebrity" and might is right so don't 'diss me!
Do you like this brief summation? I could have continued BUT would still like to know just how Fergusson and you for that matter would have a kangaroo pull a plough????? Please admit that Geograpghy has some involvement in surplus supplies of grain and what IS your definition of Civilization? Please.
Cheers Minette. -
Message 36
Posted by Minette Minor (U14272111) on Saturday, 26th March 2011
Dear Paul,
It's always a pleasure to see you here.
Hopefully your friend too! Minette. -
Message 37
Posted by an ex-nordmann - it has ceased to exist (U3472955) on Saturday, 26th March 2011
Has it actually been shown that the invention of printing in Korea was transmitted to the West, and so into Germany? Is there any evidence of printing materials or manuscripts coming from there into Europe?
Μύ
There are a few examples of just such a transition. The most well known is when Marco Polo's book (hand copied in its day, ironically) included a description of a Chinese wood block printing technique and apparatus which in turn is credited with having kick-started a 13th century printing industry in Italy based on this design of press, though the restrictions of the material confined output to pamphlets, inserts, illustrations and the like, rather than whole books. Polo's book's popularity also encouraged an interest in oriental curiosities as valued collectables, among which were printed documents and images of a quality well in excess of that which could be achieved with woodcut. It was known that these were being produced using metal type though the technique was neither fully understood nor considered worth the investment of finance to perfect since the little of it which was known included the fact that the few presses which could manage it obviously required thousands of interchangeable blocks to produce one volume and must therefore have been heavily subsidised state enterprises, a business model not attractive to Europeans of the day.
Gutenburg's first innovation seems to have been the realisation that this huge number of plates and type was because of the oriental alphabet and that the Roman alphabet therefore would require considerably less moveable type. His second innovation was the choosing of a suitable metal, though he might have been aided in this by previous experimentation in Italy, where metal blocks for printing illustrations were already in use and undergoing perfection. The inclusion of antimony in a lead and tin alloy appears to have been employed there first. Once these concepts had been realised the design of an apparatus to employ them profitably, though still a considerable innovation in its own right, was made much easier. In fact his first device was simly an existing olive press imaginatively adapted.
The Chester Beatty collection in Dublin, for example, includes some Korean printed manuscripts which had found their way into Europe in the two centuries before Gutenburg, as do similar collections elsewhere, and we can assume therefore that Europeans such as Gutenburg, while still having to originate much of the technology themselves, at least had available proofs that someone else had already managed the feat and was providing a standard to emulate. It wasn't the most straightforward transfer of skills and technique between continents therefore, but to infer that the European "discovery" of printing owes nothing to its oriental predecessor is also wide of the mark, I think. -
Message 38
Posted by Minette Minor (U14272111) on Saturday, 26th March 2011
Nordmann,
So very nice to see you use your mind. -
Message 39
Posted by islanddawn (U7379884) on Sunday, 27th March 2011
Thanks Nordmann.
I have been trying to find the original article that I had read on this and other sources to formulate a reply but, as ever, you have addressed the topic with far more knowledge and said it all more eloquently than I could have hoped to. -
Message 40
Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Sunday, 27th March 2011
Minette, you ask what the West has given to the world in modern times. In the sense of actual giving,many billions of pounds worth of foreign aid. In the sense of selling, I would say the vast majority of the material wealth of the world has come via Western methods. What I am saying is, in a nutshell, people from around the world have freely decided to buy Western products (or products at least invented in the West). I am not judging whether that is good or bad, it is just a FACT. If you say that is not a fact then please say why.
I am not going to get into a long discussion about what is meant by civilisation. -
Message 41
Posted by shivfan (U2435266) on Sunday, 27th March 2011
This particular episode was interesting....
In a nutshell, it dealt with the 'app' of 'modern medicine', and how the French used it to aid them in their colonisation of western Africa. But I found Niall Ferguson's reference to eugenics and its development in German colonies very interesting, and alarming. I've started a separate thread on it....
But I had a couple of nit-picks to make....
1) Ferguson kept referring over and over to a quote from Mahatma Gandhi about western civilisation, as if Gandhi's philosophy revolved around that quote. That's not at all accurate. Gandhi was just giving a clever answer to a silly question.
2) Ferguson rightly pointed out that slavery was abolished during the French revolution, and that the ex-slaves in west Africa were given French citizenship and the right to vote. Actually, it wasn't just in Africa - it was in the Caribbean too. Ferguson was trying to show that the French were quite enlightened in their dealings with black people, compared to other European countries. But that was only true to a point. It was mainly Robespierre and the Jacobins who gave slaves their freedom, and when the reactionaries tried to counter that revolutionary move, it led to the Haitian Revolution. Also, that move was an aberration, and little more. When Napoleon came to power, he immediately rolled back any freedoms granted to black Africans, and reinstituted slavery. The reactionary forces were in power in France and French colonies, and it wasn't until after Britain granted freedom to their slaves in 1833-1838 that the French began to think about following suit. I'm surprised that Ferguson glossed over this....
3) Ferguson said that practised a policy of 'intergration' with black Africans. Again, that's not quite true. The French never encouraged miscegenation at the same level that the Portuguese did. This was just a brief episode during the Jacobin ascendancy during the French Revolution, and little more.
Aside from those minor points, I thought it was a thought-provoking episode.... -
Message 42
Posted by cloudyj (U1773646) on Monday, 28th March 2011
It worries me. WHAT has the west given to the world in modern times? Μύ
Apart from vast amounts fo life saving medicine? A market for their surplus food? A market for their minerals and oil? Computers to log on to history messageboards? Mobile phones so they can keep in touch with each other? The idea that a country should be ruled by someone chosen by the people rather than the hardest army? Fridges so their food doesn't rot?
teenage pregnancies, drug addiction,Μύ
Despite the hysteria, a teenage girl in modern Britain is only half as likely to be pregnant as she would have been 50 years ago.
Drug addiction has a long tradition and certainly wasn't given to the rest of the world by the West. Pretty much every civilization ever has developed its own native drug use. Even during Britain's shameful Opium Wars the demand was an indigenous Chinese demand, not something stoked up by evil imperialists. -
Message 43
Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Monday, 28th March 2011
Despite the hysteria, a teenage girl in modern Britain is only half as likely to be pregnant as she would have been 50 years ago.
Μύ
Can you provide the figures? -
Message 44
Posted by WarsawPact (U1831709) on Monday, 28th March 2011
Here's the figures you asked for...
Average teenage girl 1961
.|..)
.|..\
(....)
.|.|
Average teenage girl 2011
.|..)
.|.|
(../
.|| -
Message 45
Posted by somewhatsilly (U14315357) on Monday, 28th March 2011
1955 births 33 000
1971 84 500 abortions 23 000
2009 44 000 44 000
-
Message 46
Posted by somewhatsilly (U14315357) on Monday, 28th March 2011
Sorry, this stupid website has messed up the table but I hope you can understand it.
1971 and 2009 figures are births and then abortions. -
Message 47
Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Monday, 28th March 2011
So, in reality, teenage pregnancies (births + abortions) are now MUCH HIGHER than they were 50 years ago.
-
Message 48
Posted by cloudyj (U1773646) on Monday, 28th March 2011
I need to pause before I post. I stumbled across the "fact" in the Economist earlier this year and in retrospect realize they must have been talking about births.
So, in reality, teenage pregnancies (births + abortions) are now MUCH HIGHER than they were 50 years ago. Μύ
Taking 1969, for instance, there were 58 births and abortions per 1000, compared to 54.2 in 2009. Prior to 1967 abortion was illegal, so it's difficult to tell how many we should add to the figures, though some estimates (for women of all ages) are here:
-
Message 49
Posted by fascinating (U1944795) on Monday, 28th March 2011
Please dont move the goalposts, you said 50 years ago ie 1961. Before then, the figures show much less teenage pregnancy - this at a time of no sex education and less accessability to contraception.
Teenage pregnancy is not a worry if it means adult teenagers who are in settled committed relationship (usually means married) being pregnant. What is most worrying is teenagers under 16, who are still children, having children themselves. The figures show huge rise in pregnancy out of wedlock, also huge increase, since the 1950s, of children having children. -
Message 50
Posted by cloudyj (U1773646) on Monday, 28th March 2011
Please dont move the goalposts,Μύ
In my defence I did say I'd got it wrong based on misremembering an article. So any subsequent comments are therefore rendered meaningless?
That'll be an interesting precedent for the future of this board.
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