Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris

Author:Ian Morris [Morris, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2010-10-11T16:00:00+00:00

Guns, Germs, and Cast Iron

When Eastern social development had fallen before, from the first until the fourth century CE, it had been part of a Eurasia-wide paradox. The sharp rise in social development in the first millennium BCE had effectively shrunk the distance between the cores, and a handful of travelers, traders, and raiders had created overlapping zones of contact across the steppes and Indian Ocean. This Old World Exchange was a consequence of rising development but also generated the forces that would undermine development, and when the Western core failed to break through the hard ceiling around forty-three points, the horsemen of the apocalypse dragged down both cores.

By the ninth century Eastern development had recovered enough to set off a Second Old World Exchange. Merchants, missionaries, and migrants crossed the steppes and Indian Ocean, again building overlapping zones of contact (Figure 8.4). By Genghis Khan’s boyhood years, traders were already carrying not just luxuries such as spices and silk but also bulk foods across the Indian Ocean in quantities even Romans would have envied, and from Hormuz in the Persian Gulf to Majapahit in Java, cosmopolitan merchant cities were flourishing.

The Mongol conquest of the steppes brought stability to a second East-West artery, and Khan Ögödei, eager to turn the new capital he built at Karakorum into a worthy imperial metropolis, reportedly lured merchants there by paying 10 percent over whatever price they asked for their goods. He “would sit,” the Persian scholar Rashid al-Din wrote, “every day, after he finished his meal, on a chair outside his court, where every kind of merchandise that was to be found in the world was heaped up in piles.”

Along with merchants came clerics, drawn by the Mongols’ relaxed attitudes about religion. “Just as God gave different fingers to the hand,” Ögödei’s successor told a Christian, “so He has given different ways to men.” Curious about these ways, in 1254 the khan decided to stage a public debate among Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians. Only in Karakorum could this have happened.

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