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The Sunday Paper – Horsemen of the Apocalypse: The Mongol Empire and the Great Divergence

From a somewhat unexpected source comes new work on the age-old question of why the East failed to industrialize and why the Industrial Revolution was a Euro-centric affair.

Rafael Torres Gaviria, from the Department of Economics at the Universidad de los Andes, Colombia believes the answer, in a nutshell, is Mongols.

The mystery is more complicated than it may at first appear. Not only do we have to answer the question ‘How did the West gather the intellectual wherewithal to power their progress?’, but also ‘How did India, China and the Middle East slide backwards from a better starting position?’

The paper is dense and well worked so my summary is going to be an injustice; but in the interest of brevity here are the key points:

  1. As the Mongols swept across Asia to Europe their brutality and destructiveness did immeasurable damage to the societies they came into contact with. The biggest problem of their legacy was a taste for centralized authority which persisted even after they were gone.
  2. Europe benefited in two ways. It stayed fragmented and competed against itself which prompted innovation in all manner of fields. It also benefited from access to the best ideas from the East which came their way via new trade routes the Mongols opened up.
  3. The devastation the Mongols caused in their occupied territories in the East retarded trade at a time when Europe was just starting to become a trading powerhouse. Europe also found uses for gunpowder and the printing press that Easterners hadn’t explored.
  4. Once the patterns of poor growth in the East, due to depopulation and impacts to trade that Mongol violence had occasioned, and rising growth in the West due to new trade and technological application took hold they became self-reinforcing trends.

We teach history these days in a less deterministic way then when I was at school so I’m inclined to a degree of skepticism on analysis that goes ‘from a, to b and therefore to c’; but, nonetheless this work has a lot of intuitive appeal as it answers not just one huge developmental question but two.

You can access the work in full via the following link Mongols and the Great Divergence.

Happy Sunday

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