0.6 The end of the west  (Page 5/19)

By the end of the 13th century, several trends had emerged that changed the course of history. Islam had become less innovative and Christian Europe was beginning to experience the intellectual ferment that the Muslim realm had earlier known. The tensions unlocked by competing schools of friars applying Aristotelian rationalism were making Christianity a more individualistic faith, limiting the power of poorly-educated local priests. Economic and social changes prompted by waves of urbanisation, weakened clans and strengthened individual accountability. Finally, the emergence of science brought a measure of control and some capacity to predict events.

The first breakthrough was in the Italian city-states, where the wealth amassed by merchants and bankers in the 14th century sparked the renaissance. The second explosion of wealth accrued to the merchant-adventurers, first from Portugal and Spain (whose lands had been occupied by the Arabs and who knew their astrolabes, sextants, trigonometry and charts) and then to the Dutch, (who had learned from the Spanish who occupied them until the 16th century), and later the English, (whose fortunes were intertwined with all three). The success of these states in exploring the globe and widening the reach of Christian Europe built the foundations of Western economic and political dominance.

As the Abbasids had earlier learned in a different context, a spirit of enquiry, extensive travel and the acquisition of knowledge sat uncomfortably in Europe with papal infallibility and episcopal and monastic privileges. The emergence of rational humanism, epitomised by Erasmus, and the reformation initiated by Luther and Calvin, broke the monopoly power of the Catholic Church and paved the way for the 18th century Enlightenment. The great advances in scientific enquiry that this permitted, led to the industrial revolution and the rapid advance of the British empire a century later.

Consolidation of the Western paradigm

The past two hundred years, since the advent of the industrial revolution, saw the remaking of the political map of Europe many times, and the birth – and growth from 13 to 50 states, by conquest, purchase and pacification – of the United States. The origins of these changes lay in the crisis of monarchical systems. The institutions of the agrarian era, based on kinship – monarchy, feudal aristocracy and clan membership – and ownership of land as the index of wealth, became dysfunctional in the late-17th and 18th centuries. Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Adam Smith and Hume in the 18th century (building on Descartes’ proposition that cogito, ergo sum) and John Stuart Mill, Bentham, Hegel and Marx in the 19th, provided ethical and logical rationales for change. Their views fuelled the American and French revolutions, opening the way in Europe for the ascendancy of Napoleon, the collapse of empires (though the Ottomans and Austro-Hungarians only passed from the scene at Versailles), and the birth of nations, as well as the October Revolution and the Bolshevik assumption of power in Russia.. In the United States, meanwhile, a civil war in the 1860s which cost over 600 000 lives, prompted the industrialisation of North America.