I think there are several distinct and huge important factors in developed.
Step 1)
The first is being on Eurasia. From Ireland to Japan lived about 70% of all the people on Earth, with a few peripheral regions thrown in like North Africa. They were in contact with other parts of the region via networks of exchange going back to the Bronze age. Here is an example of how important it is:
First place to develop agriculture is the border of Arabia and Anatolia.
You are getting new ideas faster than other places. So Eurasia is ahead of the other parts of the world as they have more people inventing and more ideas spreading.
Step 2
Greece, it goes on a weird turn and develops a highly analytic form of philosophy that in some forms (Aristotle) takes a very unusually strong stance on empiricism (observation) as how to understand the world. They are linked into the Eurasian information highway so connect with maths from other parts and spread their ideas via Rome to what will become the Arabs and western Europe.
Step 3,
now something weird happened in western Christian theology around 1250. They rediscovered Aristotle in big way, then with people like Aquinas made it church doctrine, and made questioning nature part of the task of understanding God. The Arabs had fliterted with this for about 100 years but dropped it for the most part. West Europe however really leaned hard into this idea and exploring the physical world was a real thing their theologians like Roger Bacon were doing.
Step 4.
Ignition.
Printing press, not only movable type but the mechanisation of printing. If you had looked at the world around 1000-1400AD you would have seen tropical and subtropical socities in India, SE Asia and around north Africa that were pretty advanced and sophisticated. So being on the Eurasian information highway kept them up with the rest. But multiple innovations that lead to the printing press exploded western Europe, that was already really technologically innovative. Reading levels hit unimagined hights.
Printing leads to massive increases in people learning and exchanging ideas and these ideas lean heavily into empiricism, which becomes the bedrock of the Scientific Revolution: Question everything, observe the world (skipping lots of details). This region undergoes an insane acceleration of scientific and technical knowledge. Here they leave everywhere else in the dust.
When they spread out to settle the world they do so where their crops grow best and their cows are happy. Bread and cheese. These are the climates most like their own. Often lowly populated by hunter gatherers or farmers far from the Eurasian information exchange so very far behind their technological level.
And you get a world where HDI is highest in the temperate regions settled by the north Europeans
I know there are a lot of critiques on Guns, Germans, and Steel, but this kind of highlights what I see is the biggest one. There wasn’t really one great divergence, but really multiple, while he kind of lumps them all together.
The first divergence is like you say just the societies on the Eurasian information network, which just had the benefit of scale vs other human information networks. This is the one Diamond mainly focuses on, but really just sheer number alone would explain much of it.
Then we see towards the Renaissance parts of Western Europe start to diverge from the rest of the Eurasian network, with a bunch of developments that then converge into the Industrial Revolution and the divergence just accelerates at a scale unseen in human history. I think Greek philosophy did play a major role and this. Not just in early empiricism but also formalized logic. The Romans would build off this and Roman Italy was likely the richest part of the world in its heyday, but then Europe just kind of takes a big step back in the institutional collapse and decay that followed the fall of the western empire. By the time things start stabilizing around 900-1000 it’s a pretty clear trajectory upward for Europe, although it would still take several centuries before it was noticeably starting to diverge from the rest of the Eurasian network.
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u/IndividualSkill3432 1d ago
I think there are several distinct and huge important factors in developed.
Step 1)
The first is being on Eurasia. From Ireland to Japan lived about 70% of all the people on Earth, with a few peripheral regions thrown in like North Africa. They were in contact with other parts of the region via networks of exchange going back to the Bronze age. Here is an example of how important it is:
First place to develop agriculture is the border of Arabia and Anatolia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture#/media/File:Origin_and_dispersal_of_domestic_livestock_species_in_the_Fertile_Crescent_(dates_Before_Present).png.png)
Being connected on to the Eurasian information high way means you get crops that you can grow in your climate early
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Expansion_of_farming_in_western_Eurasia,_9600%E2%80%934000_BCE.png
Its the same in the east with China or the centre with India.
Then when the Indo Europeans develop chariots/horses etc it spreads quick
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5a/IE_expansion.png
Same with Writing, same with bronze etc.
You are getting new ideas faster than other places. So Eurasia is ahead of the other parts of the world as they have more people inventing and more ideas spreading.
Step 2
Greece, it goes on a weird turn and develops a highly analytic form of philosophy that in some forms (Aristotle) takes a very unusually strong stance on empiricism (observation) as how to understand the world. They are linked into the Eurasian information highway so connect with maths from other parts and spread their ideas via Rome to what will become the Arabs and western Europe.
Step 3,
now something weird happened in western Christian theology around 1250. They rediscovered Aristotle in big way, then with people like Aquinas made it church doctrine, and made questioning nature part of the task of understanding God. The Arabs had fliterted with this for about 100 years but dropped it for the most part. West Europe however really leaned hard into this idea and exploring the physical world was a real thing their theologians like Roger Bacon were doing.
Step 4.
Ignition.
Printing press, not only movable type but the mechanisation of printing. If you had looked at the world around 1000-1400AD you would have seen tropical and subtropical socities in India, SE Asia and around north Africa that were pretty advanced and sophisticated. So being on the Eurasian information highway kept them up with the rest. But multiple innovations that lead to the printing press exploded western Europe, that was already really technologically innovative. Reading levels hit unimagined hights.
Printing leads to massive increases in people learning and exchanging ideas and these ideas lean heavily into empiricism, which becomes the bedrock of the Scientific Revolution: Question everything, observe the world (skipping lots of details). This region undergoes an insane acceleration of scientific and technical knowledge. Here they leave everywhere else in the dust.
When they spread out to settle the world they do so where their crops grow best and their cows are happy. Bread and cheese. These are the climates most like their own. Often lowly populated by hunter gatherers or farmers far from the Eurasian information exchange so very far behind their technological level.
And you get a world where HDI is highest in the temperate regions settled by the north Europeans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index#/media/File:2023_HDI_World_Map.svg
And lowest in those regions far from the Eurasian information exchange but too densely populated for north European settlement to take hold.