that China once turned its back on. Not any more. Today, Admiral Zheng He, the personification of Chinese expansionism and for so long forgotten, is a hero in China. In the words of the greatest economic reformer of the post-Mao era, Deng Xiaoping:
No country that wishes to become developed today can pursue closed-door policies. We have tasted this bitter experience and our ancestors have tasted it. In the early Ming Dynasty in the reign of Yongle when Zheng He sailed the Western Ocean, our country was open. After Yongle died the dynasty went into decline. China was invaded. Counting from the middle of the Ming Dynasty to the Opium Wars, through 300 years of isolation China was made poor, and became backward and mired in darkness and ignorance. No open door is not an option.
It is a plausible reading of history (and one remarkably close to Adam Smith’s).
Thirty years ago, if you had predicted that within half a centuryChina’s would be the world’s biggest economy, you would have been dismissed as a fantasist. But if back in 1420 you had predicted that Western Europe would one day be producing more than the whole of Asia, and that within 500 years the average Briton would be nine times richer than the average Chinese, you would have been regarded as no more realistic. Such was the dynamic effect of competition in Western Europe – and the retarding effect of political monopoly in East Asia.
Science
I feigned a mighty interest in science; and, by dint of pretending, soon became really attached to it. I ceased to be a man of affairs … I resolved to leave my native land, and my withdrawal from court supplied a plausible excuse. I waited on the king; I emphasized the great desire I had to acquaint myself with the sciences of the West, and hinted that my travels might even be of service to him.
Montesquieu
It would be of some use to explain how the sandy country of Brandenburg came to wield such power that greater efforts have been marshalled against it than were ever mustered against Louis XIV.
Voltaire
MICROGRAPHIA
Europe’s path to the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment was very far from straight and narrow; rather, it was long and tortuous. It had its origins in the fundamental Christian tenet that Church and state should be separate. ‘Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s’ (Matthew 22: 21) is an injunction radically different from that in the Koran, which insists on the indivisibility of God’s law as revealed to the Prophet and the unity of any power structure based on Islam. It was Christ’s distinction between the temporal and the spiritual, adumbrated in the fifth century by St Augustine’s
City of God
(as opposed to the Roman Empire’s ‘City of Man’), that enabled successive European rulers to resist the political pretensions of the papacy in Rome; indeed, until the reassertion of papal power over the investiture (appointment) of the clergy by Gregory VII (1073–85), it was the secular authorities that threatened to turn the Pope into a puppet.
Europe before 1500 was a vale of tears, but not of ignorance. Much classical learning was rediscovered in the Renaissance, often thanks to contact with the Muslim world. There were important innovations too. The twelfth century saw the birth of polyphony, a revolutionary breakthrough in the history of Western music. The central importance of the experimental method was proposed by Robert Grosseteste and seconded by Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century. In around 1413 Filippo Brunelleschi invented linear perspective in painting. The first true novel was the anonymous
La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes
(1500). But a more decisive breakthrough than the Renaissance was the advent of the Reformation and the ensuing fragmentation of Western Christianity after 1517. This was in large measure because of the revolutionary role of the printing press, surely the single most
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The war in 202