Why didn’t Asia explore the rest of the world, given their head start in developing civilization and lack of a religiously inspired period of stagnation (the dark ages) before the Europeans did?
What were they doing while the Europeans were busy fighting each other after they gave up the technological advances of the Romans? Did Asia have it’s own dark age, or were there other factors limiting the development?
Well, the primary motivation of the European age of discovery was to get to Asian markets. In Asia, they could achieve the same thing by walking out the front door.
Probably the short answer is “they did”. The Arabs, for example, advanced math and science while Europe was stuck in the dark (for ages).
The real question is “why did European technology suddenly outgrow everyone else by leaps and bounds starting about 1500 or so?”
A good book to read is “Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond. He suggests part of the benefit was happenstance. Europe ran east to west, with roughly similar geology and ecology, so an invention in one place worked with everyone - as opposed to, say, Africa where developments like new crops only worked in the same tropical band. Then, there’s the avialability of resources, the competition of a number of competing states in close proximity,versus the monolithic Chinese empire. then there’s the luck of finding resources like coal and ores available to exploit when wood became scarce, and the luck of finding animals like horses that became excellent war animals… etc. (Mentions the fact that zebras are useless as domestic animals because one way they fight back is to take a sizeable bite out of whoever is bothering them…)
That’s actually an incredibly good point that I hadn’t thought about before. Europeans were motivated in large part for the desire for Asian goods such including silks, spices, tea and so forth. Even the discovery of the Americas was based on a desire for Asian trade goods. In contrast, Europeans didn’t have much to offer Asians in return except gold. So the driver for Asian exploration really wasn’t there.
There are all the other factors that “Guns, Germs and Steel” goes into, such as the powerful stabilising influence China, but it seems like the major reason for the lack of exploration by South or East Asians is likely to be a lack of trade goods from abroad. You can grow most temperate crops in tropical climates far more cheaply than you can import them in wooden ships, but without glasshouses the reverse is not true.
First off, the Dark Ages were not religiously inspired. It can be best attributed to the collapse of the Roman Empire.
In his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, David Landes makes the case that Asia (China specifically) was too homogeneous. There wasn’t enough competition between societies to spur innovation. Europe took off at the start of the Renaissance when there were many competing ideas and nations.
Cultural attitude was also a big factor, at least as far as China was concerned. China simply didn’t care about what happened in other countries. There was zero interest in international trade, and why should there be, when they had the best of the best right there at home? Likewise, why should they care about what the underprivileged barbarians across the sea were doing?
Which isn’t to say that they didn’t explore. Most notably, a series of expeditions were sent out in the 15th century to various locations in Asia and Africa. Goods were exchanged, but that wasn’t the main purpose of the expeditions; they were more like imperial favors: providing gifts of gold, silk, etc., in exchange for little novelties (unusual animals and such) and, more importantly, acknowledgment that China was the superior country.
(This egocentric attitude would backfire in a few hundred years, but that’s a whole 'nother discussion.)
This is known amongst historians of science and technology as the Needham Problem, and has been much debated for many decades. Numerous theories (mostly not exclusive of one another) have been proposed.
One possibility is that major leaps forward in intellectual culture are actually stimulate by teh emergence from a “dark age”. The great flowering of classical Greek culture followed fairly rapidly upon Greece’s emergence from their own “dark age”, as the Renaissance (and then the scientific and industrial revolutions) followed western Europe’s emergence from the “dark ages”. Even in China, I think it would be possible to see the flowering of intellectual culture in the Warring States period, from which emerged Confucianism, Taoism, and most of the other main Chinese philosophical traditions, as following on a from a “dark age” of the culture. Perhaps China’s tragedy was that it never really had a dark age again after that.
Another possibility that deserves consideration is that Christianity, with its concepts such as God as lawgiver of the universe and mankind as having dominion over the natural world, provided an intellectual background much more conducive to the development of modern science than did eastern religious and philosophical traditions.
Could it have been the Mongol sweep?
A second for GG&S. To be specific on competition, for example, if a potential Chinese explorer was turned down for funding for a voyage or enterprise, well, that was it. Game over. In Europe, if one king said “No,” there was another king across the mountains to be asked.
1493, a recent book by Charles Mann, is a really good exploration of how the Columbian Exchange transformed Asia, especially China. It goes into some detail about China’s interactions with the outside world pre-Columbian exchange.
I had read somewhere, it may have been GG&S, that the Chinese did have the technology and ships for exploration, and did send them out as you describe, but upon their return to China, the imperial court was in transition, and no one there cared to finance additional explorations, so the ships rotted and the potential of discovery was squashed, leaving a wide open field for other ship-building nations.
Add the point MLS stated about sponsor shopping.
I don’t think so. The Mongol conquest of China did not really damage Chinese civilization very much, it just replaced a Chinese dynasty of Emperors with a Mongol dynasty.
Zheng He’sexpeditions were well after the Dark Ages, 1405-1433. The Treasure ships were beached by a new Emperor, possibly as part of a factional power struggle. It would be fascinating to speculate what would have happend if the Portuguese had encountered a massive Chinese fleet on their way to India.
The main reason Zheng He’s expeditions were stopped is because they were ungodly expensive and the Ming Dynasty wasn’t in the greatest financial shape.
To add to what lisiate and cckerberos have said…
Gavin Menzies wrote a well-researched book entitled 1421 in which he describes the journeys of seven fleets under the command of Zheng He. He presents the thesis that the Chinese basically discovered the world at that time but that there was no significant follow up in terms of trade or colonisation because of political changes back in China.
His sequel 1434 proposes the thesis that the Renaissance was due in part to Chinese influence in Italy and the adoption of significant Chinese technologies and ideologies. IMO, this second book is less substantiated and while parts of the thesis may well be true there were probably many other factors involved.
Anyway, both books are a good read and relevant to the question.
I assume this is meant to be a joke?
Menzies’ work is universallyconsidered to be poorly researched and largely fabricated.
No joke. I read the book. I didn’t do follow-up research. Rather than saying well-researched I should have perhaps said that it contained a large number of citations from apparently authentic sources.
From your citations Blake, some of the evidence he has provided has been debunked and some of his conclusions are tenuous. I am hardly surprised. In fact this is what I would expect of a revisionist history. That doesn’t mean that it is all untrue however. Nor does it mean that the books have no relevance to the OP’s question.
FWIW, the one citation that he made which I am most interested in (since it concerns my corner of the globe) concerns Captain Cook’s log at the time he was trapped on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia. It was presented as evidence that Cook was aware of previous navigators of those waters. I am now going to have to look up the quotation myself.
Back on topic…
Take Gavin Menzies with a grain (or shovel) of salt. The OP’s questions
Some would say they did.
Undoubtedly. And these are mentioned in 1421.
If memory serves, GG&S points out that Isabella was the fifth or sixth potential sponsor that Columbus approached.
IIRC China remained the worlds largest economy until 1820.
I remember John Stuart Mill making the same point in On Liberty. At the time, I thought it was just idle philosophical speculation but it seems Diamond, Landes and other social scientists who’ve looked into it have confirmed this century and a half old insight.
On another note, perhaps Europe outpaced Asia precisely because of the Dark Ages. Without a collapse of the Roman empire, perhaps the Roman empire would have ended up being as stiffling an influence as the Chinese empire.
As further evidence of this, we can see that the Eastern Roman empire (Constantinople and its area of influence) seems to have stiffled Eastern Europe; it started out being considered quite rich and powerful but then the whole Eastern Europe area stagnated and finally got whooped in 1453 whereas Western Europe was able to resist being conquered and kept rising.