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An anonymous substacker has written up a good piece on the Rise of the West. Essentially, he comes to the conclusion that the divergence began in the 1000-1500 A.D. period and that subsequent colonisation efforts by Europe of the rest of the world was simply an outgrowth of those earlier advantages.
This of course upends the familiar trope of "the West got rich by the backs of the Third World" so popular with leftists in the West and in countries like India, across the political spectrum. I bring this up because if the poor countries of the world today have any hope of catching up, they should first re-examine honestly why they fell behind in the first place. Yet I see precious little of that, except mostly moral grandstanding about the evils of the exploitative West.
This also has domestic political implications because a lot of white guilt-driven narratives are sprung from the narrative that the West got rich by exploitation and thus the logical corollary is that evil white people should repent (preferably through monetary reparations). The narrative that colonisation was simply a natural outgrowth of European pre-existing advantages that grew over time naturally undermines it. One could also note that the Barbary slave trade, or the slave auctions in the Ottoman Empire, shows that the Third World was far from innocent. But of course these historical facts don't have high political payoffs in the contemporary era, so they are ignored or underplayed.
I was reading about technology in Sub-Saharan Africa the other day. They bought up the University of Sankore which was apparently very big and prestigious, scholars from there blitzed their Islamic brethren in terms of erudition. Some fellow there had a very big library. Yet nobody seems to know specifically what they discovered or taught in any specific sense.
There was also metalworking in the Kongo, which was apparently very advanced. Apparently they had very good iron-working, competitive with 18th century Europeans:
I'm not terribly confident in the reliability of the source African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter. Eventually they explain that there was an ecological disaster and cheap, inferior European steel was imported anyway. Nevertheless, Kongolese slaves made good steel when they were taken to America!
But why were Kongo people being dispatched as slaves if their steel was so good? Why were the Portuguese coming to them as opposed to the Kongolese coming to Europe? For that matter, the Portuguese somehow took control of maritime trade routes all over the world from as soon as they showed up. A small kingdom like Portugal directly ruled half of Ceylon/Sri Lanka, various parts of India (Goa is still the richest Indian state), swathes of the African coast. They eventually had issues defending their global empire - but only from other Europeans like Britain, France and the Dutch. The natives weren't capable of beating back the Portuguese alone, they usually had to get help from the Dutch or somebody else. It's like the whole non-European world were NPCs, unable to withstand even small forces from Europe. They were usually in a passive position, regardless of whether they had better or worse technology.
Time after time, tiny European armies show up and dominate. Pizarro, Cortes, Clive... They usually exploited divisions amongst the locals - yet nobody manages to do the same against Europe. When the Ottomans attacked, half of Christendom united to fight at Lepanto. Later on the Poles launch the largest cavalry charge in history to save Vienna from the Turk. Only the perfidious French actually worked with the Ottomans and it was a fairly loose alliance.
I have tried looking into what exactly is in the manuscripts at Timbuktu myself and my conclusion was that the material within is mostly translations of works we have from elsewhere (both Greco-Roman and Islamic), with many of the original works being of dubious interest to a modern audience i.e. books about astrology and lists of magic spells. There may be some novel contributions to Islamic jurisprudence and accounts of historical events as well, but I remain unconvinced that there are brilliant philosophical insights or scientific discoveries waiting to be unearthed from this particular collection.
It was a great surprise to me the first time I realized that certain societies could be literate for centuries with relatively little to show for it in terms of great works. The literary output of classical Athens in a single century was easily better than the previous three thousand years of Egyptian writing combined. Even accounting for the difference in literacy rates (and just look at China to see what you can do without an alphabet), the contrast is stark.
I don't really know much about this topic. But my first assumption here would be Hellenism's spread via Alexander and the Roman adoption of Greek mores would be first to blame for Greek prominence.
Alexander appeared afterwards. The Romans arrived after him.
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