Why Europe: An analysis of Jack Goldstone's Theories

I have here posted my reaction to a reading of Jack Goldstone's book on the rise of Western dominance to the world. It's unedited, but enjoy:

In his brief volume on World History entitled Why Europe? – The Rise of the West in World History, Jack Goldstone lays out all of the traditional theories on why Europe and the United States became the dominant powers in world history and proceeds to debunk them. In the end, Goldstone lays out six reasons why Europe (and eventually the United States) became the dominant powers in the world. Of these six reasons, four pertain to science while the other two to religion. To go into all of the approaches discussed by Goldstone in detail would be a task for a book longer than Goldstone’s itself, so I will simply point out one or two reasons I find compelling and one or two I find less well-founded.

One of the major shortcomings of Goldstone’s argument is his treatment of European exploration and expansion. The crux of Goldstone’s argument seems to lie in the premise that technology developed by the West enabled them to conquer vast swaths of land. He states, “It was not colonialism and conquest that made possible the rise of the West, but the reverse – it was the rise of the West (in terms of technology) and the decline of the rest that made possible the full extension of European power across the globe”(69). While the importance of European technology cannot be underestimated in their conquest of first the Americas and eventually East Asia, disease must also be accounted for. Although Goldstone at first makes significant reference to disease, his conclusion (excerpted above) makes no reference to the role of disease. There is something contradictory here. Earlier in this chapter, Goldstone wrote that “it is difficult to know whether the death toll among Native Americans reached 90, 95, or even 98 percent… but it is clear that the devastation was unlike anything else known to world history”(63). I find this argument much more compelling. The disease which wiped out at least 90% of the population of the Americas allowed for European control and eventually colonization. The precious metals mined in this hemisphere were what initially allowed the Europeans entry into the Asian markets, for as Goldstone pointed out, prior to acquiring precious metals, the Europeans had nothing of interest to Asians. After gaining control of the Americas, Europeans used the raw materials here to further their trade with Asia and additionally, to improve agricultural practices to, as Goldstone consistently put it, “catch up” with Asia. Access to natural resources has been essential in the history of expanding economic production from the forest-clearing of the Roman Empire to the westward expansion of the United States and the oil-pumping in the Middle East and Venezuela. In looking at the broad trends in history, I find this resource-based argument more compelling than the idea that superior European military technology led to Western world dominance.

Another argument which I found to be somewhat fallacious was Goldstone’s rejection of Protestantism as having a significant impact on the rise of the West. Among his six concluding reasons for the rise of the West, Goldstone lists “a climate of pluralism, rather than of conformity and state-imposed orthodoxy, and of Anglican Church support for the new science”(169). Earlier, Goldstone had discussed how it was not Protestantism in and of itself that contributed to progress but this climate of openness in general that encouraged economic growth. The nations that achieved this climate of pluralism, however, were Britain and the Netherlands – two Protestant nations. For pluralism to exist, it took a challenge to the Catholic Church from somewhere, and that challenge came from Protestantism. Goldstone also fails to note that while the power of the major Catholic powers of Europe has been rather ephemeral, the power of the major Protestant powers has been longer lasting. While Spain and France both had brief golden ages (Spain in the 16th and France in the early 19th centuries), it is German and British influence that has been longer lasting. Goldstone’s evidence against Protestantism’s influence is the decline of the Netherlands as world power, yet this ignores the obvious reason for this – their limited size/population – compared with other European and world powers.

Historians have also offered other alternatives of which I found Goldstone’s rejections compelling. He seems to successfully refute the claim that different family norms played any role in the rise of the West. Similarly, I find his debunking of the theory that the political breakdown of Europe into competing nation-states attributed to rise of the West equally compelling. While Goldstone’s main argument seems to be that the rise of the West was the result of superior methodology and technology relating to science, and this argument is certainly valid, I find the arguments for Protestantism’s and America’s conquest much more convincing theories as to the rise to dominance of the West militarily, economically, and culturally.