The more I learn about the history of Asia the more I wonder if it was just a quirk of history that the west ended up...

The more I learn about the history of Asia the more I wonder if it was just a quirk of history that the west ended up triumphing over them.

Whether you look at China, Japan, Thailand, Malaysia or Indonesia they were pretty advanced for their time.

What caused the West to pull ahead or for Asia to stagnate?

What could have tipped the odds in their favour?

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The westen civilizations were older (Japanese civilization only dates to the times of the Roman empire and the other civs except China are even younger)

The Chinese had crossbows at the time of Jesus and they build this massive fucking wall.

It's a shame that the vast expanse of central Asia and Himalayas blocked them from The West.

India was also similarly insulated from the West via vast distances and geographical barriers.

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Wrong

Exploitation of New World resources, Scientific method, then industrialization. You can ask why China didn't industrialize first but that basically goes into alternate history

They're not as old as the Greeks, Egyptians but many of them are as old as the Romans and older than the Brits, French, Germanics and Slavs.

Was going to post, but then saw this. The New World and prioritization of colonization was a game changer.

China was aware of India, all of South-East Asia, Africa and the Northern part of Australia. What stopped them from colonising anything?

>Wrong
Incredible argument, Japanese were basically hunter gatherers when much of Europe had agriculture, fortified towns, written languages and advanced metal working
>The Chinese had crossbows at the time of Jesus and they build this massive fucking wall.
Leaving aside the fact that that portion of the wall was built way later than the birth of Jesus And Greeks had calculated the circumference of the earth, had primordial computers, created axiomatic math which allowed them to formally demonstrate several theorems and create Euclidean geometry, wrote down several physical principles, among many other things and that the Roman had 50 kilometers long aqueducts in all their provinces from Libya to France, had an industrial production several times superior to that of the Han, equipped their whole armies with iron armors, had functioning heated baths and villas in every average city of theirs, I'd say that it's not surprising that the West prevailed

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Guns, germs, and steel.

>s but many of them are as old as the Romans and older than the Brits, French, Germanics and Slavs.
Such as? Except for the Chinese literally no one

Vietnam with the Dongsan culture.
Neolithic era started in 7000BC in Korea.
I don't know why you think having agriculture has anything to do with the beginning of a civilization considering Southern neolithic Europe isn't even a European civilization

>Vietnam with the Dongsan culture.
>Neolithic era started in 7000BC in Korea.
Hum, you do know that was a hoax right?
>considering Southern neolithic Europe isn't even a European civilization
It is though, without agriculture the cultures in Southern Europe would've never become civilizations in the bronze age and early iron age

But Neolithic Europe during that time never spoke an Indo-European language so weren't an Indo-European civilization. The people that made up those cultures we're their own thing that disappeared after race mixing from European steppe peoples

A unified China?

>But Neolithic Europe during that time never spoke an Indo-European language so weren't an Indo-European civilization
Why are you creating new and new strawmen as you go?
South Europeans still descend from Neolithic Europeans for the most part, and those culture obviously influenced the development of the later European cultures

It's not a strawman.
Those are not European civilizations. They're Neolithic farmer civilizations who have no relation to Indo European invaders. By your logic any neolithic culture is a civilization and since there were Neolithic cultures in Asia around the same time as Europe your whole argument is moot.

>Those are not European civilizations. They're Neolithic farmer civilizations who have no relation to Indo European invaders
They have no relation to Southern Europeans civilizations like Greece? you're kidding right, 80-90% of their DNA came from the Neolithic and Calcolithic cultures of the Agean, as well as agriculture, metal working, their ships, and even the urban sites which were in many cases, such as Argos or Corinth, inhabited without a break, I think you have no idea what you're talking about, Mycenaeans were much more similar to Minoans both in genes and in technology and in culture than to someone living in France or Britain during the bronze age

>and since there were Neolithic cultures in Asia around the same time as Europe your whole argument is moot.
First of all I wasn't talking originally about "Neolithic cultures" you're putting words in my mouth, I was implicitly talking just about ancient cultures like the early Greeks, the Iberians, the Celts, the Venetian or the Etruscans who had cities and complex technologies while Japanese were still a mix of hunter gatherers and primitive farmers as well as most of South East Asia/Indonesia, but even if we compare Neolithic and Calcolithic proto-historic cultures of Southern Europe like the Terramare, Cycladic, Minoan, Nuragic, El Argar or Los Millares they were still on a completely other league than the few places in East and South East Asia which had agriculture during the same period except for the Shang area of influence in China

Isolationism + big governments restricting innovation + stultifying belief systems such as Confucianism (ultra-conservative and wary of change) and Hinduism (accept your place, goy, or you will be reincarnated as a slug!)

Nigga we ain't talking about SEAsia and Indonesia and I sure as hell am not talking about the Japanese. We're talking about East Asia. And I'm telling you Shang, Sanxingdui, and Dongsan had contemporaneous civilizations as Europe did.

Partly geography and culture.
All it took was for one guy, the Chinese emperor, to say "fuck that, we're not colonizing anything" or "fuck that, we're not gonna develop this" and that halted all progress in an ostensibly advanced culture.

Meanwhile Europe is a collection of smaller states that compete against each other.

>Meme answers.

>west ended up triumphing over them.
The game isn't over yet.

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We ain't? I don't know if you're OP or not but OP's picture is of South East Asia, and I'm pretty sure East Asia includes Japan and Korea too that were backward and much less advanced than contemporary bronze age and ancient Europe

Republics and constitutional monarchies are OP, because people can set up businesses and be reasonably secure that they won't just get all of their shit stolen by politically connected assholes.

In a related note, being divided and constantly fighting is superior to being unified and stagnating. Conflict drives innovation.

Furthermore Dongsan is compaarable to the Celtic Hallstat culture both in technology and in chronology, Southern Europe had much older advanced cultures than Vietnam which I already have listed above, that by the time of the early Dogsan culture lived in massive cities, had writing and infrastructure

Asia is amazing and magic-filled. Just looking at the ruins of Angkor-Wat make me daydream of how life would be like the back in the day. But all this talk "my civilization is better/can beat yours" is childish, son.

>they had middle-eastern derived innovations
Gee...who would have thunk?

>Gee...who would have thunk?
What? Can you tell me which one of the innovations I've listed were possessed by the Middle East before Rome or Greece'

Its only about ~150 years since the west trumped over East Asia.

East Asia is once more set to take the stage.

The West triumphed over East Asia at least since the Hellenism, East Asia somewhat regained some ground during the early middle ages but they were quickly surpassed again since the late middle ages

>The West triumphed over East Asia at least since the Hellenism,
Read Marco Polo's diaries, he was absolutely shell shocked by how advanced Asia was compared to Europe.

Quote the passages, I can't be bothered to read the whole il Milione while arguing now

Not that user, but Marco Polo needs to be taken with a massive grain of salt since he made up so much fucking shit

You realize he's referring to Rome and Greece, in which case the line kind of blurs between MENA and europe but each still share a claim of the title of 'the West' over china, and most people know this when there's a conversation about Antiquity?

The Great Wall was not a monolithic project and the full extent of it was only completed a couple centuries ago. Furthermore, most of the wall didn't even look like that at all. Most of it was made of earth.

Mesopotamia the greatest civilization in Asia fell after that only the persians were worthwhile

Marco Polo also wrote about dragons, stupid ass.

What do you mean the west ended up triumphing over them? History isn't over, and Japan is arguably wealthier, better educated, more creative, and more influential than all Western countries excepting the USA. China will soon reach that level.

>and Japan is arguably wealthier, better educated, more creative, and more influential than all Western countries
You're kidding, right?

...

>wealthier, better educated, more creative, and more influential than all Western countries excepting the USA

>better educated
>than all Western countries
>excepting the USA
What did he mean by this?

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>Not using per capita
>No data on education in that image
>Bunch of meme indexes
>"Country brand"
>"national wealth"
>"creativity"
>"innovators"
Into the trash it goes.

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I was mocking the fact that you think America has the most educated populace in the western world
>accepting the USA
I assume It's also your home country.

>anything that isn't in favor of me is a meme
lmao, also, those small "rich" european countries, if any, are irrelevant as fuck irl, not to mention the fact that 90's japan's per capita were even higher than those ones such as nordics.

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>The more I learn about the history of Asia the more I wonder if it was just a quirk of history that the west ended up triumphing over them.
There is no Asian Milton or Shakespeare or Mozart. Nor anything even remotely approaching them.

Just stop.

i'm not him though
anyway, america is more influential than japan

During his time, dragons existed. Heck, to the 90% of the world, Gods exist. To a good 60-80% of the world, angels/heaven/hell exist.

If Marco Polo wrote "God commanded me", are you going to complain his work is fiction or a work of a lunatic?

>Heck, to the 90% of the world, Gods exist.

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Because individualism was hard-wired into western societies, by the Christian concept of the infinite value of the individual soul, Buttressed by Roman Law it became the great reforming force of western civilisation and it is notable by its absence, in the other great cultures of the past; those of Islam, Hindu India, and China.

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Gunpowder. It's gunpowder. And the Asian mentality.

Yeah no, this is christard special pleading bullshit. Indvidualism and the idea that everyone has individual rights as a concept didn't really take off until the enlightenment and the gradual move away from basing society around christian religious principles. Furthermore, individual rights alone are no guarantee of success on the international stage.

OP? The europeans got access to two entire continents worth of land and resources when they discovered the Americas. That tends to allow people to shoot ahead.

They also raped africa

Yeah but later, in the 19th century when the European states had already dramatically shot ahead of everybody else.

> Rides off on zebra , nothing personal bucko

Asians have collectivist, hivemind like cultures, which leads to stagnation.

Western civilization champions classical liberalism and individualism, which create the conditions for more progress and innovation.

And despite all this,

Marco Polo visited the east. But nobody visited the west. And therein lies your answer to why the west won.

>But nobody visited the west.
Not really.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenshō_embassy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasekura_Tsunenaga#The_1613_embassy_project

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>But nobody visited the west.
That's wrong though? T

Europe is literally RIGHT next to the America's, two entire continents full of resources to exploit. How they remained behind for so much of history is the question we should really be asking.

Rome also got raped to death by primitive snownigger barbarians in the 5th century.

And no, the Byzantines were never comparable to the Tangs.

>how they remained behind so much of history
They didn’t
>Inb4 Southern Europe isn’t Europe
Fuck off

>Marco Polo visited the east. But nobody visited the west.
There were several Middle Eastern travellers that visited the West but the reason why (East) Asians tended not to do so was because of their differing civilizational history.

China grew as one of the greatest powers in the East and stayed their for most of history. They were surrounded by barbarians and so they got arrogant from their wealth, progress and power that they thought themselves the peak of the world.

The West on the other hand, had an almost opposite experience after the fall of the Roman Empire. Constantly getting battered by invasions from Islamic dynasties/Steppeniggers they were usually the ones on the losers end. The best thing to happen to the West in the late Middle Ages was Timur stopping the halt of the Ottomans.

That's why you had more people that travelled to the East then the West, as it was usually out of desperation at the beginning.

As to answer your question OP

>What caused the West to pull ahead or for Asia to stagnate?

I believe it was a mix of culture and luck. Western cultures focus on logic as well as what others have pointed out with the proximity of the America's, the native inhabitants being unable to handle New World diseases and the two largest enemies of the West deteriorating under toxic Central Asian dynasties (Ottomans and Qings).

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Big talk for a fucking Chinaman whose ancestors were slaves to the Manchus for 300 years until the 20th century.

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>Manchus
>not Chinese

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The west was always far more military minded with more advanced military technology, e.g. Platemail when Japan was still using lacquered wood

The Himalayas

>What stopped them from colonising anything?

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Siam (Thailand) should be yellow. They were always a vassal state of China up until the Opium War.

China, for the longest period of time, was ALREADY top-dog in its part of the world. It's sheer size, population and wealth meant that all it had to do was ask for tribute from its neighbouring states and it would get it.

There was virtually no impetuous to colonize. They were wealthy, secure, and had a civilization built of conservative confucian values. Wayward colonisation for no real benefit wasn't something they were interested in.

That's a good point.

They were in the process of colonizing Southeast Asia not too long ago. See Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, etc.

>My ignorance means that I'm right!
Lurk moar

>Who is Zhang Qian and Zheng He?

At one point China had a huge fleet of junks and was going to set out to colonise the world but some guy came to power and destroyed them all.

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>They were in the process of colonizing Southeast Asia not too long ago.
I can see Vietnam but not really for the others desu

Chinese had gunpowder thousand years before Europeans you fucking imbecile

The Treasure Fleets were never intended for widespread colonization. They were more used to explore, conduct trade, diplomacy, and leave behind some trading posts for future Chinese travelers.

1421 hypothesis is a shit

Well not directly since China never really tried to expand in that direction. The region did receive massive amounts of Chinese immigrants explaining why Singapore is majority Han Chinese since it broke off from Malaysia.

Yes. The east is already surpassing us

A FUCKING RAMP

The turning point will forever be the opening of the spice route around Africa, forever making the silk road redundant and cutting deeply into the wealth of the middle east and central Asia.

>Malaysia or Indonesia
Malaysia and Indonesia didn't exist until decolonization. There were a variety of kingdoms and sultanates in the region, none of them were Malaysia or Indonesia.

To be fair Asians didn't have shit on Roman and medieval European architecture. Also it was mainly China driving things forward.

That said Classical China started shitting out innovations, the horse collar, solid saddle tree, stirrup, heavy mouldboard plow, their mathematicians figured out everything the Greeks did, they developed civil service exams, paper, wood block printing, ceramics, leeboards, watertight compartments. Of course gunpowder, kites and some other things.

What did the Romans invent besides cement?

>their mathematicians figured out everything the Greeks did
Not at all, they did make some excellent discoveries but they didn't even ever develop the principles of Euclidean geometry, I think you ought to study the history of math better

The Chinese migrants to Malaya and Singapore were going there for economic reasons, to trade and to work the mines and the plantations for the British, because all the turmoil under the Qing meant life sucked. The Qing considered those who left to be traitors and would have them executed if they ever returned. They weren't colonists

Heh, you think you're real smart don't ya. Shame it is all the dunning kruger effect. ;)

Mo Jing compiles pretty much every mathematical principle attributed to Euclid, for example in it it states "a point may stand at the end (of a line) or at its beginning like a head-presentation in childbirth. (As to its invisibility) there is nothing similar to it."

Maybe you should study history better or go back to Veeky Forums with your precious nerdy math books.

>What did the Romans invent besides cement?
Postal service, newspapers, optic studies, true domes, socks, bound books, c-section

But what's the most impressive thing about them is greatly improving already existing things like aqueducts and making them much, much bigger and more complex and building them everywhere, and I mean EVERYWHERE, building massive sewers and aqueducts in every shithole town they conquered or founded, building giant theaters, amphitheaters and highways, spreading new technology

> "a point may stand at the end (of a line) or at its beginning like a head-presentation in childbirth. (As to its invisibility) there is nothing similar to it."
That's not "pretty much every point" of Euclidean geometry and to my knowledge they never used these axioms to demonstrate theorems like the Greek did

>To be fair Asians didn't have shit on Roman and medieval European architecture

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Those were the same motives why Europeans moved into the Americas so heavily and there is no dispute that this was colonization. What distinguishes mass immigration from colonization, especially if the migrants don't assimilate into the indigenous society?

We're obviously talking about East Asians
Anyway other than demonstrating several geometry theorems using Euclidean axioms the Greeks made some incredible mathematical discoveries that I don't recall the Chinese making:
>Plato’s student Eudoxus of Cnidus is usually credited with the first implementation of the “method of exhaustion” (later developed by Archimedes), an early method of integration by successive approximations which he used for the calculation of the volume of the pyramid and cone. He also developed a general theory of proportion, which was applicable to incommensurable (irrational) magnitudes that cannot be expressed as a ratio of two whole numbers, as well as to commensurable (rational) magnitudes, thus extending Pythagoras’ incomplete ideas.

>The Pythagoreans also established the foundations of number theory, with their investigations of triangular, square and also perfect numbers (numbers that are the sum of their divisors). They discovered several new properties of square numbers, such as that the square of a number n is equal to the sum of the first n odd numbers (e.g. 42 = 16 = 1 + 3 + 5 + 7). They also discovered at least the first pair of amicable numbers, 220 and 284 (amicable numbers are pairs of numbers for which the sum of the divisors of one number equals the other number, e.g. the proper divisors of 220 are 1, 2, 4, 5, 10, 11, 20, 22, 44, 55 and 110, of which the sum is 284; and the proper divisors of 284 are 1, 2, 4, 71, and 142, of which the sum is 220).

>Pythagoras is also credited with the discovery that the intervals between harmonious musical notes always have whole number ratios. For instance, playing half a length of a guitar string gives the same note as the open string, but an octave higher; a third of a length gives a different but harmonious note; etc. Non-whole number ratios, on the other hand, tend to give dissonant sounds. In this way, Pythagoras described the first four overtones which create the common intervals which have become the primary building blocks of musical harmony: the octave (1:1), the perfect fifth, the perfect fourth (4:3) and the major third (5:4). The oldest way of tuning the 12-note chromatic scale is known as Pythagorean tuning, and it is based on a stack of perfect fifths, each tuned in the ratio 3:2
>Menelaus of Alexandria, who lived in the 1st - 2nd Century CE, was the first to recognize geodesics on a curved surface as the natural analogues of straight lines on a flat plane. His book “Sphaerica” dealt with the geometry of the sphere and its application in astronomical measurements and calculations, and introduced the concept of spherical triangle (a figure formed of three great circle arcs, which he named "trilaterals").
>In the 3rd Century CE, Diophantus of Alexandria was the first to recognize fractions as numbers, and is considered an early innovator in the field of what would later become known as algebra. He applied himself to some quite complex algebraic problems, including what is now known as Diophantine Analysis, which deals with finding integer solutions to kinds of problems that lead to equations in several unknowns (Diophantine equations). Diophantus’ “Arithmetica”, a collection of problems giving numerical solutions of both determinate and indeterminate equations, was the most prominent work on algebra in all Greek mathematics, and his problems exercised the minds of many of the world's best mathematicians for much of the next two millennia.

>But Alexandria was not the only centre of learning in the Hellenistic Greek empire. Mention should also be made of Apollonius of Perga (a city in modern-day southern Turkey) whose late 3rd Century BCE work on geometry (and, in particular, on conics and conic sections) was very influential on later European mathematicians. It was Apollonius who gave the ellipse, the parabola, and the hyperbola the names by which we know them, and showed how they could be derived from different sections through a cone.

>Hipparchus, who was also from Hellenistic Anatolia and who live in the 2nd Century BCE, was perhaps the greatest of all ancient astronomers. He revived the use of arithmetic techniques first developed by the Chaldeans and Babylonians, and is usually credited with the beginnings of trigonometry. He calculated (with remarkable accuracy for the time) the distance of the moon from the earth by measuring the different parts of the moon visible at different locations and calculating the distance using the properties of triangles. He went on to create the first table of chords (side lengths corresponding to different angles of a triangle). By the time of the great Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy in the 2nd Century CE, however, Greek mastery of numerical procedures had progressed to the point where Ptolemy was able to include in his “Almagest” a table of trigonometric chords in a circle for steps of ¼° which (although expressed sexagesimally in the Babylonian style) is accurate to about five decimal places.

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>Archimedes produced formulas to calculate the areas of regular shapes, using a revolutionary method of capturing new shapes by using shapes he already understood. For example, to estimate the area of a circle, he constructed a larger polygon outside the circle and a smaller one inside it. He first enclosed the circle in a triangle, then in a square, pentagon, hexagon, etc, etc, each time approximating the area of the circle more closely. By this so-called “method of exhaustion” (or simply “Archimedes’ Method”), he effectively homed in on a value for one of the most important numbers in all of mathematics, π. His estimate was between 317 (approximately 3.1429) and 31071 (approximately 3.1408), which compares well with its actual value of approximately 3.1416.
>Interestingly, Archimedes seemed quite aware that a range was all that could be established and that the actual value might never be known. His method for estimating π was taken to the extreme by Ludoph van Ceulen in the 16th Century, who used a polygon with an extraordinary 4,611,686,018,427,387,904 sides to arrive at a value of π correct to 35 digits. We now know that π is in fact an irrational number, whose value can never be known with complete accuracy.
>Similarly, he calculated the approximate volume of a solid like a sphere by slicing it up into a series of cylinders, and adding up the volumes of the constituent cylinders. He saw that by making the slices ever thinner, his approximation became more and more exact, so that, in the limit, his approximation became an exact calculation. This use of infinitesimals, in a way similar to modern integral calculus, allowed him to give answers to problems to an arbitrary degree of accuracy, while specifying the limits within which the answer lay.

>Archimedes’ most sophisticated use of the method of exhaustion, which remained unsurpassed until the development of integral calculus in the 17th Century, was his proof - known as the Quadrature of the Parabola - that the area of a parabolic segment is 43 that of a certain inscribed triangle. He dissected the area of a parabolic segment (the region enclosed by a parabola and a line) into infinitely many triangles whose areas form a geometric progression. He then computed the sum of the resulting geometric series, and proved that this is the area of the parabolic segment.
>Another example of the meticulousness and precision of Archimedes’ work is his calculation of the value of the square root of 3 as lying between 265153 (approximately 1.7320261) and 1351780 (approximately 1.7320512) - the actual value is approximately 1.7320508. He even calculated the number of grains of sand required to fill the universe, using a system of counting based on the myriad (10,000) and myriad of myriads (100 million). His estimate was 8 vigintillion, or 8 x 1063.
>The discovery of which Archimedes claimed to be most proud was that of the relationship between a sphere and a circumscribing cylinder of the same height and diameter. He calculated the volume of a sphere as 43πr3, and that of a cylinder of the same height and diameter as 2πr3. The surface area was 4πr2 for the sphere, and 6πr2 for the cylinder (including its two bases). Therefore, it turns out that the sphere has a volume equal to two-thirds that of the cylinder, and a surface area also equal to two-thirds that of the cylinder. Archimedes was so pleased with this result that a sculpted sphere and cylinder were supposed to have been placed on his tomb of at his request.

Care to explain this meme?
As I see it, and I know nothing about carrier tech, a mechanized plane pushing system can break down, but a ramp cant.

The new ski platform for the winter olympics game looks good

>Exploitation of New World resources, Scientific method, then industrialization.

This is the corrrect answer. Prior to the industrial revolution, which was possible thanks to those events leading into each other (the scientific revolution was partially the result of european powers having a whole new landmass of shit too comprehend),

Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and even Mesoamerica and the Andes really weren't that far apart and any one of them could have pulled ahead in the right conditions (though it would be harder for the latter two, but still possible)

You can't really have an industrial revolution without the specific style of government and economics that was developed from the Greeks and Romans.

No other continent developed constitutional republicanism.

And you can't have a scientific revolution without all the formalism introduced by the Greeks