Frank-Landes Debate, Page 3
David Landes: Thank you. First I want to express my gratitude for the opportunity of coming here and talking to you. I did tell Jeff that I thought, having seen the list of people who had spoken that it would do the students here some good to hear another point of view. And it was I who suggested that we would bring Gunder Frank here because I knew his new book and I thought his new book represented a very sharp contrast to what I had written in the Wealth and Poverty of Nations. Now, I have to tell you that I am not going to criticize his book for the moment except to say that it's full of misstatements of alleged fact. Alright, and I am prepared to demonstrate that. I want to talk, rather, about what my book was trying to do since there is little in what he said that would give you a sense of what my book is about, alright? That's just what I think. Alright. My book is an effort to understand how the world got to where it is. And it is global history. It is concerned with the large process of what you might call economic and industrial development or what you might call modernization. And my thesis is that this story, over the last thousand years has been set and driven by what was happening in Europe and some of its overseas extensions, alright? And what's more, it is not something that started relatively recently, that if you want to follow the process by which Europe – which at the start of this period is a somewhat backward western extremity of the Eurasian land mass – that Europe, over a period of centuries beginning already in the 10th and 11th centuries, begins to take a different path from the rest. That is, it really deviates from the pattern of what has sometimes been called aristocratic empires in which small elites ruled large populations often connected to the elites only by their submission, submissiveness and subordination that Europe moved in an entirely different way in the direction of science and the application of science, such that, by 1500 already, the Europeans could plant themselves anywhere in the world within reach of naval cannon. That's not a trivial achievement. It may not be for good, and I don't want to say anything about Europe being morally better, more virtuous. I'm talking simply about the material achievement and the power that goes with it. And, yes, Europe learned many of these things from other civilizations. Europe learned gunpowder from the Chinese, it learned printing from the Chinese, it learned porcelain from the Chinese. It learned key mathematical concepts from India. It learned a great deal from the Muslim/Middle-Eastern society and civilization, in particular, astronomical observations that proved crucial to mastery of oceanic navigation. But Europe learned these things and improved these things and surpassed its teachers, so that when Vasco DeGama leads the first European/Portuguese fleet to the Indies, the most important message it brings back is we can shoot straighter and farther than they can. And when the second Portuguese fleet goes out, it gets instructions, don't look for trouble, but if you see a vessel that looks hostile, don't let it get close, just blow it out of the water. And when you can destroy the presumed enemy from a distance that way, it means that you possess an important technological advantage and, in fact, that remains a key consideration in the penetration by Europe in the whole Asian and South Asian and Southeastern Asian market. The whole area of spices, of cottons and Indians, so on, all of this rests in the last analysis on European superiority of power. So that's the question that I put myself, how did this happen? And it happened in ways that have a lot to do with the Judeo-Christian tradition. I find myself a little amused to be put in bed with Karl Marx. People do not think of me as a radical, or as a communist or as a socialist. When I was a little boy and I misbehaved, my father would call me a socialist, so I got the lesson. Yes?
Andre Gunder Frank: I'm glad I have something in common with your father.
David Landes: Yeah... Okay... Alright... Whatever, it is true and I have always taught my students, you want to see a paean of praise to Western achievement, read Marx and Engels on the Communist Manifesto and see what they say about the bourgeoisie and so on. It is true. And Marx was absolutely right. I mean, he looked around and saw what was happening. As for Mr. Smith, whom I greatly admire, I have to tell you immediately that I think that, on the whole, he is on my side. But it is true that he does say at certain points, that he thinks China was richer than any part of Europe. Now he was wrong about that, he never visited China. He read what he could and Adam Smith is not always right, or even always consistent. He also said that China had not grown or become richer for hundreds of years and he assumed that that was because it had gone as far as it could given its system of government, given its social order and so on. So that, you know, you're talking about a Europe that's on the rise and a China that's going no where. I wouldn't say no where, but it is true that the Chinese, and that's an important part of my book, the Chinese reacted counter-productively to their encounter in Europe. Instead of behaving the way the Europeans had and learning whatever it could from Europe, it decided that it didn't need what Europe knew how to make and do. They did have certain European things that they admired, like clocks. The Chinese had forgotten how to make really accurate complicated clocks and they never really learned to make mechanical clocks. The Europeans were way ahead. The Chinese loved what they saw, they wanted to have clocks, too. The Europeans sent the clocks with clock makers because you couldn't have a complicated clock in those days without someone to take care of it. And the Chinese thought of these things as primarily entertainment for the court and the important people in the society, so they never really learned to use clocks for what they're good for and a whole series of other innovations in Europe. I like to talk about the fact that one of the earliest European achievements, so banal, so everyday, that you hardly think it counts, was the invention of eye-glasses at the beginning of the 13th century. Now why are eye-glasses so important? Some of you are here are very young, but anyone who is around 40 or over knows that he needs visual correction. It's a biological fact. It doesn't matter whether you are white, black, yellow or red. All human beings need visual correction from about the age of 40 and on. The Europeans got it. No one else had it for hundreds of years. Why is that so important? It means that their most experienced specialists in the, in close work, in small work, more than doubled their working productive lives, `cause if you lived to 40, you had every chance of living to 60. I mean, in so far as the rate, the mortality rate was high, it was killing the children and the babies. If you lived to 40, you lived to 60 and those were the best 20 years because you were a better writer and a better reader and a better user of fine instruments at the age of 50 than you were at the age of 25. So, or printing. Mr. McNeill, whose knowledge of these matters, in spite of his great reputation, is seriously flawed, thinks that printing was the same in Europe and in China. Where has he been? The Europeans had an alphabet, the Chinese had no alphabet. The Europeans could make extensive use of moveable type, the Chinese found it costly to produce printed matter make with moveable type. So in the 50 years from Gutenberg, say, the period of the so-called inconobula, the Europeans are producing more printed material than the Chinese had made, had put out in hundreds of years before. But that's what the alphabet will do for you. All in all, I'm interested in the fact that this European achievement is an extraordinary achievement. Now, it is true, that people are not happy with this, that is, so called world historians who feel that this is not good for Europeans to feel so complacent and arrogant about this achievement. You know, it's not good for them, their morality. It's not good for the world, we want a multicultural world in which everybody is as good and as important as everyone else. I think that's a worthy objective. It has nothing to do with history. Nothing. History is concerned to understand what happened. You don't like the story, well, try moving to the moon or something, but you want to do it here on earth. Yeah, you have this extraordinary European achievement and it's seen everywhere, not only in economic performance. The ideology of the entire world, whether you're socialist, or communist, or liberal, or conservative, in almost all instances, was imported from Europe, all right? You want to talk about just clothing, the world dresses in European fashion, that's not an accident. Alright, so Europe did all this and in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Europeans themselves split sharply with a move in the center of economic gravity from the South, the Mediterranean to the North and I'm interested in that. That's where my friend Max Weber comes in and that's were my Calvinist convictions come in. I just think that the kinds of work habits that... you want me to stop. Alright, I shall stop... Let it go. We'll talk more about Max Weber in the course of the discussion.
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