The Eurasian Miracle
eBook - ePub

The Eurasian Miracle

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Eurasian Miracle

About this book

The idea of long-term European dominance is characteristic of most evolutionary theories of human culture and society in the nineteenth century. It was commonly believed that there was a natural progression from Antiquity through Feudalism to Capitalism which could not have taken place elsewhere. Today there are many who still believe that this progression was part of a European miracle that underlay the rise to global supremacy of the West.

In this short book Jack Goody systematically dismantles this Eurocentric view of the world. He argues that we need to look, not for a European miracle, but rather for a Eurasian miracle that went back to the Urban Revolution of the Bronze Age, that affected the Near East, India and China well before Europe and that was much advanced by the adoption of writing. Under these conditions we find a long-term exchange of information between East and West, and the dominance of one followed by the dominance of the other - in other words, alternation rather than dominance. There were measures during the Renaissance in Europe that made for continuous growth, especially the secularization of learning, but it appears that the period of Western supremacy is now coming to an end and that we are about to experience a further alternation in favour of the East.

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Yes, you can access The Eurasian Miracle by Jack Goody in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Cultural & Social Anthropology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title page
  3. Copyright page
  4. 1 Alternation or supremacy?
  5. 2 Why European and not Eurasian?
  6. 3 Domestic aspects of the ‘miracle’
  7. 4 Eurasia and the Bronze Age
  8. 5 Merchants and their role in alternation
  9. 6 Merchant wealth and puritanical asceticism
  10. 7 Towards a knowledge society
  11. 8 The temporary advantage in alternation of the post-Renaissance west
  12. 9 Alternation in Eurasia
  13. Appendix 1 Arguments of the Europeanists
  14. Appendix 2 Water in east and west
  15. References
  16. Index