Introduction
A prevalent misconception in current historical narratives postulates that European (or “Western”) societies were intellectually and technologically backward compared to Eastern civilizations until the late Renaissance around the 1500s, with the “Great Divergence” occurring only with the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s. This view often highlights the early achievements of civilizations such as Egypt (from 3100 BC), Sumer (3500 BC), Babylonia (1800 BC), Persia (Achaemenid Empire, 550 BC), China (from 1600 BC), and the Indus Valley (2500 BC), crediting them with “foundational inventions” such as pottery, irrigation, sailing ships, the wheel, writing systems, bronze metallurgy, the lever, the nail, and monumental architecture.
Europe, the story goes, only learned the basics of civilized life from the Near East, starting with Mycenaean Greece (1750–1050 BC). Advocates of this thesis also point to the persistently larger economies of China and India well into the 1700s in terms of total gross output. They note that India’s GDP accounted for approximately 24.4% of the world total, China’s 22.8%, while the combined share of Western Europe stood at around 23%. This thesis, driven by the ideological imperative for a multicultural understanding of world history, contains crucial refuting flaws.
While non-Western civilizations made essential, generic foundational contributions that appeared independently across early societies, the West’s uniqueness lay in its culture of continuous improvements or innovations upon existing technologies, combined with continuous inventions and the creation of entirely novel fields of scientific knowledge from the 1400s onward. In stark contrast, non-Western societies, after initial bursts of progress, experienced relative intellectual and technological stagnation.
Exaggerations of later achievements during the Islamic “Golden Age” and Medieval and Modern China further distort this picture, as these changes were either extensions of earlier toolkits or isolated inventions without subsequent improvements, and thus not transformative breakthroughs.....
Conclusion
The real divide in technological history is not between “advanced” Eastern origins and a “backward” West that suddenly stumbled into an industrial revolution. It is between the generic, one-time foundational achievements of non-Western civilizations (prone to stagnation after their Axial Age peaks) and the West’s unrelenting culture of continuous refinement, cumulative innovation, and breakthrough inventions. While Eastern societies provided the basic toolkit of civilization, only the West persistently built upon it, creating new domains of knowledge and power that shattered pre-modern Malthusian limits. Whether the West will remain at the forefront of future innovations and inventions is another question.
