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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 11/9/19

"Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay"

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What incessant violence must have been required to create a state from the ruins of the Roman Empire!

According to Frankopan:

"Thus while focus normally falls on the investment in art and the impacts of new wealth on culture, it is perhaps more instructive to look to the parallel advances in weapon-making in this period [of European history]. Just as paintings were produced in enormous quantities for a hungry audience, so too were guns.

"Similarly, although the names of scientists like Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton and Leonhard Euler have become famous to generations of schoolchildren, it can be all too easy to forget that some of their most important work was on the trajectory of projectiles and understanding the causes of deviation to enable artillery to be more accurate. These distinguished scientists helped make weapons more powerful and ever more reliable; military and technological advances went hand in hand with the Age of Enlightenment."

(Finer: "Hence the restlessness of Europe as the counter-tradition [Renaissance and Reformation] upset all the old familiar assumptions and opened the way for the advances in secular thought, especially in scientific thought and thereby the new technology that was to make Europe masters of the world."

Pace Finer, Frankopan states baldly that Asians didn't stand a chance against the instruments of violence and the sheer determination to win at all costs.)

"It was not that aggression did not exist in other societies. As numerous examples from other continents would show, any conquest could bring death and suffering on a large scale. But periods of explosive expansion across Asia and North Africa, such as in the extraordinary first decades of the spread of Islam or during the time of the Mongol conquests, were followed by long periods of stability, peace and prosperity. The frequency and rhythm of warfare was different in Europe to other parts of the world; no sooner would one conflict be resolved than another would flare up. Competition was brutal and relentless. In that sense, seminal works like Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan were quintessential texts that explained the rise of the west. Only a European author could have concluded that the natural state of man was to be in a constant state of violence; and only a European author would have been right (Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), p. 261).) Indeed, Frankopan goes so far as to claim that the two world wars were but the continuation of past European wars.

Then, we come to non-citizens: Jews, conversos, Moors, heretics, rebels... received little protection of their life, liberty and property.

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Iftekhar Sayeed teaches English and economics. He was born and lives in Dhaka, à ‚¬Å½Bangladesh. He has contributed to AXIS OF LOGIC, ENTER TEXT, POSTCOLONIAL à ‚¬Å½TEXT, LEFT CURVE, MOBIUS, ERBACCE, THE JOURNAL, and other publications. à ‚¬Å½He (more...)
 
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