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Comment by i_dont_know_ | Hacker News Reader

Really good point.

The industrial revolution pushed "the west" pretty far in terms of power/economics but there were thousands of years of human history prior to it. In that longer view of history, China has always been a major player, and the last 150-ish years have been a fluke that's being corrected.

But western journalism really treats everything prior to the industrial revolution as caveman times, meaning they'll be equally surprized seeing Iran (Persia), India, Turkey and others 'rise' up in the coming decades as well.

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> meaning they'll be equally surprized seeing Iran (Persia), India, Turkey and others 'rise' up in the coming decades as well.

Not every big country in the world (I'm not talking specifically about your examples) has society that's sufficiently developed and sophisticated to pull off a modern XXI-century information age economy. In other words, it's not obvious that all the laggers will eventually (say within the next 50-100 years) catch up.

You could also view it as China blowing a 2,000 year head start and now working to catch up.

Well, they didn't discover a whole new continent to exploit for gold and riches and get rid of its inhabitants, or plundered 2/3rds of the world (instead, they were themselves invaded by colonial powers).

So, while they lost their head start, at least they have that...

I’m a believer in China dominance in the coming decades.

However, painting the West’s ability to heap “unequal treaties” on China cannot reasonably be described as a function of finding and conquering the new word. Firstly: the major conquest of the new world came through Spain, which had little to no involvement in the humiliation of the Middle Kingdom. Second, colonies in North America did not give the British gunboats capable of demolishing the Chinese fleets.

The reasonable conclusion is that the Enlightenment and the scientific advances eminating from that allowed the West to go from isolated, low population minor powers into worldwide empires.

Anybody who didn't get to ride the knowledge scalability wave that came from Gutenberg's printing press is now way behind.

That's basically every body apart from the west.

The movable type printing press in Asia predates Europe's by centuries. Although it's admittedly more practical to use with a 26 character alphabet.

Not in the same social context.

Education was a very elite thing in most societies, even in the west too. But some thing very strange happened around Gutenberg's times and west was able to take advantage of that unique situation.

For example, there is no parallel of Renaissance or Industrial revolution in any non-western country. China comes close, but even then, not exactly.

> But western journalism really treats everything prior to the industrial revolution as caveman times, meaning they'll be equally surprized seeing Iran (Persia), India, Turkey and others 'rise' up in the coming decades as well.

That's one way to look at it. The other would be to yield to the continuum a bit, to see that growth (technological, military, economic) usually doesn't happen overnight. Even if Iran were on the cusp of again being a world power, it wouldn't happen overnight.

I think due to climate change it's pretty unlikely that Iran will become a superpower.

Interesting. Could anyone chime in on how various countries/superpowers will be affected by climate change? Or point me to an article that hypothesizes about this?

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