Why was western printing superior to Asian printing?
erikexamines.substack.com
erikexamines.substack.com
Chinese or Korean, on the other hand, needed many more characters. Creating the movable types for them was not an easy feat. Certainly more difficult than with the German equivalent.
In particular for Korea: Hangul [0], which is a "simpler" language that gradually took over Hanja [1] in Korea, was "created" only in the 15th century, not before. Earlier than that, even if Korea has the equivalent of "printing", the complexity of it was higher than the one experienced with the west alphabet.
It's not a language, it's an alphabet. And I fail to see the need for quotes, there's really no denying hangul is simpler than hanja.
However the syllabic structure of hangul would still make it a lot more challenging printing than the linear structure of the latin alphabetic script: you'd need either a type piece per syllable (of which there are >10000), or you'd need a variant for each possible block layout.
There are 9 possible layouts, though there are limitations which cuts down on the complexity of that option. But still, assuming you want fixed-size blocks and depending on your decisions on complex finals you'd need 6-9 variants of each initial, and 2-3 version of each final.
If you're fine with variable-size blocks (and spacers to line things up) then you can probably cut down to 3 or even 2 of each initials, but it's not going to look great.
I dont ask about learning actual Korean. Just Hangul yo say "write English in Hangul" - if it is possible.
Or some service that "translitetates" your name to Hangul?
I don't really understand this. It's even easier to learn the Italian writing system, coming from English, than it is to learn the Korean writing system.
Who concludes from that that it's going to be easy to learn to speak Italian?
Peoples' preconscious lizard brain, that generates gut feelings and first impressions based on superficial brute-force pattern-matching, presumably.
you simply insert padding-vocals and "silences" to make the syllable stuff line up, my name (Igor) becomes (silence)I-go-ru.
But the Korean phonology is different from English and generally simpler so you’ll need to approximate a fair bit (not unlike English words in Japanese phonology).
> apparently even linguists have to learn subsets of IPA in order to properly pronounce phonemes in different languages
I don't actually understand what you mean by this clause, but if we strip some words, "linguists learn subsets of IPA in order to properly pronounce phonemes in different languages" is in fact exactly what IPA is for.
What exactly do you mean above? If "subsets of IPA" are enough to "properly pronounce phonemes in different languages" then IPA is indeed a "universal alphabet".
More or less, the same way different subsets of Unicode cover most/all languages, which makes it a universal encoding.
Did you meant to imply that IPA would be a universal alphabet only if all of it was needed to cover each language - and e.g. no IPA-letters were redundant for covering this or that language?
This means that when Koreans adopt an English word that has multiple consonants not separated by a vowel then they need to add in some new vowels to be able to pronounce it. Thus words like Starbucks have two syllables in English but six in Korean.
The fancy/searchable term for this is epenthetic vowels / epenthesis, FWIW.
Simpler is a culturally conditioned subjective value judgement rather than a scientific one and therefore it expresses an opinionated view. It may be more correct to say it is a more systematic script.
Do you think people believe “tic tac toe is simpler than chess” because of cultural conditioning?
While there is a “floor” to the complexity of a script in its ability to faithfully reproduce a langage, there is no “ceiling”, you can always pile on complexity.
Although I would say that logographic scripts are the other kind of complexity, they’re complicated to learn and use because they’re simplistic in their approach.
Syllabic or alphabetic scripts require higher concepts, but that makes them more flexible and composable.
Hangul is simpler, that’s not really in dispute. It was literally designed to be simple so that a native speaker could become literate in ten days.
Hangul is not phonetic, it's a morphophonemic script. The Korean language has a lot of rules that applies at different boundaries, which make the pronunciation of words different from what is written. The best example of this is the "Korean wave" /han/ + /lyu/ => [hallyu], written has "hanlyu" (한류) which is conforming to the phonemic decomposition but certainly not to how the word is pronounced.
But "simpler" can be used in fairly objective ways. Spoon is a simpler mechanism than internal combustion engine. "Yes" is a simpler way of saying "absolutely I would be willing to undertake that endeavour". Square of plain colour is simpler than a painting. Some formula are simpler than others.
In this case the Immediate difference in sheer count makes it difficult for me to understand what point you're trying to make about this particular example, try as I might, because in this case I aftually think "more systematic" is the less defined, more ambiguous term :-(
Obviously, "native English-speaking" is assumed, so the time for a Mandarin speaker to learn Swahili or vice versa is not considered. This isn't really "complexity" in a universal sense.
It would be interesting to see a similar chart from the Chinese foreign service's language institute (I assume they must have one). Or the Egyptian one.
[1] https://www.atlasandboots.com/travel-blog/foreign-service-in...
What if we had the results of learning difficulty for native speakers of all the major languages, and some languages were hard for everyone? In principle, this is an experiment that's doable, if the foreign ministries of the other countries also publish this data.
Now the kicker is, they encoded pure-Korean words using stand-ins using Chinese. Particles would be written in Chinese with ridiculously complex rules, and pure Korean words were written phonetically in Chinese, with the pronunciation of the Chinese characters would be "close enough" to the pronunciation of the Korean word. It was a horrendous system which is why hangul was made (like the yangban nobles literally needed full time learning all day for like a decade to master it, and the literacy test to get into high status government jobs was literally just to write a few essays)
The first few lines of 훈민정음 (basically a declaration that hangul is a thing we made, please use it) starts off with "the language of our land is different to that of the chinese and our writing system is not compatible. For that reason the uneducated subjects of the kingdom have trouble accomplishing their desires. So I (king sejong) find pity in this so I have created a new system of 28 characters, and would like everyone to practice it daily so that people can use it comfortably"
This article has presumably mentioned it. It says:
> Answering this question is actually quite complex because it involves mechanical knowledge, metallurgy, mills and writing systems. I have read numerous articles on this topic, but I started to notice that everyone leaves out some different essential part of the story. Here I am trying to include all the factors involved.
The content is cut off in the middle by the paywall (which raises the question of whether it's suitable to be submitted to HN in the first place, if there's no workaround available).
It does get into discussing alphabets at the end.
You only need 62 glyphs for a basic Latin alphabet including case (although gutenberg’s german would require a few more), but you need a lot of copies of each to lay a complete page, and they’d lay multiple pages per sheet.
Not to mention because character frequencies are not equal you need a lot more of some than others so you might have a multi-type matrix of just Es in order to cast enough of those for your needs in a reasonable time frame.
Gutenberg's bible used ligatures and various symbols too, that ups the count a lot. I haven't counted them myself, but wikipedia says 290 characters and cites John Man's book about Gutenberg. A paper I found about using ML to do cluster analysis on the glyphs says 299 unique glyphs and cites Gottfried Zedler. I can't read either of those sources, but a bit less than 300 seems like a safe bet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible#Type
https://deepai.org/publication/classifying-the-typefaces-of-...
I am not a historian - I am only married to one. So I'll only say that from my personal experience interacting with historians who know Mullaney well (both professionally and personally) that his writing is well respected even if his social media presence is a bit much.
Of course we can print anything today. But in early days some of these things add additional complexity and barriers to what is already a very nascent tech and social trend.
- Phase 1: Before movable type printing press - no strong advantage for either character set
- Phase 2: After printing press but before digital media - advantage Latin characters
- Phase 3: After digital media - no strong advantage for either character set
Phase 2 just happens to line up very neatly with the "great divergence" where Europe surpassed China in technology and economic output. Probably just a coincidence, or, more likely, one small factor among many.
This article spends a lot of time expressing that the Gutenberg printing press was better than Eastern printing presses. That's true. But why was the Gutenberg press better, given that there were eastern printing presses hundreds of years earlier?
I think a big part of the answer was that because of the difficulties in printing their languages, there was no big incentive to improve their printing presses. You couldn't look at it and say, "Oh, man, if I could just solve this problem, my fortune would be assured!" And so the technology languished.
And the result was, as the article demonstrates, a vast difference in literacy and knowledge storage/transfer in the West. And that's certainly not the only reason why the West diverged from the East, but it's a big factor.
There was still need in Europe to standardize and simplify those things. That process was still underway well into the 18th century.
There was also the problem of spelling.
Early Latin print in Europe is similar to Chinese also in that it's written form was more or less understood by educated Europeans, but their spoken langues had splintered away and we're often not mutually intelligible.
The spread of new scientific ideas mentioned in the article only came later on the exhaust fumes of spreading new religious ideas.
Gutenberg was a Catholic who sold Bibles to the gentry.
Really? I feel like this is usually used as the main - sometimes only - argument for why moveable type took off in the West. If you look at the Wikipedia for moveable type[1], the simpler alphabet is listed in the article summary at the top of the page as a reason for why Gutenberg's printing press was so successful.
I havne't seen a good analysis of this but I wonder how much the impact of literacy has on the demand for books. Now in the Middle Ages in Europe, literacy wasn't universal. The monastic class, clergy, the nobility and certain professions (eg merchants) were likely literate but less so the general population.
A simpler and more phonetic alphabet clearly impacts literacy. Post-1929 Turkey is good evidence of this (where Turkish switched from the Arabic alphabet to what they use today).
Chinese is notoriously difficult to learn to read and write. Is it possible that lower literacy reduced the demand for printed works? Was literacy in China actually lower than in European countries 500-1000 years ago? I have no idea but it's an interesting thought.
So there is a lot of inherent complexity in Arabic.
From a typesetting POV (both for the printed press and computers), Arabic's cursive nature is more difficult because the letters need to connect and the shapes can vary depending on what's next to them.
It's a game of scrabble essentially.
And in addition Gutenberg found an alloy using antimony, a metal nobody had any uses for in absolute, but was known to be toxic (anti-mony anti-monk killed the monks who volunteered for testing its toxicity, similar to the Jesuits with malaria, Catholic scientific testing). So he was a jeweller and he banged out an allow that slightly expanded when cooled, it was always the opposite until that point...I'm not sure if with bronze too. Antimony, tin and silver IIRC. So expensive glyphs, and further once the Americas started pumping out silver the economics of the printing press improved a lot, because it was silver-intensive.
Further, printing presses every now and then piss the fuck out of the ruler, when that happens the whole place gets confiscated so there go your millions of Chinese silver glyphs, and all the work into making them the typography, that's expensive. China is also centralized geographically, so censorship was too easily carried out, resistance was impossible. On the other hand in India it was too fragmented, no common language, also problematic for literacy, letters, glyph sets. Though they didn't do badly, China in terms of the development of books I would have to say did do badly, sometimes it's that simple. Invented paper, gunpowder, the compass, and gave them all away to Europe.
There's more to it, it made sense to have carved wood blocks in the context. I'll truncate here.
on wikipedia if you look up "movable type" you see a big discussion of the earlier work in China and Korea before moving on to Gutenberg.
if you look up "printing press" you get the Gutenberg story only, including that Gutenberg discovered an alloy for his type that was so good it remained unchanged for hundreds of years.
conflating movable type with printing press is a big mistake for this type of analysis, and that's before getting to the out of the box simplicity of movable type for alphabets a few dozen characters long vs the vocabulary required for Chinese writing.
(I happened to look this up the other day just to get the date that mass printing started in Europe, and I started with movable type so I had already recently discovered all the above points)
I mean, once you've arranged all your type onto a plate representing a page, what are you going to do with it except slap some ink on it and put paper against it? Is the difference that the Chinese just lay the paper manually over it rather than use a machine (the press) to do it?
Also a printing press would not lay the paper, it was "just" used to press said paper onto the type (which had been inked by hand).
You'd lay the type, then ink the type, lay paper on top (usually using a frame to ensure it's correctly positioned), move the assembly under the press then press it down.
Release the press, open the assembly, get the printed sheet out, repeat (minus laying the type).
That Gutenberg also invented movable metal type in europe, as well as a production process for reproducible quality metal type, are probably bigger factors than the press itself (though the separation of labor and mechanical efficiency of the press should not be discounted). But since he basically released the entire thing as a "movable-type printing system", the printing press is often used as a stand-in for the entire production process.
So it's kind of like, why didn't we use electric cars in the 1900s, the answer is we did, but since something else was cheaper/better at that moment given the context all the decades of industrial innovation happened around that model, until there was a reason to revisit it much later. I think the Chinese inventors were like those early electric car makers. Really smart inventors, but just missing some key supporting infrastructure or need. Just like printing in Europe was held back by lack of paper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodblock_printing#Impact_of_m...
Seems so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press
> European printing presses of around 1600 were capable of producing between 1,500[47] and 3,600 impressions per workday.[3] By comparison, Far Eastern printing, where the back of the paper was manually rubbed to the page,[48] did not exceed an output of forty pages per day.[4]
> only Europeans who had never seen Chinese woodblock printing in action tended to dismiss it, perhaps due to the almost instantaneous arrival of both xylography and movable type in Europe. The early Jesuit missionaries of late 16th century China, for instance, had a similar distaste for wood based printing for very different reasons. These Jesuits found that "the cheapness and omnipresence of printing in China made the prevailing wood-based technology extremely disturbing, even dangerous."[42] Matteo Ricci made note of "the exceedingly large numbers of books in circulation here and the ridiculously low prices at which they are sold."[43] Two hundred years later the Englishman John Barrow, by way of the Macartney mission to Qing China, also remarked with some amazement that the printing industry was "as free as in England, and the profession of printing open to everyone."[42] The commercial success and profitability of woodblock printing was attested to by one British observer at the end of the nineteenth century, who noted that even before the arrival of western printing methods, the price of books and printed materials in China had already reached an astoundingly low price compared to what could be found in his home country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodblock_printing#Impact_of_m...
Also interesting that the Korean moveable type was highly restricted, as mentioned elsewhere, so it's partly industrial technology and commerce but partly lack of censorship the Westerners are surprised by.
Innovation on the movable types was a key part of Gutenbergs system and creating the movable metal types was an inseparable part of the Gutenberg innovation. The article mentions a bit more than my short summary too.
I think the mistake actually is to separate them in your analysis of the analysis. To get a working product Gutenberg created an integrated package with both.
It specifically mentions the innovations in creating the movable metal types themselves under "Advantages of Gutenberg's Printing Technique". A much better metal alloy and a hand mold, allowing for much faster creation of new metal types than the Chinese alloy and technique.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press
> European printing presses of around 1600 were capable of producing between 1,500[47] and 3,600 impressions per workday.[3] By comparison, Far Eastern printing, where the back of the paper was manually rubbed to the page,[48] did not exceed an output of forty pages per day.[4]
The press was not that big of a novelty. Described more in detail here: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/why-was-the-printing-pre...
His part of the world was a patch work of city states, small provinces, and kingdoms. Germany as a country simply did not exist at the time. Many of those states were fiercely independent and interdependent (trade).
And some of them were prospering and featured a growing middle class, trade, and relative freedom. So, he was in a place that was relatively literate (for the time) and entrepreneurial. The combination of people capable and free to express themselves and a new technology to do that at scale created a perfect storm of information and soon revolution.
Aside from the complexities of their written language and its many characters; China and Korea were basically very old empires at the time they invented movable type. Their societies were managed in a very hierarchical way. They had the means to spread information but only used it to spread officially sanctioned information. So, it did not really catch on to the same level that Gutenberg's press revolutionized (quite literally) Europe.
You're making this up. There was a robust tradition of scholar-bureaucrats printing whatever the hell they wanted (usually red-blooded tracts against the Emperor when he didn't toe the Confucian line). Travel literature was incredibly popular in late Ming China.
In the same way, there are a lot of details that tend to get ignored in the Gutenberg as Great Man narrative. They did get enumerated, and it's important to keep those details in mind as they were the decisive factor, and Gutenberg was just the hacker who managed to successfully combine them in an effective manner.
He did it, while others did not. So Gutenberg gets the credit.
First Nicola Tesla for electricity, then transistors, then programmable microchips, then operating systems, then video games and because of them GPUs came into existance, them machine learning, then GPUs because more programmable because games required more and more freedom in shaders, then eventually deep learning, and now stable diffusion.
"The right man at the right time makes all the difference."
Watt invented the steam engine in a similar way to how Bill Gates invented the computer.
Development in Book Prices and Productivity
Pages printed per day: Europe
Cheapest book: biggest bar
The years go forward but you want to read it backwards to understand it's meaning.
Size of Largest Book Collection
no y axis, just text written on random bars. big year gaps that don't really add to the narrative.
I get you're retelling the paragraph you wrote before in a visual format. It's hard to read and doesn't add much.
I don't really get what you mean with that. Prices dropped rappidly within 60 years. Bar graphs are maybe not the best pick here, but I definitely read this graph forward to understand its meaning.
China had machines, but they were used at a much smaller scale and had no way to expand in usage thanks to unsuitable geography and climate in China.
I once saw an old YouTube video that claimed that some hanzi are super obscure and even native Chinese have to look them up sometimes when wanting to use them, and gave the example of "sneeze".
I asked my Shanghai born coworker, who led the local Chinese friendship society, about this, and he furrowed his brow and said "...shit, actually, yeah, I'd need to look that up myself."
This is merely one anecdote, of course,
There's information density, but there's also information accessibility. And the trick is finding the balance between the two.
Having 8000 characters (in simplified Chinese) may be information dense, but how accessible is that information? E.g., a typical Chinese university graduate will know, on average, 3 -4K of them, and no doubt ones that are unused will atrophy over the years.
The balance between density and accessibility is always ongoing. E.g., I find reading presentation slides with a transcript far more information dense than watching a video of that presentation, but some people find it far more accessible in video form. And then for complex discussions, I find video calls far more information dense than Slack message or email exchanges.
In addition, if you're reading a text and you come across an uncommon character, you can often figure it out, both from context and by recognizing elements in the character (which give hints about the pronunciation and meaning).
喷嚏 is the example always used because it describes a common thing that is rarely written about, and there is no other, more frequently written character with the 疐 component that could remind people how to write it. So when handwriting, one might substitute 喷㖷 instead.
Most obscure characters are simply obscure because they refer to an obscure thing, like not being able to spell the name of a village you've never heard of.
And characters for non-obscure things made of obscure components are usually common enough that people get enough practice writing them. E.g. 藏 "store/hide" contains 臧, an archaic term for "good" that now mostly occurs in ancient idioms and as a rare surname. But hardly anybody seems to have trouble writing 藏.
Isn't that also the case in other languages? Most people don't know all the words in a dictionary for example, and a word is roughly analogous to a character in Chinese.
jˈɛs, ˈɪŋɡlɪʃ ɪz ɐ tˈɛɹɪbəl ɹˈɪtən lˈaŋɡwɪdʒ. ɪn ɐ sˈeɪn wˈɜːld wiː wʊdhɐv mˈuːvd tʊ ˌaɪpˌiːˈeɪ ɐ lˈɒŋ tˈaɪm ɐɡˈəʊ.
We all agree that English spelling is a royal pain in the ass.
Imagine a common "Germanic" or "Roman" script that would be comprehensible to any literate person that speaks any Germanic or Roman language. So the same book could be read by people in San Francisco, Berlin, Oslo and Amsterdam without the need to learn any new language.
This might be one of the reasons why China is still one country with one central bureaucracy, which is nigh impossible to establish in Europe, all the EU-wide initiatives notwithstanding.
But it comes with a high bar to clear as to what "literacy" even means. Westerners are fully literate in their native languages after several years of elementary school; the same cannot be said about the Chinese.
Kanji is part of the Japanese writing system, it's not the entire thing. "Translated to Japanese kanji" is like saying "translated to English consonants".
> Kanji characters were printed significantly larger than ASCII, so that accounted for a lot of it.
Japanese books also have a lot more whitespace and are generally smaller than western books. I disagree that the font is much larger -- the books I read have a font size that is practically identical to most western books (the difference is that CJK characters are more boxy and so they may appear larger).
> ASCII can have a pretty small font and still be perfectly legible - apparently not so with Kanji.
You can print kanji pretty small and have it still them be legible to native speakers (just look at the first video games that used kanji instead of just using kana -- the effective font size is tiny).
The hiragana and katakana are syllabaries and don’t have the information density that you get with kanji.
I don’t imagine you’d get Japanese books that are more compact than their English counterparts because per sentence Japanese texts are comprised mostly of hiragana and katakana with a sprinkling of kanji.
Chinese on the other hand is all hanzi, and that does provide significant information density.
I used to have the lord of the rings in both English and Chinese on my bookshelf. The 3 volumes in Chinese where about the same thickness as a single volume in English (width and height were approximately the same) and this was with a much larger Chinese font required for legibility.
> maybe even some
I.e. unreliable :-/
It took millennia for us to go from emojis to characters and the few societies that did ended up dominating the world because of the increases in efficiency. Now we're heading in the other direction because literacy is too hard.
And aside from emoji (which is demand-driven), Unicode isn't inventing anything, it's codifying things that already exist.
Care to take a stab at the difference between these and emoji?
The vast majority are complex compounds of smaller radicals.
They are nothing like emoji.
This is one of the most absurd things I have ever read, but in an extremely funny way!
I think you're trying to make the argument that both Chinese characters and emoji are pictographs. Yes, a few Chinese characters originated as pictographs (a tiny minority of them), and emoji are one form of pictograph, but that... doesn't make Chinese characters emoji, not even "the original ones". It doesn't even put them on the same "continuum" -- one is stroke-based logograms that represent individual syllables of words, the other is pure artistic illustration.
You seem to be trying to redefine the word "emoji" into something it's not, your own idiosyncratic personal definition. But that's not how words work.
Really? Funny that neither of those shapes is convex.
All I can say is LOL to that. Even the original Mac icons required someone to tell you what they meant first, down to today where half the icons on a car's controls make no sense, and of course there are the laundry icons, which people can probably guess correctly half of them.
> letters where you have to learn how to pronounce an otherwise mostly arbitrary squiggle.
Yes, we learn the sounds they make in first grade. Then we can sound out new words, and look up the meanings of words in the dictionary. Not so with icons. There's no sounding them out. There's no way to look them up in a dictionary. If you can't guess what they mean, you're out of luck.
> arbitrary squiggle
The letters are all derived from icons. The letter A is a bull's head and horns turned upside down. Phonetic alphabets are derived from icon languages, and are a great invention.
> Unicode isn't inventing anything, it's codifying things that already exist.
Not true. As for emoji, there is no difference between them and icons.
Source: https://books.google.com/books/publisher/content?id=d__HBAAA...
Wood cuts and bronze types were worth mentioning as they were widely used in China and Korea.
I think though that the point about shrinkage is the large change between casting and room temperatures (and maybe during pressing?); the differences in thermal coefficients (per degree) are significant but not that huge.
As for oil based inks-- that too was widely used in China-- for seals. In fact sealpressing and pressprinting is the same process, wouldnt you say? Have not found anything indicating the Chinese made that leap (en masse, of course).
Finally .. antimony is kind of the unsung hero here. Its the magic element that the Chinese didnt know about.
If a ruler was against a invention, you would pack up, move into the town behind the next hill were some upstart youngster would welcome the new things - because he had a expansion planned.
So fierce competition and wars destroy entrenched interests and landlords of stagnating stability (church, guilds, etc.). To push inventions, one need - in a civilized manner, recreate those conditions.
https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/the-european-mill-revolu...
Medieval Europe significantly advanced glass making, invented spectacles and lenses, laying the groundwork for telescopes and microscopes:
https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/glass-the-substance-of-s...
Medieval Europe pioneered mechanical clocks which was a pretty big deal: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/the-missing-chinese-mech...
Medieval Europe also advanced gunpowder weapons more rapidly than in China, and already had evolved technology around plate armor and crossbows far beyond anything the Romans did: https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/why-did-europe-and-not-c...
The idea that no innovation happened in medieval Europe is severely overstated. I think it stems from the fact that medieval Europe had less production of literature, science and arts than Rome and Greece. Yet in terms of practical inventions, medieval Europe, did a lot more.
Yet in relative terms, I would say Europe was still embroiled in a lot more wars than China even during the industrial revolution. Think of the 7-years war, Napoleonic wars, American war of independence.
Why the industrial revolution happened in Britain is of course a big topic onto itself. I have argued before that it could in fact ONLY have happened in Britain due to the geography, resources and climate of Britain: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/why-england-industri...
1. France and the Netherlands lacked the coal and iron. 2. Germany didn't have the right kind of coal, and no as ideal conditions to dig canals and utilize water power as Great Britain.
If you sort of go over a checklist of needed prerequisites, you are pretty much left with Britain. Sure it could have happened elsewhere but then only after a number of other innovation had happened. At the technological level the world existing in in the mid 1700s, Britain was really the only candidate.
Internal stability is of course always good, but Italy, Spain, France, Greece etc could not possibly have started an industrial revolution no matter how peaceful and stable they had been. They just lacked the resources, climate and geography to do so.
> The Thirty Years' War from 1618 to 1648 was one of the most destructive wars in European history, directly responsible for the death of an estimated 4.5 to 8 million soldiers and civilians, with some areas of present-day Germany experiencing population declines of over 50%
But sure Europe being fragmented did lead to more wars, which is bad. On the other hand those wars mean European military technology advanced quicker, and the existence of multiple political units meant that different ideas about religion, science and society was far more difficult to suppress than in a unified China.
The price China paid for its unity was a far more oppressive regime. To keep such a huge empire from falling apart a lot more state power had to be exercised. At the time of the 30 years war the average Europe was generally a lot freer.
One could say there was a tradeoff. Europe "accepted" more violence for more freedom. China "accepted" more peace for less freedom. What you prefer depends on your values and ideological beliefs.
Sure competition and allowing things to fail can, under the right circumstances, generate great advancements. But given the context of human history, it seems that decentralized feudal societies caused about as many technological revolutions as communist societies...
The development of advanced plate armor, gunpowder weapons, mechanical clocks, medieval cathedrals, innovation within glass making, lenses, spectacles etc suggest medieval society was plenty capable on innovation. Both earlier Greek city states and later medieval Italian city states demonstrated a large amount of innovation.
I would rather say that large monopolies outcompete smaller competing units in the short term but loose in the long term. We can see that in markets as well as in comparison between China and Europe. Fragmented Europe was at a disadvantage for several hundred years until that fragmentation started paying off.
There are two main downsides to centralization.
1) A single ruler means the whims of that ruler can have major impacts on the development of society. When the Ming abandoned their treasure fleets, there was no alternative power to step in and continue expanding maritime commerce. The emperor was so powerful that their monopoly on trade decided the course of history for the whole region: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_treasure_voyages
2) A unipolar power structure inherently seeks to maintain the status quo. When you have a dynasty that already has unquestioned authority within its borders while also having no plausible rivals outside them (at the time of the "great divergence" the Mongols had ceased to be a threat), ANY change leads to a loss of status and power for the ruling elite. Any commercial activity or technological advance was measured by whether it benefitted the emperor or hindered him.
None of this is to say that there weren't substantial downsides to the decentralized mess of European politics. In earlier time periods, the centralized model helped China to be the richest region on earth while Europe was one of the poorest, but post-Renaissance, competition between European states drove innovation and pressured those states to expand or die. Both of which led to Portuguese ships sailing into Guangzhou in 1513 rather than Ming ships sailing into Lisbon.
The Honourable East India company settled on opium as the one commodity which might settle their balance of payments problem. The period when China was poor was 100, 150 years in the 19th and 20th centuries, linked to specific bad governments (Great Leap Forward, cough).
Some of the questions popping up here regarding significance of different components of the Gutenberg invention is addressed in a linked article:
https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/why-was-the-printing-pre...
This discusses technologies existing in Europe at the time but not in China, which Gutenberg could leverage to create his printing system.
To clarify the point here isn't to suggest a civilization or society is superior to another. It is a discussion about printing systems, not people or languages.
I recommend approaching these topics without predetermined judgement on whether a language is inherently superior or inferior. Such biases are the last things we need in today's world full of division and tribalism.
The article isn't suggesting one language is superior to another, but that one printing technique was a superior to another at some point in time. If one cannot recognize that then we are getting a bit too touchy when discussing history of technology.
The point here is to understand why the printing press had such an impact Europe, while existence of movable type in China and Korea did not have the same impact. It is about understanding historical developments.
In a day and age where Chinese language content occupies a significant portion of the Internet, there are still people who claim the non-alphabetical nature of the language is somehow a conspiracy at monopolizing knowledge. What's so touchy about recognizing some people being stuck in 19th century mentalities (not the author of the article, but the crowd these articles inevitably attract) are perhaps not the most credible?
Understanding why Europe rose to prominence requires looking at several different aspects such as development of glass technology, mechanical clocks, navigation, gun powder weapons and printing. If I was writing and publishing a book then that would be my topic. Naturally when printing isn't really the main topic of the book, but part of a larger narrative then you cannot cover that as extensively as a book which is ONLY about printing which is what you are talking about.
My writing isn't concerned with Chinese typewriters as that would come at a much later date when Western dominance has already been well established.
I didn't actually know that there are people who think Chinese letters are a conspiracy to monopolize knowledge. That is a very bizarre belief indeed.
I certainly use slightly tabloid headlines, but they are a reflection of what the article is about and I think it will become clear to anyone reading through the article that isn't meant to be some kind of civilization scorecard or competition. I have seen a MAGA republican retweet the article, but if they follow more of my writing I think they would be rather disappointed. I am generally promoting a fairly leftist view in my writing, so not really what would appeal to conservatives.
I'm always confused by this wording. Does this mean that the new price was 1/60th the original?
The reason it's not silly/wrong is that you can say, and people often do, that something is "much cheaper" than something else, and that clearly means that it is less expensive. So, the language already accepts that a thing becomes less expensive as it becomes cheaper.
So, if it becomes twice as cheap, it becomes half as expensive. Similarly, as something becomes less cheap, it becomes more expensive, so you can also say that something is half as cheap as something else, so it's twice as expensive. There is no ambiguity, it's just an uncommon way of quantifying price changes. Without the speicifc quantifier, the relative comparisons are actually quite common - it would be cheaper to buy X; is not as expensive as Y - common phrases.
Extrapolating, 60 times cheaper means 1/60th -- you could buy 60 books for the same price 1 book cost 50 years ago.
https://erikexamines.substack.com/p/why-was-the-printing-pre...
The screw press already existed in Europe and was widely used. Reducing Gutenbergs invention to just being about using a screw press does not do justice to what he did. It was really about combining several techniques to advance printing. Better alloys for types. Better system for duplicating types. Better ink. A lot of the advancement could have been made even without the printing press itself. And the printing press without these advancement would have made very little improvement.
Movable type was suitable for the Greek and Latin alphabets, but not for Chinese characters or Arabic flowing script. The Chinese had great success with woodblock printing.