"The Fates of Human Societies: A Review of Recent Macrohistories" by Gale Stokes, in The American Historical Review (April 2001), 400 A St. S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003.

It’s money, not politics, that makes our new globalized world go ’round, and that may explain why historians have been returning lately to an old question: Why Europe? Why, asks Stokes, did this "relatively small and backward" region suddenly burst upon the world scene in the 16th century and soon dominate it?

Two main schools of thought exist, according to the Rice University historian, while a third, very impressive body of ideas is developing.

One school, led by Harvard University’s David Landes, author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998), holds that some kind of European exceptionalism—individualism, the rise of unfettered science—is the best answer. Europe, says Landes, enjoyed the advantage of diverse cultures combined with a single unifying language: Latin. More important, it developed values, such as thrift and honesty, that favored economic development. Above all Europe was open to new knowledge, while its chief rival, China, was hobbled by what Stokes calls "a systematic resistance to learning from other cultures."

An opposing school of thought, which finds its best expression in Andre Gunder Frank’s ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (1998), holds that, essentially, Europe got lucky. Frank and other scholars portray the last 1,000 years as an era dominated by the more advanced cultures and economies of Asia (mainly China), with the period of Western advantage brief—and likely to end soon. They see evidence in China of all the things said to distinguish precapitalist Europe, including vigorous markets and trade, technological innovation, and Ben Franklin-like sages who preached capitalist virtues. Even after Emperor Wang Yang-Ming famously pulled the plug on China’s ambitious program of overseas exploration in 1433, prosperity continued. Europe didn’t really get a leg up until about 1800, in this view, and then only because it was able to exploit the gold and silver wealth it had stumbled upon in the New World. Says Frank, "The Europeans bought themselves a seat, and then even a whole railway car, on the Asian train."

Historians in the emerging third school of thought tend to avoid invidious comparisons. In China Transformed (1997), for example, R. Bin Wong of the University of California, Irvine, argues that Europe’s many states, its semi-autonomous social classes, and its independent church combined to give it great flexibility and other advantages in adapting to economic change. Yet Wong also argues, in Stokes’s words, that "the Chinese state’s concern for the welfare and moral education of the public, especially the poor, produced social policies that European states could not even imagine until recently."

Wong and his leading ally, historian Kenneth Pomeranz, author of The Great Divergence (2000), join Frank and others in pushing forward the moment when Europe gained an edge from the 16th century to about 1800, but they give a different reason: the invention of coal-fired steam power. This, too, owed something to accident: England’s endowment of coal and iron deposits in proximity to each other. In the 18th century, China and Europe both felt the effects of ecological constraints, such as shortages of wood and declining soil fertility. Steam power, which led to industrialization, allowed Europe to escape the "Malthusian trap."

Stokes calls the Wong-Pomeranz arguments "powerful." But he thinks that the two historians’ new "world history" has yet to take into account the uniquely European ideas—liberty, individualism, equality, popular sovereignty—that have done so much to shape the world since 1800.