Europe Dominated Because It Never Stopped Fighting Itself

Why did the West dominate all rivals on Earth? How did a group of states that were nearly wiped out in the late Middle Ages by enemies to the south and east grow to conquer the globe by the 16th century? To answer that question, we need to go back to its beginning and see what made Europe, Europe. As good a point as any is the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, when Athens preserved democracy from Persian conquest. It consolidated further in 146 BC when Rome began continental integration, and more so under Charlemagne when it became defined as wherever Christian rulers governed rather than by Hadrian's fixed borders six centuries earlier. Overall, it’s a mix of Greek political systems, Roman law, Christianity's moral architecture, and Niall Ferguson's "killer app" of competition where states and merchants constantly vied to outdo each other in ways China's unified empire never experienced.

Today's guest is Roderick Beaton, author of Europe: A New History. We discuss why the Scientific Revolution happened in Europe and not Asia or China (the reintroduction of Greek scholarship into universities combined with the printing press allowing radical ideas to bypass censorship), how representative government emerged when Dutch and English merchant classes traded tax revenue for permanent voice in state policy, and why the European Union's visionary supranational system with open borders under rule of law did not mark the end of history as America celebrated in 1991. Beaton explains that while Princeton dropped even the language requirement for Classics majors in recent years, Europe as an idea and collective identity cannot simply be deconstructed without offering any replacement for the framework we all still use.

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