Left wing college professors aren’t going to like Rodney
Stark’s book. His brilliant work promotes the idea of European superiority over
that of the Muslim empires, then debunks the myths about the Dark Ages. He
claims that the centuries after the Roman collapse were not a time of
starvation and were the catalyst for independence and self-sufficiency.
Skeletons from the era reveal that Europeans were eating more meat than ever
before! This was hardly the age of horror.
One of the more
humorous pieces in How the West Won is the issue of education in the post-Roman
days. He talks about the “accepted fact” that there was illiteracy in the Dark
Ages, and nobody doubts that, there weren’t lots of free elementary schools in
750 A.D. But was that a radical change from before? Was literacy widespread in
the Roman era? Somehow I doubt the average Roman plebian sent his son to
school, and if he did, who at the time would read for leisure? This was the
time before printing presses, and there weren’t any newspapers or bookstores.
You wouldn’t have been able to go to a stall in the market and say “a scroll of
Homer’s Iliad, if you please.” As for the library of Alexandria, I doubt the average
Roman or Egyptian could just walk in there and help himself to a copy of
Herodotus.
If countering the
ideal of the lawless Dark Ages won’t be enough to infuriate the professors at
Columbia, you should see what he does to the Muslim Empires. He debunks the
ideal of Ottoman superiority, calling Suleiman the Magnificent anything but
that. For proof, he simply states the facts; Suleiman’s army and navy scored a
few victories than got trounced by Europe. As for the fall of Constantinople
(1453), he makes clear that it was not a great conquest. The Byzantine Empire
was just a city state by that point, and the Sultan’s army had cannons. Now
where did he get the cannons? A Hungarian engineer built them! Muslim engineers
were nowhere near the geniuses they’ve been made out to be. Furthermore, the
outnumbered Greeks in the city put up a serious fight, and the Sultan lost
thousands of troops. Don’t forget, his elite fighters, the Janissaries, were
actually slaves stolen from Christian families!
One of the reasons
for European advances, according to Stark, was that they were more open to
accepting foreign things. Europe’s nobles are stereotyped as xenophobic, but
even without reading this book, you can see that they weren’t. Delft ceramics,
for instance, originated in China, and tomatoes, essential to Italian cuisine,
came from the Americas. The British would never have had their famous 4pm tea
if they hadn’t learned of it from the Chinese, same thing with “tea cups.” Oh,
and don’t forget the famous German chocolate cakes, because chocolate
originated in Mexico, not the Swiss Alps. The caravel ships used by Columbus
were based on Arab dhows. But the bottom line here is that the Europeans
advanced on what came from Asia and the Americas. Everything flowed from China
to Europe, not the other way. It wasn’t the Arab sailors that risked their
lives sailing across the Atlantic. Even the conquest of the American West is cited,
though I wouldn’t need to read it to believe it. The reason Custer’s men were
defeated at Little Big Horn was because the Indians bought repeating Winchesters;
an example of adopting new technologies and winning the game.
To sum up, Rodney
Stark trashes political correctness by stating the facts. It was Europe that
provided the great engineers, mapmakers, navigators, physicians, strategists,
and farmers, and if you want proof, look at the results. Did the Turks manage
to conquer Europe? How come their navies never defeated their Spanish rivals?
As for rights and law, it’s true that France, Spain, and England expelled the
Jews, but were Muslim rulers any better? Slavery was widely practiced in Muslim
countries, and when you’re a slave there isn’t much incentive to invent things.
Even today, you can
see evidence of European superiority. China has great industry to produce
metals and technology, but so does Germany. The difference is that Germany does
it without polluting the land.
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