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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
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To: c.hinton who wrote (239722)8/22/2007 12:02:44 PM
From: Nadine Carroll  Read Replies (2) of 281500
 
rape,pillage,genocide are words that are more appropriate than "hungry for new ideas"


My history is not candy coated, I was just referring to one aspect of it, an aspect to which colonialism does not particularly apply. The Europeans founded colonis to exploit natural resources, not to get new ideas. I think you have a bile-coated history if all you can see in the European past is the sins of colonialism.

I was talking about a period over the last 1000 years, during which the Europeans absorbed the philosophy of Averroes, learned mathematics and how to build windmills from the Arabs, learned Greek Fire from the Byzantines and gunpowder from the Chinese. A period in which similar flows of philosophy and inventions did not go the other way. Now the Europeans bowed to nobody in terms of believing their own religion & culture right and other people infidels and barbarians, but it didn't prevent them from collecting ideas as well as profit, often the former in the service of the latter.

It's a significant quirk of history. Any global observer of the year 1000 would have guessed that the Arabs would industrialize first; of 1500, the Chinese. But neither did, and the "not invented here" cultures of each probably played a big role.
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