Batılı

Göndermeler

Bloch'dan

Outside Europe, in distant Japan, it so happened that a system of personal and territorial subordination, very similar to Western feudalism, was gradually formed over against a monarchy which, as in the West, was much older than itself. But there the two institutions coexisted without interpenetration. Batı'da olduğu gibi kendisinden çok daha eski olan bir monarşi karşısında Batı feodalizmine çok benzeyen kişisel ve teritoryal bir tahakküm düzeninin aşama aşama biçimlenmesi hasbelkader Avrupa dışında, uzaklarda Japonya'da yaşandı. Ama orada iki kurum bir birinin içine geçmeden bir arada bulundu. (Çev. DrOS)

Diğer

In the 1930s, the social scientist Frederick Teggart looked at the Eurasian connections between Rome and Han and their shared problem with “barbarians” on the frontiers; he wrote a book attempting to explain what he saw as correlations between Eastern and Western history. Wars in the Roman east and barbarian invasions along the Danube and Rhine were ultimately the result, Teggart argued, of policies of the Han government. How? Through trade and nomadic migrations. Wars in the Tarim Basin disrupted trade that would have passed through Parthia, which in turn made trouble on the eastern Roman frontier in Armenia. Likewise, Han policies to split the Xiongnu set tribes in motion across the steppe to Russia, who in turn drove other “barbarian” tribes before them, right up to the Roman northern frontier in Europe.

An important aspect of Hodgson's reevaluation of modernity is his insistence that in historical time it is the discontinuities and not the continuities of Western history which are most striking. He notes that the ascending curve which runs from ancient Greece, to the Renaissance, to modern times is an optical illusion. In fact, he argues, for most of history Europe was an insignificant outlier of mainland Asia. Furthermore, he notes, the Renaissance did not inaugurate modernity. Instead, it brought Europe up to the cultural level of the other major civilizations of the Oikoumene. It did so in some measure by assimilating the advances of the other Asian civilizations. The list of inventions which developed elsewhere and diffused subsequently to Europe is a long one. It includes gunpowder firearms, the compass, the sternpost rudder, decimal notation, and the university, among others. Seen in this light, the European experience looks much less original. This is not to deny that there were original European developments. But in the context of three millennia of agrarianate citied life in the Afro-Eurasian Oikoumene, there was a tendency for civilizations to achieve a rough parity with one another as cultural innovations diffused throughout the Oikoumene.