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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 4656274" data-attributes="member: 463">Exactly.  Renaissance-Enlightenment-Industrial Revoluton.  Nothing like it had ever happened before.For most of recorded history there has been a band of civiliations across Eurasia from the Mediterranean through India to China.  For most of that time China was somewhat more organisationally and technologically advanced than the others.  Attempts to measure intelligence developed by Westerners consistently show that north-east Asians (Chinese, Japanese, Koreans) are on average more intelligent than Westerners (by about 5-8 IQ points), so this general superiority is unsurprising.  While the Middle East-Mediterranean civilisational area was comparable to India, north-west Europe was uncivilised.  North-West Europe has a very short history of civilisation compared to most of the civilised world.Yet, starting in northern Italy in the mid 15th century, and spreading northwest through France and the Netherlands to England and Scotland, something remarkable happened.  By 1800 European civilisation was massively technologically superior to all other world civilisations and globally dominant.  This dominance has continued to the present day, but has been in relative decline since the First World War and seems (to me) unlikely to continue much beyond the mid 21st century, so it may be a blip in world-historical terms.  Still, it's a very important blip that has undoubtedly changed the world for ever.If you can't see that I feel like you must be living on a different planet.</blockquote>

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