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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8340061" data-attributes="member: 42582">Agreed.This discussion of rates of change and diffusion also relates to my question about the Grippli and Cormyr - what is the timeframe in relation to which I am expected to imagine there has been no significant technological diffusion. And also why I asked about a comparison to twelfth-century Kent and western Ireland.If Cormyr resembles twelfth-century Kent, but the Grippli who live nearby resemble much of Australia in the same period, what is the reason why? As far as I can tell there's no in-fiction explanation, just an authorial stipulation that the Grippli are primitive.That is reinforced by the fact that, in D&D, all the ways in which we would find mediaeval Kent "primitive" - be that in public and personal health, or the amount of material goods around, or the quality of a lot of manufacturing - are glossed over in depictions of Cormyr; while the descriptions of the Grippli doubld down on the ways in which they are "primitive".It's not a presentation of a seriously considered social reality. It's just the reproduction of pulp tropes.This is why I hardly find it surprsing that, after a short (ie approximately two century) blip, China is returning to its status as a centre of world production. The same is true for India.Here's another salient quote from Hodgson (same essay, p 46):At least till very recently, there was a tendency among Europeans (including, of course, Americans) to take this remarkable fact [of European power] for granted. . . . Such Europeans have wondered why in recent years, after many centuries (so they suppose) of static quiescence, the various "backward" peoples now are stirring. They have overlooked the wonder of how it could be that, for what is in fact a rather brief period of little more than one century, Europeans could have held so unique a position in the world. [Fn: The notion of the "millennial torpor" of "the East" remains so widespread partly because of touristic misimpressions but also because it has been subsumed in the approach of two sorts of scholars: the Westernists, who downgrade all alien societies, and the area students, who suppose all pre-Moderns were overwhelmed by tradition.] The real question, from the standpoint of the world at large, is just that: what gave the Europeans such overwhelming power for a time?</blockquote>

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