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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8349601" data-attributes="member: 42582">Comparing processes of technological diffusion in the "modern" period to earlier periods is fraught. Not to say that it can't be done, but doing it well requires close attention to the social processes involved.Here's Hodgson again (same essay, pp 70-71):Within the Afro-Eurasian historical complex, the overall rise in the level of social power that had everywhere taken pace (sic) was cumulatively very marked. In the sixteenth century, the Spanish, the Ottoman, the Indian, or the Chinese empires could, any of them, have easily crushed the ancient Sumerians at their strongest - as one of them did crush the Aztecs, who were on a comparable level. But the rise was very gradual. In any given era, each society . . . had to reckon with the others essentially as equals, whatever temporary superiority one of them might gain. . . . This was because over the millennia any really basic new developments had been gradually adopted everywhere within the space of four or five centuries - or even more rapidly in such a case as gunpowder weapons. But it was part of the transmutational character of the new transformation [ie modernity] that it broke down the very historical presuppositions in terms of which such gradual diffusion had maintained parity among Afro-Eurasian citied societies. In the new pace of historical change, when decades sufficed to produce what centuries had produced before, a lag of four or five centuries was no longer safe. The old gradual diffusion and adjustment was no longer possible. Very shortly - at the latest by the end of the seventeenth century - all non-Western peoples were faced with the problem of coping as outsiders with the new order of civilized life as it was emerging in the Occident. Unless, by the oddest of chances, they happened to have started a comparable transmutation of their own at precisely the same moment as the Occident, there was no time for them to follow their own independent developments, however promising. Yet, still moving, culturally, at an agrarianate pace, the could also not simply adopt the Western development for themselves year by year as it proceeded (which would have been required for such adoption to be effective). Those untransmutated agrarianate-level societies that did not share the Western cultural presuppositions had perforce to continue developing in their own traditions at their own pace, adopting from alien traditions only what could be assimilated on that basis. Hence the Wester Transmutation, once it got well under way, could neither be paralleled independently nor be borrowed wholesale. Yet it could not in most cases, be escaped. The millennial parity of social power broke down, with results that were disastrous almost everywhere.And the analysis doesn't get any more straightforward once one factors in deliberate processes of colonisation, which  have deliberately set out to disrupt, in various ways, processes of borrowing, diffusion and accommodation.</blockquote>

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