Critique of India

l.m.fosse at easteur-orient.uio.no l.m.fosse at easteur-orient.uio.no
Thu Aug 17 12:32:42 UTC 1995


Stephen Clark wrote:

>I hesitate to intrude: I'm not an Indologist, but a lowly philosopher who has
>only visited India
>once (though we do have Indian research fellows here at Liverpool, courtesy of
>the Charles
>Wallace Memorial Trust).
>
>But I'm not convinced that we need any special reason why `India' is poor, or
>relatively
>powerless. I'm not even convinced that India is much more of a unity than that
>other
>protuberance on the edge of the great eurasian continent (namely Europe). A
>thousand years
>ago Europe was a barbarous, filthy fringe, and the light, wealth and music
>were to be found
>much further east. .....

Those of you who are interested in this sort of thing might want to read
the following book:

E. L. Jones (1987). The European miracle : Environments, economies, and
geopolitics in the history of Europe and Asia. Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press. 2 ed.. 279 pages. ISBN 0-521-33449-7, 0-521-33670-8.

It tries to come to terms with the economic and political differences
between the East and the West. Apart from that, I think Stephen Clark's
comments are quite sensible. There is a sort of civilizational
merry-go-round in the world. In certain periods, some areas do better than
others. Europe has had a peak period during the last 500 years or so, the
last century has also carried the imprint of North America. There are signs
that we are slowly loosing ground to Asians, particularly East Asians. In
one or two centuries, Europa (or simply the West) may be in total decline
again.

As far as invations are concerned, unlike India we have been lucky. The
Arabs didn't quite get us (they got Spain for some centuries), the Mongols
didn't get us (though little merit of our own, we were just plain lucky)
and the Turks didn't get us (although it was a close call). It seems that
in history, you need a bit of luck.

Best regards,

Lars Martin Fosse



Lars Martin Fosse
Research Fellow
Department of East European
and Oriental Studies
P. O. Box 1030, Blindern
N-0315 OSLO Norway

Tel: +47 22 85 68 48
Fax: +47 22 85 41 40

E-mail: l.m.fosse at easteur-orient.uio.no


 






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