This started out as a response to an article by Craig Neumier in the last issue of POD.  I thought it might be of interest to Alternate History fans in general.  Why was Western Europe able to go from being a relative technological backwater to conquering most of the world and defining the world's culture?  Why did the industrial and scientific revolutions happen there? 

On the Great Transformation (GT): I go back and forth between believing that the wealth of the Americas, and especially the way they were spent made the GT possible and believing that Europe was special. Last issue, I took the "America made it possible" position in a reply to Robert Alley. I'm not as sure of that as I sounded. I do believe that having the Americas as a safety valve to give the most ambitious of the inevitable losers in a time of change an outlet was very important. That safety valve made change much less dangerous for European kings and kingdoms. On the other hand, I started doubting my conclusion that Europe would lapse back into a change-resistant universal monarchy in the absence of the American discoveries even as I said that was likely. I have a great deal of difficulty seeing a way to get from the Europe of 1492 to any kind of universal monarchy, and that might be telling me something. Was the system of competing states of Europe resistant to consolidation beyond a certain point? If so, that might provide something special that gave the Europeans an edge in continuing to change.

The part of me that believes that Europe was nothing special says that whichever center of culture managed to establish a world-wide trading network would eventually leave the competition behind. They would get access to the bulk of the innovations available from all of the cultures that they have contact with. That means they could pick out the things from all of the other cultures that fit into theirs. A culture that has access to five or six other cultures doesn't necessarily have to be all that much more innovative than those other cultures in order to pass them by. The people controlling contact between other cultures have an enormous advantage. From that point of view, the GT was inevitable as soon as:

1) Ship-building and navigation got good enough to allow someone to build a world-wide trading network.

2) The easily to spread diseases of the major centers had spread widely enough that building a world-wide trading network did not result in the destruction of the society that built it. If Peru and Mexico and maybe the southeastern US had each had a set of endemic diseases comparable to those of Europe, India, and China, the GT would have certainly been postponed as those diseases got transported back, and the characteristics of Europe would not make much of a difference.

Let's illustrate the point that controlling contact is vital. Imagine for a minute that some unlikely group of people--maybe the ancestors of a couple of the California Indian tribes--somehow developed the ability to visit any other area of the world inhabited by hunter-gatherers and bring stuff back with them. They begin developing that ability around the time of the crusades, and by 1570 or so they can visit anywhere in the world that is still inhabited by hunter-gatherers. (It would take something like teleportation to make that possible, but let's assume for the moment that it is possible-make it a slow process to simulate ships crossing oceans, but not so slow that no one is interested in doing it.). These people are regularly visiting the Ainu of Japan, tribes in Siberia, people in the northwestern United States, people in Baja California, the more primitive Khoisan and Pygmy tribes in Africa, some parts of New Guinea, anywhere in Australia and Tasmania, and parts of South America.

Now, given these teleporting hunter-gatherers:

1) Does the culture of hunter-gatherers throughout the world begin to change at a quicker rate?

2) Which hunter-gatherer culture would we regard as most advanced by say 1850?

3) Which hunter-gatherer culture would the other hunter-gatherer cultures look the most like in 1850?

4) Which hunter-gatherer culture would have the most flexible and pragmatic view of the world?

Presumably the answer to all of those questions would be "the teleporters."

Now, the fact that they are hunter-gathers limits the amount of culture that these people can collect, but if you want to amplify the effect, try giving some random Neolithic or copper/bronze working group the same ability. Give the ancestors of the Cherokees the ability to visit and trade with any group on earth with Neolithic or earlier technology, starting in 1200 AD. Almost every area involved advances more rapidly, but the Cherokees determine which traits spread and which ones stay put or die out. The Cherokees are the only people that can, for example, get an inspiration to take arrow poisons from South America and combine them with those nice compound bows that the Apaches use, and then use those very thin arrows that some Chichimec tribes use. The other groups wouldn't know that the raw materials for that inspiration exist, unless for some reason the Cherokees decided to tell them. The Cherokees are the only people that can decide to import Khoisan cattle and establish cattle ranches on the fringe of the plains, or not to. They are the only people who can look at the crops of the Mexican and Peruvian highlands and choose which if any of them gets spread throughout the world of Neolithic people.

I could go on on this subject for another couple of hundred pages, but perhaps mercifully I'm running short of time.  The bottom line is: the culture that puts a world-wide trading network together has an enormous advantage over all of the other cultures of the world.  It should become dominant, and it did.