I don't think the VHS/Betamax analogy applies. Betamax counts for its role in the industry and competition, yet Chinese inventions are definitely the precursor to many essential modern technologies.
Yet they wouldn't be had they been lost, or credit would have been given elsewhere if they were independently developed later. Again, see steam power - adopted worldwide just as you note gunpowder was, but not as a result of the Greeks who first originated the technology.
I didn't mention any dead branches, post-neolithic.
No, but that misses the point. The point is that the reason these aren't dead branches can largely be attributed to non-Chinese societies. This is particularly evident with printing; you might well be right that gunpowder may have been adopted more widely without Mongol intervention (although as that contact would have been much later, it would have been delayed - ironically, your very argument for giving the Chinese originators so much more credit than the Mongols who disseminated it).
Printing, however, required a more flexible writing system than Chinese to develop into what it is today. An abiguda or an abjad would work as well as an alphabet, but neither the Indians nor the Arabs made the advances in printing Europeans did (perhaps partly because in Europe printing advanced as a result of the need to print Christian texts en masse).
As for the necessity of "non-Chinese intervention", that assertion is hard to defend given how much Chinese technology has spread. Gunpowder was readily adopted by just about every non-Chinese civilization that learned how to employ it.
Eventually, and as a result of Mongol intercession - not just introducing the technology, but as an expansionist warrior empire doing so by demonstrating its application.
It absolutely is relevant. Chinese culture created the conditions necessary for these inventions and innovations. No other culture showed any signs whatsoever of being close to inventing gunpowder, seed drills (except the proven dead Mid-Eastern variant), pound locks, etc. The world would be unrecognizable if China didn't invent these each at the time they invented them.
See above. China invented gunpowder centuries before it spread anywhere else; even Korea didn't obtain it until the 14th Century. It's not very relevant to the way gunpowder use developed whether China had developed gunpowder in the 9th Century or the 12th. Had the Mongols not been there, it might have remained in China and Korea for centuries more - so the Mongols really deserve more credit in that regard.
On my arguments? Wrong and wrong, I don't say technological discovery is paramount and I don't elevate those "most important to Europeans". Gunpowder was certainly important to the Arabs and Chinese, and even the Iroquois. Likewise for those on the receiving end. Seed drill, row planting, various ploughs, pound locks are NOT included in the stereotypical four inventions but have had profound impact on the world.
You also didn't highlight these. Yes, gunpowder was important to the Arabs and to the Iroquois ... but mainly with reference to competitors in or from Europe (the Iroquois certainly wouldn't have needed guns otherwise).
Both are statements from ignorance: one, technology proven to have been spread through the world with China as the cited origin are not regional novelties
Not once they were spread through the world, by definition. My point is that
without other cultures to spread them, they would have remained regional novelties. China made no effort to disseminate the technology; legend has it that the Koreans only obtained it because an enterprising Korean visited China and obtained the recipe from a market.
I'd say it has almost been the rule that the technologically dominant power is the one that had the most impact on the world at the time, even the Mongols adopted military tech rapidly and then used it to great effect throughout the empire. Scientifically? Maybe not.
What are you basing this 'rule' on? The Mongols are a good example, as they were not the technologically dominant power but were the dominant power of their time - yes, they adopted one key military innovation from a more advanced subject, but overall they certainly weren't as advanced. Similar cases can be made for European dominance over India, their defeats of the Arabs, or Alexander's over Persia, or the falls of Rome, Egypt or Babylon, among others.
I highly, highly doubt that. The Portuguese never invested as much in their search for El Dorado as they did the India/China trade.
Not El Dorado in the case of the Portuguese - that was the preserve of the later Spanish and English. The Portuguese did indeed invest as much in the search for Prester John as for trade with India; when they first arrived in India they didn't even bring very much to trade, and their first demand was to locate the local Christians they believed to be found there.
If Mali was not hugely influential on the development of the world, it was not an economic powerhouse. Mansa Musa had lots of gold mines, and he wasted a lot of the gold. That's not economic impact.
Spain wasted its silver; China hoarded it. Neither is economic impact either.
So were Burma, Thailand, India. But they didn't, they needed to wait thousands of years for the Chinese to transfer it to them. Just as Euros didn't cultivate wheat.
If we grant that the plant is naturally that widespread, that still leaves only a rather limited number of societies who could have cultivated it. Wheat cultivation in Germany and Spain dates to at least 5,000 BC - it's a rather meaningless comparison.
True. I'm just arguing that the "dissemination" argument for impact is subordinate simply because the powers in question are so interchangeable and their "accomplishments" so forgettable as a result. You may as well ask what general geographic area of the world is more statistically likely to produce powerful polities, and stop at that.
Except that this isn't an exercise in probability, it is - again - a discussion of what happened, and who had the most impact. It doesn't matter how 'interchangeable' the societies that accomplish it. England had the characteristics needed to start the Age of Discovery, but it was Portugal that did so. That doesn't diminish the credit Portugal gets (in fact, Portugal - as a poorer, newer and far more minor European power - should surely deserve more credit if we're weighting the effects of their influence by how relatively impressive they were for the time. Of course that same weighting would play against China: being already more advanced, larger and more urbanised than much of the world at the time, it's only to be expected that it would develop most of its novelties sooner).
Partially, yes, so the really interesting stuff is that which isn't a generalizable norm. Particularly why each "culture" excels in some environments whereas others fail miserably in the very same environments.
Anthropologically interesting, undoubtedly, but that's a very different discussion from the subject of this thread.
There's a difference between real admiration and a few hucksters expropriating cultures they don't understand in order to make money off of gullible non-entities to this discussion.
Yet those hucksters are successful by exploiting the genuine admiration of their clientele. This is not a phenomenon you see associated with 'ancient African wisdom', and no one is looking to Huitzilipotchli for religious guidance. It doesn't even extent to areas of Asia except the traditional European lures of India and China and those countries' associated cultures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Battle_of_Tamao
I'm curious as to how Portugal's famed Caravels were destroyed by Ming junks if indeed the Ming didn't have ship-mounted cannons? I guess there's always wushu.
You might have to remain so, as this piece gives no indication of the Chinese armaments, and I'm aware of no accounts indicating that Ming junks were equipped with cannon - an account I read of the treasure fleets indicated that they carried troops with arquebuses on board, but the vessels themselves appear to have been simply fighting platforms, as was typical for combat-equipped ships in most of the world. This was also of course post-contact with Europeans.
In terms of who the "disseminator" is, I argue again that it doesn't matter - because why it happens is more a function of geography than anything else. That's why I find it more interesting to separate geography and natural resources from what a culture manages to do with them - but still I count the influence of geography and resources toward this "impact" score we're trying to get at. Still think China is tops.
I'm not convinced you're engaging in the same discussion as everyone else on the thread. It has nothing to do with the reasons for impact, purely the fact of impact. Look at the world from a Jared Diamondesque perspective, and at the eastern edge of the Atlantic you'll find a large island with extensive natural deposits of iron, coal and silver, a climate fortuitously warmed by the Gulf Stream with more rainfall that aids in growing crops than most other areas at similar latitude. In comparison with the surrounding mainland it's an extremely large area, while being sufficiently isolated by sea that it's easily accessible only from one or two directions. You can imagine that if its people developed a maritime society, their proximity to the nearby mainland and the straight run westwards would make them nearly ideally placed to spread their culture and products around the world.
And, of course, Britain in one form or another - like France - has been a near-constant of European history, coming and going as a major power and often a desired target for invasion precisely because of many of these natural characteristics. And eventually it founded a maritime empire and later consolidated and expanded it through industrialisation.
The actual
impact of Britain on the modern world, however, would be just as large if it had started out in the same position as Portugal, or as Mongolia and achieved what Britain did in reality, it would just be a much more impressive achievement (especially a maritime Mongol empire...) if we hadn't had such a good 'starting position'.
Because gunpowder was used against them by the Mongols. My understanding is that guns died out in Japan, and then had to be re-introduced by the Europeans (emphasis on re-), after which they reverse engineered and improved upon the Dutch and Portuguese designs which were formerly the best in the world.
If you concede that that's a possibility, why do you have such trouble imagining that the same could have happened in China had the Mongols not made an appearance?
EDIT: There's also one important difference between Japan (and Java, which the Mongols also invaded apparently without inspiring the use of guns) and the areas where guns became established, which may relate to the point I made above about the way the Mongols introduced it. In Japan and Java, the Mongols lost. People tend to pick up on the military innovations among their enemies that win battles; they likely don't take as many lessons from their enemies' defeat.
Are we counting negative or positive impact here?
Impact as I, and it seems most others in the thread, are using it is entirely value-neutral: it's just a question of what effect it's had in shaping the modern world. Christianity gave Europe - among other things - a sophisticated calendar, the Copernican revolution, moveable type, geology, a motive for discovery, imperial ambitions, a unified identity, much art and literature, and an entire social structure (including mechanisms of governance for many centuries), not to mention a significant number of the prejudices inherent in modern society and that to a large extent still shape its politics.
I personally don't think it makes much of a difference whether Christianity or New Age Paganism were to be the world's largest organized religion.
Without Christianity there might not be such a concept as an organised religion.
I simply don't exalt that religion above all else, so I have my doubts when claims are made that it was instrumental to history aside from destroying countless native cultures and obstructing rational inquiry.
You don't imagine that destroying native cultures constitutes an impact?
The Turks would have been hostile to Europe if they were Christian or Zoroastrian or anything else, religion has no primary importance there.
What's the basis for this? The Turks maintained good relations with, for instance, Protestant England on purely religious grounds - they and the Protestants were united in opposing Catholicism. Earlier, the Turks had maintained longstanding good relations with Venice - where conflict arose, it was largely or entirely driven by religious intolerance, that mainly from the West (a characteristic particularly pronounced in Christianity - had New Age Paganism been the dominant Western religion it's very unlikely that most of the religious conflict that characterised and spurred Europe's development would have taken place).
The whole blockade thing just shows that Chinese goods were such a draw for European merchants that they were willing to field huge expeditions to try to find a new route.
They didn't need a new route for any economic reason - most could have gone the Venetian route and traded with the Turks to obtain it; the Turks held a monopoly on supply, but they didn't refuse to trade. The reason they didn't comes back, once again, to the religious differences.
Actually China had been trading for cane hundreds of years (nearly a thousand in fact) before the Europeans ever reached Southeast Asia. They even cultivated it themselves and documented diabetes first as a result.
If that's the case, evidently drinking it with tea wasn't so intuitive after all.
I'd say this is debatable on fact and not in principle. I wouldn't argue if you were to say the Spanish made a huge impact on the world by spreading new world crops everywhere. Tea? China spread tea all over Asia with no problem. Even the Tibetans were willing to trade horses for it, 1,300 years ago.
"Even the Tibetans"? The Tibetans adjacent to China, you mean? At least as far as Wikipedia is concerned, tea was confined to China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam until the British arrived on the scene - elsewhere it was used medicinally in the Indian Himalayas, but nowhere was it drunk as a beverage.
The Sinosphere must have been fairly large then
Yes, there's no disputing that China's a big place.
They're arbitrarily European. I'm dismissing European sentiment, which is paltry compared to Chinese sentiment and a sense of itself. This sentiment is based on shared history, culture, interests and even blood. On all four fronts the European is much less than the Chinese.
In Europe there's an overlay, because Europeans have both a national identity and an identity as Europeans, and I suspect this obscures it. Also, in some areas 'Europeanness' is understated now compared with the historical norm - take Britain, for instance, for centuries defining itself in relation to the rest of Europe (many of those colonial authors extolling affinities with fellow Europeans being British), now more often than not considering itself a separate entity in part due to the legacy of 20th Century events. Certainly any European who travels much - even to states that from afar look noticeably similar, like the US - is likely to quickly identify as European, not in opposition to foreign cultures so much as realising the extent of their affinity with others from the same continent.
More likely they simply wanted to expand their territory willy-nilly and invoking Rome was just an easy way for them to do it.
Which works insofar as the subject peoples share a cultural association with Rome and so recognise that as a legitimate claim.
Han Chinese expansion largely started and stopped with "China-proper".
Until the colonial era, Europe also largely stuck to its self-defined borders - it never extended more than peripherally into North Africa, nor did it aim to claim lands to the east once it had defeated the major rivals there.
Except we're using this metaphor as one for civilizations, not people, and as we've established civilizations are far more broad and amorphous. Likewise sentiment and standards of awarding credit are far different, we feel much more obliged to be precise with an individual's achievements.
It's not a question of being precise - we can say with precision that the Mongols spread gunpowder outside China, and that the Chinese didn't. That gives us all the grounds we need to attribute the impact of gunpowder to the Mongols - without them it may never have left China, and certainly wouldn't have left China as early as it did. Without leaving China as early as it did, you've contended yourself its impact on the world would have been very different.