ABSTRACT
What I have surveyed above is a tale of technological success. It may seem to some “Whiggish”, telling a story of progress and improvement. Although technology did not move linearly, and not even necessarily always unidirectionally, it can scarcely be maintained that today's techniques for producing any good or service, from wheat to filling a tooth, are not vastly superior to those of 1750 let alone the year 1000. “Better” here is meant strictly in the tautological economic sense of being more efficient. Much, though by no means all, of the progress occurred in Europe. The survey above has therefore been inevitably Europocentric. The notion, however, that modern technology and the modern economy it created were primarily the responsibility of occidental Europe is oversimplified. Thanks to the labors of Joseph Needham and his associates, we know now that China had developed by about 1400 a highly sophisticated economy. Needham has tirelessly tried to link almost every major invention made in the West to Chinese precedent, and although in some of these cases we have to assume that Europeans made some inventions independently, the priority of Chinese technology in many areas can hardly be disputed. Europe also owed debts to other non-European civilizations, from India to pre-Colombian America. In the last century it has repaid these debts with usurious interest, and its phenomenal success is expressed in recent titles such as How The West Grew Rich and The European Miracle.
