GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

4 1 4 " EPILOGUE
technological preeminence to Europe is to understand China's chronic
unity and Europe's chronic disunity. The answer is again suggested by
maps (see page 415). Europe has a highly indented coastline, with five
large peninsulas that approach islands in their isolation, and all of which
evolved independent languages, ethnic groups, and governments: Greece,
Italy, Iberia, Denmark, and Norway / Sweden. China's coastline is much
smoother, and only the nearby Korean Peninsula attained separate importance.
Europe has two islands (Britain and Ireland) sufficiently big to assert
their political independence and to maintain their own languages and ethnicities,
and one of them (Britain) big and close enough to become a major
independent European power. But even China's two largest islands, Taiwan
and Hainan, have each less than half the area of Ireland; neither was
a major independent power until Taiwan's emergence in recent decades;
and Japan's geographic isolation kept it until recently much more isolated
politically from the Asian mainland than Britain has been from mainland
Europe. Europe is carved up into independent linguistic, ethnic, and political
units by high mountains (the Alps, Pyrenees, Carpathians, and Norwegian
border mountains), while China's mountains east of the Tibetan
plateau are much less formidable barriers. China's heartland is bound
together from east to west by two long navigable river systems in rich
alluvial valleys (the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers), and it is joined from north
to south by relatively easy connections between these two river systems
(eventually linked by canals). As a result, China very early became dominated
by two huge geographic core areas of high productivity, themselves
only weakly separated from each other and eventually fused into a single
core. Europe's two biggest rivers, the Rhine and Danube, are smaller and
connect much less of Europe. Unlike China, Europe has many scattered
small core areas, none big enough to dominate the others for long, and
each the center of chronically independent states.
Once China was finally unified, in 221 B.C., no other independent state
ever had a chance of arising and persisting for long in China. Although
periods of disunity returned several times after 221 B.C., they always ended
in reunification. But the unification of Europe has resisted the efforts of
such determined conquerors as Charlemagne, Napoleon, and Hitler; even
the Roman Empire at its peak never controlled more than half of Europe's
area.
Thus, geographic connectedness and only modest internal barriers gave
China an initial advantage. North China, South China, the coast, and the