The Spanish Inquisition from the late fifteenth century was an attempt to
assert the dominance of the Catholic Church and its ideas against free-thinking
heresy and foreign ideas in the late sixteenth century. Copernicus, Galileo and
Newton were banned by the Spanish Jesuits until 1746 and those printing
presses that were permitted were monopolized by clerical hands. This attempt
at despotism in Europe was mitigated by territorial partition. If ideas were
banned in one country they could move and their inventors with them (see
Chapter 11 on the importance of geographical fragmentation in Europe).
While the Spanish attempted repression, cheaper printing and spreading liter-
acy were elsewhere giving new ideas wider circulation (Roberts, 1985).
Thousands of Europeans in the eighteenth century came to feel that they were
part of a movement in which educated men (and less often women) could think
and reject inherited tradition. This became known as the Enlightenment. The
movement was based on a new scientific emphasis and rational scepticism that
gradually undermined religious belief. Though modern science had roots in
Islamic and Chinese science and Indian mathematics it was fundamentally an
‘artefact of post-Renaissance western culture; (Roberts, 1985:158). The new
science was found first in observations,then in recording and dissemination of
those records. The notion of experimentation and the testing of hypotheses by
replicable means was aided by generalized explanations of how the universe
worked from Copernicus,Kepler and Galileo. The ‘crucial change in the
making of the modern mind was the widespread acceptance of the idea that the
world is essentially rational and explicable’ (Roberts, 1985:161). Their ideas
spread rapidly across Protestant Europe but long remained heretical in Spain
and other Catholic countries.
China had two chances (Landes, 1998, 2006). The first was to generate a
sustained internal process of scientific and technological advance on the basis
of its indigenous achievement and the second was to learn from European
science and technology once contact was made in the sixteenth century. China
failed at both (this is discussed in more detail in Chapter 7). Pre-empting
Britain and Europe in industry (textiles, porcelain and iron manufacture), agri-
cultural technology (wheelbarrow, stirrup, rigid horse collar), the means of
order and administration (clocks and paper), trade (the compass and shipping)
and military (gunpowder), China yet failed to realize the potential of these
inventions and go on to have an industrial revolution after the fifteenth century.
Many authors have stressed the lack of openness as being crucial in explaining
this failure. In 1368, for example, the new Ming Emperor wished to enforce
social stability and so ordered that people were to stay put and move only with
state permission, whether home or abroad. Migration was made subject to the
death penalty. After the early decades of its rule the Ming Dynasty
(1368–1644) prohibited all overseas trade. The second, later chance was to
learn from foreigners. But China was the self-proclaimed ‘celestial empire’, in
its own view the leading nation in terms of age, experience, cultural achieve-
ment, moral and spiritual superiority. Cultural triumphalism made China a bad
learner. Chinese scientific enquiry tended to look back at own writings to
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