(^528) NOTES
bureaucracy was dominant in almost all aspects of large-scale activity—administrative,
military, religious, and economic—so that no sanction for private enterprise ever be
came established ..." The United States and China, p. 47. Note the use of the word
"Oriental," not then frowned upon.
- On the significance of law and justice for medieval political rule, see Crone, Pre-
Industrial Societies, pp. 157-58, who stresses the contribution of this function to royal
revenues. But perverse consequence: he who gets his living by the law must live by the
law. - Cited in Edmonds, Northern Frontiers, p. 55.
- Some have argued that this is not so; thus Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society
in a Chinese City, and Perdue, Exhausting the Earth, p. 263, n. 6. Such arguments miss
the explicit political autonomies and status privileges of European communes. - Robert Lopez, cited by Pounds, Economic History, p. 104.
- On rural privileges and their link to projects of land reclamation and extension of
cultivation, going back to the eleventh century, see the important article of Bryce
Lyon, "Medieval Real Estate Developments and Freedom," Amer. Hist. Rev., 63
(1957), 47-61. - Cf. Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change.
- "Far from being stultified by imperial government, Europe was to be propelled
forward by constant competition between its component parts." And, stressing the
paradox of redemption in the loss of imperial paradise: "Europe failed: had it suc
ceeded, it would have remained a pre-industrial society"—Crone, Pre-Industrial Soci
eties, pp. 161, 172. - Hippocrates, Air Waters Places, cited in March, Idea of China, p. 29. For March,
the very idea of Asia is a myth—an opposing "they" that defines Europe in terms of
what it is not or does not want to be. This, he feels, reflects ideological and class in
terests: "Our modern 'Asia' is perpetuated not for science but on behalf of those strata
whose care is to maintain the ideal of western civilisation and who benefit from its sa
cred myths of individualism, private property, and aggressive defence of liberty" (p.
35). None of which necessarily invalidates these contrasts. - On the "Peace of God" movement of the late tenth, early eleventh century, which
took the form of mass public encounters of clergy, nobility, and populace and produced
a series of social compacts, cf. Head and Landes, eds., The Peace of God: Social Violence
and Religious Response. These compacts were not always honored, but principle mat
ters, and again, such evidences of popular initiative and expression were distinctively
European.
CHAPTER 4- The key piece is the seminal article of Lynn White, Jr., "Technology and Inven
tion in the Middle Ages," Speculum, 15 (1940): 141-59. - Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine, p. 14. Cf. White, Medieval Religion and
Technology, pp. 226-27. White also points out that whereas paper from Muslim lands
(not mechanically produced) never shows watermarks, such trademarks appear in Ital
ian paper by the 1280s, a sign of commercial enterprise. - On these glasses before eyeglasses, see the work of Zecchin, Vetro e vetrai di Mu-
rano (Venice, 1989), cited by Ilardi, "Renaissance Florence," p. 510. - The speaker is the Dominican Fra Giordano of Pisa, in a sermon at Santa Maria
Novella in Florence in 1306. Quoted in White, "Cultural Climates," p. 174; also in
reprint, 1978, p. 221. White cites the Italian original. I have made small stylistic
changes in the translation. See also Rosen, "Invention of Eyeglasses"; and Ilardi, Oc-
chiali and "Renaissance Florence."