west to east

Why is that the West discovered the New World before the East?

Europeans’ most obvious geographical advantage was physical: the prevailing winds, the placing of islands, and the sheer size of the Pacific ocean versus the Atlantic ocean made things easier for them. Given time, East Asian explorers would surely have crossed the Pacific eventually, but other things being equal, it was always going to be easier for Viking or Portuguese sailors to reach the New World than for Chinese or Japanese.

In reality, of course, other things are rarely equal, and in the fifteenth century economic and political geography conspired to multiply the advantages that physical geography gave western Europe. Eastern social development was much higher than Western, and thanks to men like. Marco Polo, Westerners knew it. This gave Westerners economic incentives to get to the East and tap into the richest markets on earth. Easterners, by contrast, had few incentives to go west. They could rely on everyone else to come to them.

The Arabs were conveniently placed to dominate the western stretches of the Silk Road and Indian Ocean trade routes, and for many centuries Europeans, at the farthest end of both East arteries, mostly stayed home and made do with the crumbs that Venetians collected from Arab tables. The Crusades and Mongol conquests began changing the political map, though, easing European access to the East. Greed began trumping sloth and fear, pulling traders (particularly Venetians) down the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean or, like the Polos, across the steppes.

When western European states began moving toward the high end and intensifying their wars after the Black Death, political geography added a push to the economic pull. Rulers along the Atlantic fringe were desperate to buy more cannons and were exhausting the usual ways to get rich (ramping up the bureaucracy to tax their subjects, rob and killing Jews, plundering neighbors, and so on). They were ready to talk to anyone who could offer them new revenue sources, even the shady, greedy characters who hung around harbors.

Again, but in different words:

…Rising development set off a Second Old World Exchange and freed the five horsemen again (disease, migration, climate change, famine and state collapse). Social development fell in both cores, but fell longest and furthest in the East. In the West, the more developed Muslim heartland east of the Mediterranean suffered most, and by 1400 a new core was forming and having its own renaissance in western Europe.

These fragmented, previously peripheral European lands now discovered advantages in their own backwardness. Shipbuilding and gunnery, technologies western Europeans had learned from the East during the Second Old World Exchange, allowed them to turn the Atlantic Ocean into a highway, once again transforming the meanings of geography. Eager to tap into the wealth of the East, Western sailors fanned out and their surprise into the Americas.

Easterners could have discovered America in the fifteenth century (some people believe they did) but geography always made it more likely that Westerners would get there first. Easterners had far more to gain by sailing toward the riches of the Indian Ocean than into the empty Pacific and by pushing inland into the steppes, which had been the greatest threat to their security for nearly two thousand years.

In the seventeenth century the expansion of the cores changed the meanings of geography more dramatically than ever before. Centralized empires with muskets and cannons closed the Inner Asian steppe highway that linked East and West, ending nomadic migration and effectively killing one of the horsemen of the apocalypse. On the Atlantic, by contrast, the oceanic highway that western European merchants had opened fueled the rise of new kinds of markets and raised entirely new questions about how the natural world worked. By 1700 social development was again pressing the hard ceiling, but this time, with the full complement of horsemen of the apocalypse unable to ride, disaster was held at bay long enough for western European entrepreneurs to respond to the incentives of the oceanic highway by unleashing the awesome powers of coal and steam.

Given enough time, Easterners would probably have made the same discoveries and had their own industrial revolution, but geography made it much easier for Westerners meant that because people (in large groups) are all much the same, Westerners had their industrial revolution first.

- Ian Morris