Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

In India, as in China, two civilizations have followed one another. Although we know relatively little about the earlier of the two, the later (as in China) culminated in a Universal Empire ruled by an alien and peripheral people. Indie Civilization, which began about 3500 B.C., was destroyed by Aryan invaders about 1700 B.C. Hindu Civilization, which emerged from Indie Civilization about 1700 B.C., culminated in the Mogul Empire and was destroyed by invaders from Western Civilization in the period 1500-1900.

Turning to the extremely complicated area of the Near East, we can see a similar pattern. Islamic Civilization, which began about a.d. 500, culminated in the Ottoman Empire in the period 1300-1600 and has been in the process of being destroyed by invaders from Western Civilization since about 1750.

Expressed in this way, these patterns in the life cycles of various civilizations may seem confused. But if we tabulate them, the pattern emerges with some simplicity.

From this table a most extraordinary fact emerges. Of approximately twenty civilizations which have existed in all of human history, we have listed sixteen. Of these sixteen, twelve, possibly fourteen, are already dead or dying, their cultures destroyed by outsiders able to come in with sufficient power to disrupt the civilization, destroy its established modes of thought and action, and eventually wipe it out. Of these twelve dead or dying cultures, six have been destroyed by Europeans bearing the culture of Western Civilization.

Final

Their

Civilization

Its Dates

Universal Empire

Invasions

Dates

Mesopotamian

6000 B.c-300 B.C.

Assyrian 725-333 B.C.

Persian 725-333 B.C.

Greeks

335 B.c-300 B.C.

Egyptian

5500 B.c-300 B.C.

Egyptian

Greeks

334 B.c-300 B.C.

Cretan

3500 b.c.-i 150 B.C.

Minoan-Mycenaean

Dorian Greeks

1200 B.C.—1000B.C.

Indie

3500 B.C.-1700 B.C.

Harappa?

Aryans

180O B.C.-1600 B.C.

Canaanite

2200 B.C.-100 B.C.

Punic

Romans

264 B.C-I46 B.C.

Sinic

2000 B.C.-A.D. 400

Chin

Han

Ural-Altaic

A.D. 200-500

Hittite

I800-1150

Hittite

Indo-European

1200 B.C-A.D. 1000

Classical

1150 B.C.-A.D. 500

Roman

Germanic

A.D. 35O-600

Andean

1500 B.C.-A.D. 1600

Inca

Europeans

1534

Mayan

1000 B.C.-A.D. 1550

Aztec

Europeans

1519

Hindu

1800 B.C.-A.D. I900

Mogul

Europeans

1500-1900

Chinese

400-1930

Manchu

Europeans

I790-1930

Japanese

850 B.C.—?

Tokugawa

Europeans

1853-

Islamic

500-?

Ottoman

Europeans

1750-

Western

350-?

United States?

future?

?

Orthodox

350-?

Soviet

future?

?

When we consider the untold numbers of other societies, simpler than civilizations, which Western Civilization has destroyed or is now destroying, societies such as the Hottentots, the Iroquois, the Tasmanians, the Navahos, the Caribs, and countless others, the full frightening power of Western Civilization becomes obvious.

One cause, although by no means the chief cause, of the ability of Western Civilization to destroy other cultures rests on the fact that it has been expanding for a long time. This fact, in turn, rests on another condition to which we have already alluded, the fact that Western Civilization has passed through three periods of expansion, has entered into an Age of Conflict three times, each time has had its core area conquered almost completely by a single political unit, but has failed to go on to the Age of the Universal Empire because from the confusion of the Age of Conflict there emerged each time a new organization of society capable of expanding by its own organizational powers, with the result that the four phenomena characteristic of the Age of Conflict (decreasing rate of expansion, class conflicts, imperialist wars, irrationality) were gradually replaced once again by the four kinds of expansion typical of an Age of Expansion (demographic, geographic, production, knowledge). From a narrowly technical point of view, this shift from an Age of Conflict to an Age of Expansion is marked by a resumption of the investment of capital and the accumulation of capital on a large scale, just as the earlier shift from the Age of Expansion to the Age of Conflict was marked by a decreasing rate of investment and eventually by a decreasing rate of accumulation of capital.

Western Civilization began, as all civilizations do, in a period of cultural mixture. In this particular case it was a mixture resulting from the barbarian invasions which destroyed Classical Civilization in the period 350-700. By creating a new culture from the various elements offered from the barbarian tribes, the Roman world, the Saracen world, and above all the Jewish world (Christianity), Western Civilization became a new society.

This society became a civilization when it became organized, in the period 700-970, so that there was accumulation of capital and the beginnings of the investment of this capital in new methods of production. These new methods are associated with a change from infantry forces to mounted warriors in defense, from manpower (and thus slavery) to animal power in energy use, from the scratch plow and two-field, fallow agricultural technology of Mediterranean Europe to the eight-oxen, gang plow and three-field system of the Germanic peoples, and from the centralized, state-centered political orientation of the Roman world to the decentralized, private-power feudal network of the medieval world. In the new system a small number of men, equipped and trained to fight, received dues and services from the overwhelming majority of men who were expected to till the soil. From this inequitable but effective defensive system emerged an inequitable distribution of political power and, in turn, an inequitable distribution of the social economic income. This, in time, resulted in an accumulation of capital, which, by giving rise to demand for luxury goods of remote origin, began to shift the whole economic emphasis of the society from its earlier organization in self-sufficient agrarian units (manors) to commercial interchange, economic specialization, and, by the thirteenth century, to an entirely new pattern of society with towns, a bourgeois class, spreading literacy, growing freedom of alternative social choices, and new, often disturbing, thoughts.