Isn't China's stagnation suspiciously close to the Mongol conquest? I don't know anything about their domestic policy regarding invention, but I do know they whisked away all the best engineers to the other side of the world to build siege engines. Maybe that hurt or even severed their capacity for transfering their expertise to the next generation?
That Japan was able to catch up quickest to the Western challenge, and had the non-European institutional structure most like (medieval) Europe’s, strongly suggests an early established NW Europe advantage that had little to do with colonialism.
Isn't China's stagnation suspiciously close to the Mongol conquest? I don't know anything about their domestic policy regarding invention, but I do know they whisked away all the best engineers to the other side of the world to build siege engines. Maybe that hurt or even severed their capacity for transfering their expertise to the next generation?
That Japan was able to catch up quickest to the Western challenge, and had the non-European institutional structure most like (medieval) Europe’s, strongly suggests an early established NW Europe advantage that had little to do with colonialism.