Abstract
The preceding chapters have deconstructed the West’s dominance over Asia in the modern period by focusing on the increased cooperation resulting from precocious language standardization in Britain (with its American offshoot) and France. Most recent studies of the rise of the West have taken an alternative approach known as the tournament model, emphasizing not cooperation but competition. Concentrating on the period from 1450 to 1650, the latter approach argues that the interregional rivalries generated by Europe’s history and geography provided an incentive to develop improved military techniques. By the mid-seventeenth century, it is argued, the resulting military scale economies had led to the emergence of a few Great Powers that were subsequently able to dominate the rest of Eurasia. However, this approach has difficulty explaining why until 1860, the West’s success was essentially a tale of the two societies that were the first to standardize their vernaculars.
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Dudley, L. (2017). Conclusion. In: The Singularity of Western Innovation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39822-2_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39822-2_14
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