Progress

It isn't inevitable:

Before 1800 there were also long periods in which technology either showed no advance at all or even regressed. Australian Aboriginals, for example, are believed to have arrived in that country between forty and sixty thousand years ago, long before people first arrived in the Americas. But technology seemingly remained frozen on the Australian continent through the long period up to the arrival of British colonizers in 1788, judging by the technology of the Aboriginals at first contact.

Furthermore, there are signs of actual technological regression. The Aboriginals are presumed to have reached Australia by sea. Yet by 1788 they no longer had seaworthy craft in most of Australia. In Tasmania, where a community of about 5,000 Aboriginals was cut off from the mainland by rising sea levels for about twelve thousand years, the technological regression was even more dramatic. When encountered by Europeans in the late eighteenth century, the Tasmanians had a material culture at the level of the early Paleolithic, more primitive than that with which they had been endowed by their ancestors. Despite the cold they had no clothing, not even animal skins. They had no bone tools, and no ability to catch the fish abounding in the sea around them. Yet archeological evidence shows that hey had once had such bone tools, and that fish was once an important part of their diet. The gap between their technology and that of the English in 1800 was, as illustrated above, reflected in the respective population densities of the societies. Tasmania, about half the area of England, had an estimated fie thousand inhabitants at a time when England had eight million.

…In Arctic Canada the Inuit, on first contact in the nineteenth century, had a material culture considerably less complex than that of their ancestors the Thule of five centuries before. The Thule were able to hunt large sea mammals in open water, and they wintered in permanent houses that were stocked with ingenious and elegant artifacts, including games and children’s toys, harpoons, boats and dogsleds. Sometime between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries the Inuit lost much of their material culture. Hunting of sea mammals in open water disappeared, or was restricted to smaller species. Winter was not spent in transient snow-houses, since the Inuit were unable to procure sufficient food supplies to winter in one location. Artifacts were simpler, and decorated or ornamental objects were produced in only a few areas. So marked was this difference that it took archaeologists a long time to accept that the Inuit were indeed the descendants of the Thule.

It is even claimed that China, which led the world in technological sophistication as late as 1400, also went into a technological decline. When Marco Polo visited China in the 1290s he found that the Chinese were far ahead of the Europeans in technical prowess. Their oceangoing junks, for example, were larger and stronger than European ships. In them the Chinese sailed as far as Africa. The Portuguese, after a century of struggle, reached Calicut, India, in the person of Vasco da Gama in 1498 with four ships of 70-300 tons and perhaps 170 men. There they found they had been preceded years before by Zheng He, whose fleet may have had as many as three hundred ships and 28,000 men. Yet by the time the Portuguese reached China in 1514, the Chinese had lost the ability to build large oceangoing ships.

Similarly Marco Polo had been impressed and surprised by the deep coal mines of China. Yet by the nineteenth century Chinese coal mines were primitive shallow affairs which relied completely on manual power. By the eleventh century AD the Chinese measured time accurately using water clocks, yet when the Jesuits arrived in China in the 1580s they found only the most primitive methods of time measurement in use, and amazed the Chinese by showing them mechanical clocks. The decline in technological abilities in China was not caused by any catastrophic social turmoil. Indeed in the period after 1400 China continued to expand by colonizing in the south, the population grew, and there was increased commercialization.

Excerpted from A Farewell to Alms.