Another Europe, 1750

[Faeelin]

This is a thought, inspired by the TL about a Southern Ming that I will return to, one day.

Without giving too much away, but 1750 there will be a Chinese & Japanese culture that's about in contact with Europe as much as Russia was in the period. They have fewer people we'd call scientists, but man, can those guys in Japan do math, while doctors in China have stumbled upon germ theory. Coal mining is beginning to pick up again, although obviously its usefulness varies, and the Stock Exchange in Osaka is as busy as Amsterdam's.

What happens to technological development if you double the number of people in the world around 1750, hmm, involved in the scientific revolution and so forth?

[Paul Spring]

I don't think this is too far-fetched - you would need both China and Japan to follow less isolationist paths, which is entirely possible if you go back to a POD in the late 16th or 17th centuries.

Obviously the pace of scientific and industrial/technological development is likely to be faster with a lot more people involved. How much faster, though, would depend on so many different factors (cultural, politica, social, economic, even personal) that it's really hard to say whether this would mean slightly faster development or much faster development.

[Max Sinister]

There are unfortunately barriers for cooperation: Different language (European scientists at least had Latin as a lingua franca), and a long way in between. How can you make research with a partner in China if a ship needs three months to deliver a letter? You'll become old and grey even if you only start a conversation.

The least thing you'd need for that would be an earlier telegraph. In my Chaos TL this happens in the 18th century, but it takes some time until every country has at least one telegraph line.

[Faeelin]

There are unfortunately barriers for cooperation: Different language (European scientists at least had Latin as a lingua franca), and a long way in between. How can you make research with a partner in China if a ship needs three months to deliver a letter? You'll become old and grey even if you only start a conversation.

And yet this wasn't a handicap to North American involvement in 18th century science. I'm not saying cooperative research teams; I'm saying plugging into the general discourse; The Age of Reason being read by Mandarins in Gold Mountain, while the Dream of the Red Chamber is a play in London.

(hey, that one is plausible).

[Max Sinister]

OK, so:

- Distributing the results of your work over the whole civilized world: Perfectly possible.
- Actively cooperating with scientists from other continents, as they do today: Not possible.

[Faeelin]

OK, so:

- Distributing the results of your work over the whole civilized world: Perfectly possible.
- Actively cooperating with scientists from other continents, as they do today: Not possible.

They didn't do this until the middle of the 20th century, so I'm not sure what the significance of this is.

[Midgard]

- Actively cooperating with scientists from other continents, as they do today: Not possible.

Not necessarily... perhaps there is a "way station" for exchange of ideas, such as India, where Europeans could be mingling with less isolationist Chinese and Japanese? Still-functioning Silk Road, and more stable states around it? Create such a center for cooperation, and it could become an attraction for many scientists to "cut their teeth" in, so to speak - a popular place for them to travel and learn each others' ways in their youth and whatnot.

[Max Sinister]

It would be quite nice if this had been so IOTL. The Kerala School in India had developed mathematics that would be invented in Europe only centuries later. (Some people even claim that calculus and other maths weren't invented by the Europeans but imported from India, but that's far from being proven.)

[Paul Spring]

Given the instability of central Asia in the 18th century plus extensive European trade in the Indian Ocean, I think India or somewhere in Southeast Asia or Indonesia would be the most likely meeting point between Europeans and East Asians for spreading knowledge. If the Chinese government especially had allowed their merchants more freedom then they might have revived extensive trade into the Indian Ocean and met with European merchants coming from the other direction. More commercial exchange might lead after a few decades to much more cultural and scientific exchange. Even in OTL the Jesuits in the 17th century were able to impress learned scholars in China and Japan with early model telescopes and predictions of eclipses and the exact movements of planets that were more accurate in some ways than those of the Chinese. Supposedly there is a surviving text from China at the time that mention Galileo's discovery of 4 moons around Jupiter. This got choked off as both China and Japan became isolationist, but what if the trend had continued the other way ...

[Smaug]

Not necessarily... perhaps there is a "way station" for exchange of ideas, such as India, where Europeans could be mingling with less isolationist Chinese and Japanese? Still-functioning Silk Road, and more stable states around it? Create such a center for cooperation, and it could become an attraction for many scientists to "cut their teeth" in, so to speak - a popular place for them to travel and learn each others' ways in their youth and whatnot.

I can see that, but I've always been impressed by the Asian concern for education. Chinese and Indian alike. America is suckin ass in that regard.... JMO... Sorry to digress:)

[Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy]

There are unfortunately barriers for cooperation: Different language (European scientists at least had Latin as a lingua franca),

The Japanese used Chinese pictograms, so language wouldn't be a problem at all. Things would actually be made easier by the fact that East Asian scientists wouldn't have to learn a foreign language to communicate among themselves.

and a long way in between.

It's not that long. London and Vienna weren't that close either.

I think it would be fair to include Korea in this. Just because it fell to Japan in the late 19th century doesn't mean that it was always destined to be its inferior. In the 17th and 18th centuries the 2 were pretty much equal.

[Susano]

Vocse, I think you msiunderstood. It wasnt about Chinese-Japanese scientific contacts, but about scientfic contacts between Europe and East Asia - and THERE are sure problems of distance and language.

What is possible is of course East Asian contact to the European colonies in Asia. Ideally, have more and more varied colonial powers, but it also works the way it is IOTL. The East Asians could have scientific intercoruse with the European colonial elite, who then carry those ideas back to Europe (and of course new administratros carry the ideas to Asia). Of course, you still couldnt have common research, but that wasnt common so much at that time anyways. But certainly, an exchange of ideas, and an European-Asian exchange in Asia is possible.