Immanuel Kant, "Physical Geography", Volume 8 of "Gesammelte Schriften": The inhabitant of the temperate parts of the world, above all the central part, has a more beautiful body, works harder, is more jocular, more controlled in his passions, more intelligent than any other race of people in the world. That is why at all points in time these peoples have educated the others and controlled them with weapons. The Romans, Greeks, the ancient Nordic peoples, Genghis Khan, the Turks, Tamurlaine, the Europeans after Columbus's discoveries, they have all amazed the southern lands with their arts and weapons. (cited in Eze's "Race and the Enlightenment," p. 64) ******** Janet Abu-Lughod, "Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350", pp 323-324: In the past, before western scholars had sufficient information about China's achievements in science and technology, it was commonly argued that Europe's eventual triumph in the world arena was the result of her unique scientific and technological inventiveness. and, conversely, that Orientals, although perhaps "clever,". had never been able to sustain a scientific revolution. The voluminous investigations of Needham have more than corrected this error. We now have much fuller documentation on Chinese contributions to medicine and physiology, physics, and mathematics, as well as their more practical applications in technology. According to Sivin, Needham did not go far enough; he stopped short of admitting that, by Sung times, China had had a true scientific "revolution," a position strongly argued by Chinese scholars. Whether or not the term "scientific revolution" is justified, there can be no doubt that in late medieval times the level of Chinese technical competence far exceeded the Middle East, which, in turn, had outstripped Europe for many centuries. Space permits only a few examples here: paper and printing, iron and weaponry (including guns, cannons, and bombs), shipbuilding and navigational techniques, as well as two primary manufactured exports, silk and porcelain. According to Tsien: "Paper was invented in China before the Christian era, adopted for at the beginning of the 1st century A.D., and manufactured with new and fresh fibres from the early 2nd century...Woodblock printing was first employed...around 700 A.D. and moveable type in middle of the 11th century." Some time in the ninth century, the Arabs learned the process of paper making from the Chinese and later transmitted that precious knowledge to "westerners." Braudel (1973: 295) suggests that the European paper mills appeared in twelfth-century Spain but the Italians did not begin to produce paper until the fourteenth century; Cipolla , basing his remarks on a 1953 article Irigoin, however, claims that by the second half of the thirteenth century the court in Byzantium no longer bought its paper from Arabs but from Italy. But in any case, China's edge was significant. Even more impressive than paper manufacture were Chinese advances in siderurgv. which were several hundred years in advance Europe's. From at least the eighth century onward, coal was being mined in northern China and used in furnaces that produced high-quality iron and even steel "either by means of the co-fusion of pig iron and wrought iron, or by direct decarbonization in a cold oxidizing blast." Hartwell's (1967) estimates of the scale of iron production are truly staggering. By his calculations, the tonnage of coal burned annually in the eleventh century for iron production alone in northern China was "roughly equivalent to 70 percent of the total amount of coal annually used by all metal workers in Great Britain at the beginning of the eighteenth century" By the end of the eleventh century the Sung were minting iron coins and making many metal products as well. According to Hartwell: "7,000 workers were engaged in actually mining the ore and fuel, and operating the furnaces, forges, and refining hearths...[while] others were engaged in transporting the raw materials from the mines to the iron works.The scale of production at individual establishments was unprecedented, and probably was not equalled anywhere in the world until the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century." If we add to the workers engaged in direct ore extraction and processing those workers who fabricated tools and weaponry, there can be no doubt as to the high level of China's industrial development. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
