The end of China’s treasure fleets gives us a clue. Seven of those fleets sailed from China between A.D. 1405 and 1433. They were then suspended as a result of a typical aberration of local politics that could happen anywhere in the world: a power struggle between two factions at the Chinese court (the eunuchs and their opponents). The former faction had been identified with sending and captaining the fleets. Hence when the latter faction gained the upper hand in a power struggle, it stopped sending fleets, eventually dismantled the shipyards, and forbade oceangoing shipping.
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That one temporary decision became irreversible, because no shipyards remained to turn out ships that would prove the folly of that temporary decision, and to serve as a focus for rebuilding other shipyards.
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From time to time the Chinese court decided to halt other activities besides overseas navigation: it abandoned development of an elaborate water-driven spinning machine, stepped back from the verge of an industrial revolution in the 14th century, demolished or virtually abolished mechanical clocks after leading the world in clock construction, and retreated from mechanical devices and technology in general after the late 15th century. Those potentially harmful effects of unity have flared up again in modern China, notably during the madness of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, when a decision by one or a few leaders closed the whole country’s school systems for five years.
The first thing that came to mind as I read this was the harmful and far-reaching decision to kill Transit City. Is Toronto being collapsed?
8 comments:
If Toronto was isolated the way China was at the time, the Transit City decision could collapse it. Being part of Ontario and part of Canada will help Toronto withstand Rob Ford.
I hope you're enjoying the book.
I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. What he's saying makes a whole lot of sense overall and I can't find any holes in the actual reasoning (although I don't necessarily have the knowledge to do so.) But then he goes and chooses words like "Indian" and "Eskimo", and says an aardvark is like a hyena. If I'm catching problems in the scope of stuff I know something about, how many problems are there in the stuff I don't know anything about?
Hm, interesting. I read it many years ago and didn't remember those details.
"Indian" has become the word of choice in much of this kind of writing - apparently a lot of people prefer it - but Eskimo surprises me. In "Collapse," he writes a lot about Inuits... and uses "Inuit".
I found the book fascinating overall, if I didn't get bogged down in statistics and proofs.
Any idea why/how that happened? Everything I've ever heard in my life has been that you should avoid "Indian", and that discourse in general has been moving away from it. Why are they going back? What does "Indian" have that "Aboriginal" doesn't?
Same here. I don't think the return to Indian has caught on widely, and perhaps it won't.
Charles Mann, in the intro to his book "1491" explains why he chose to use Indian, even though it's a "confusing and historically inappropriate name". When referring to specific nations, he tries always to use the name people called themselves, but says "the overwhelming majority of the indigenous peoples whom I have met in North and South America describe themselves as Indians." (page xi of preface)
Then he has an appendix called "Loaded Words" explaining in more detail.
I think you can read it through Google Books: here.
Wow, that's the first I've ever heard of that! I wonder if that makes Canada an outlier, or if there are people around who prefer to be referred to as "Indian" and their preferences haven't made it into terminological resources. Because use of "Indian" in Canada, as far as I can tell, is a relic that exists only for legal purposes, where it would just be too big an undertaking to change the legislation and everything relating to it.
This is basically the standing orders for terminology in Canada. (Yes, it's 6 years old and archived, but INAC's current terminology page links to it.)
The few Aboriginal people I know personally call themselves "Native", but they're also of an older generation.
But I've never actually talked to an Aboriginal person from outside Canada about their terminological preferences, so there might be this whole thing that exists completely outside of my awareness. Weird.
I've never heard "Indian" in Canada. And to me Canada is so much more evolved about these issues, and there is so much more recognition of native peoples here than in the US.
The few native people I know in Canada call themselves Native, or refer to their nation, calling themselves Cree.
Here I always say First Nations or Aboriginal. In the US I always say Native American. I've learned that Indian activists hate that term, but I feel so weird saying "Indian" after teaching myself not to use it!
In Mexico, Central and South America, people use Los Indios or La India all the time, along with Mestizo - which can be derogatory, but is not necessarily.
Thanks for that link, too. First time I've seen that.
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