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Only marginally relevant, but the people who are in this thread and can answer may overlap quite a bit.

I have always been fascinated with why did so many advancements have been made in the last few hundreds of years, centralized mostly in the “Western countries”? Don’t get me wrong, it’s absolutely not some “superiority-check” on my side, I have just never heard a convincing argument that made this area special. Was it just a “good place at the good time” event, something related to some side effect of religion/society?

One somewhat convincing argument was the constant battles between small countries?



What is more likely, that this has never happened before ever and we are the very first, or that it has happened before and our expectation that we definitely would find some evidence X years later is simply incorrect?


Protestant Ethic? Not sure.


The enlightenment, the scientific method, and capitalist societies that fund research and development


But why did those develop in Europe, instead of, say, China?


Resourse abundance? I would recommend Jared Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel" as a good book on this question




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