Information Processing and Its Role in the Rise of the European World System

摘要

This chapter offers a millennial perspective on human history, a very global perspective that focuses on the underlying socionatural dynamics rather than on historical detail. It does so in the reverse order of what a historian would do. Whereas the latter would attempt to construct the present from the past, I have tried to reconstruct the past from my understanding of present-day dynamics. The chapter thus presents a millennial perspective on a centennial scale, a perspective that describes the period concerned in terms of large-scale dynamic generalizations. There is a distinct European bias, as very little attention is paid to what happened outside the European cultural sphere, except insofar as those events are relevant to Europe between A.D. 1000 and 2000.~1 Although this does not limit insight into the underlying dynamics in question, it does mean that the timescales are not relevant to other parts of the world. The chapter will arbitrarily follow a rather "classical" division of the last millennium into periods of about two hundred years; this seems to fit some of the phenomena highlighted just as well as any other division, at least in Europe. However, the reader is forewarned about the biases this entails. The dynamics underlying what we normally observe as history occur simultaneously at an infinite number of different timescales, some of which are observable, while others remain hidden. These timescales stretch from several millennia to momentary, roughly from 10~4 to 10~(-2) years. As it is very difficult to address simultaneously more than two or three suchscales, any theory assembled on the period under consideration will be profoundly underdetermined by our observations. Moreover, any such theory will be biased by our initial subdivision of the period, just as our choice of spatial scale will bias our ideas toward observations that can be made at the scale concerned. Even worse, we will not know how such choices have biased our ideas, as we make our choices before we have studied the phenomena concerned.