Scholars Unravel Middle East S1E1: Why Did Small European Kingdoms, and Not the Huge Empires of Asia, Conquer the World?
And when did Middle Easterners begin to all fall behind Europeans? And what does it even mean to fall behind?
For progress, which one do you think is better:
- many small states competing against each other?
- big states with huge resources and internal stability?
This question form will expire on Wed., Jan. 31, 2024.
My guest for this episode is Dr. Philip T. Hoffman. He is a professor of Business Economics and History at the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). In this episode we discuss his book Why Did Europe Conquer the World?
To learn more about Dr. Hoffman, you can visit his academic homepage.
If you enjoyed this episode with Dr. Hoffman, then you should definitely listen to my conversation with Dr. Yasheng Huang of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, in which he describes the reasons why China fell behind Europe. Dr. Huang is the author of The Rise and Fall of the East: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline, which I discus with him in S3E7 of the History Behind News podcast.
I hope you enjoy these episodes.
Adel Aali
Host, Unravelling the Middle East
Host, History Behind News Podcast
Unravelling the Middle East podcast is a production of the History Behind News program.
Music attributions:
1. Opening and closing music of the program:
Santur: Peyman Heydarian playing on the Santur some Iranian music. Recorded with a Sony PCM-D50 at the School of Oriental and African Studies of London on April 7th 2011.
Music available on at https://freesound.org/people/xserra/sounds/125654/
Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0 DEED)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
This music has been cut in shorter pieces and its volume has been adjusted in different portions of our program.
2. Background music to guest introduction:
The Desert | The Grand Score
https://www.free-stock-music.com/alexander-nakarada-the-desert.html
The Desert | The Grand Score by Alexander Nakarada (CreatorChords) | https://creatorchords.com
Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com
Creative Commons / Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ The volume and lengths of this piece have been modified.
3. Background music to promoting History Behind News episodes:
The Success by Keys of Moon | https://soundcloud.com/keysofmoon. Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The volume and lengths of this piece have been modified.
IMAGE: Middle East map by MapChart.net: https://www.mapchart.net/world.html. License is CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.