“Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.”
I like this quote because it feels true in real life. Smart people don’t need to change as much since they already understand things, and really stubborn or clueless people don’t change either. Everyone else has to learn and adjust. Kind of funny but also makes sense.
The Chinese economy produced one quarter of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 1500, followed by India which produced nearly another quarter. In comparison, the fourteen nations of western Europe produced just about half of China’s GDP or only one-eight of the global total production. The largest European economy, in Italy, produced only about one-sixth of China’s output.
I didn’t realize China and India were that dominant in 1500. It flips the way I usually think about history, because we’re often told Europe was the center of progress. It’s kind of shocking that all of western Europe together only made half of what China alone produced.
The Chinese, who valued silver higher than gold, called this the silver rule. Confucian social morality is based on this reciprocity and on empathy and understanding others rather than on divinely ordained rules.
It’s surprising that the Chinese valued silver more than gold, since usually gold is seen as the most valuable. I also like how Confucian morality focused on empathy and reciprocity instead of religion. That makes their system feel more about human relationships than divine rules.
The imperial courts sent thousands of highly-educated administrators throughout the empire and China was ruled not by hereditary nobles or even elected representatives, but by a class of men who had received rigorous training and had passed very stringent examinations to prove themselves qualified to lead.
I think it’s really interesting that China didn’t rely on kings or nobles to run things, but instead used these exams to pick leaders. It feels kind of modern, like an early version of meritocracy. Compared to Europe, where leadership was mostly inherited, this shows how different their system was.
Staple crops produce the foods that provide the greatest percentage of the calories people eat. It might surprise you that today only about fifteen staple crops account for 90% of the calories people eat every day.
This is so interesting to me and a wild fact!
In 330 CE, the Roman Emperor Constantine banned persecution of Christians, and by 400 AC, Christianity had replaced the worship of Rome’s traditional gods and goddesses as the state religion of the Roman Empire. Because Constantine embraced the new faith, the Roman Catholic Church is the most direct descendent of the Roman Empire. The Pope, leader of the Catholic Church, still lives in Rome, and the vestments of Catholic priests (and the clergy of some other liturgical Christian denominations) are similar to those worn by fourth-century Roman officials.
It is very interesting how a religion that was persecuted can work its way even up to the highest person in the empire. Religion in general is fascinating to me.
Farming was once believed to have developed in the Middle East at sites such as Jericho and Mesopotamia six or seven thousand years ago, where the ancestors of modern Europeans were usually credited with the invention of agriculture. More recently, responding to evidence of prehistoric farming in Africa, India, and China, some scholars suggested agriculture may have developed more or less independently in several regions of the world. But it was difficult to imagine how such parallel development could have occurred, with people in different parts of the world not only making the same basic discoveries but making them pretty much simultaneously. Even more recently, scientists have begun to suspect this confusion may reflect the difficulty of finding archaeological evidence, since plant materials decay in the ground much more quickly than arrowheads and stone spear points. And some have suggested we may have been thinking about agriculture wrong.
I find it interesting how so many things we learned in school growing up and that I considered were facts about History can change so much in such a short period of time.