Conquest and Culture: An International History.

Conquest and Culture: An International History, by Thomas Sowell (Basic, 512 pp., $35)

This book, as the author frequently reminds us, is the third of a trilogy, dedicated to discussing the importance of cultural transfer in the making of the world as it is today. The earlier volumes discussed race and migration. This final one discusses conquest as a means of cultural transmission.

It would be easier to understand the author's point if the arguments of his previous works were fully and clearly set out. As it is, one has to pick up the thread from allusion and fairly peremptory summary. It seems that Mr. Sowell lacks patience with those scholars who deny the idea of cultural diffusion. Such scholars refuse to accept that there were centers of excellence, from which leading ideas, technologies, and techniques were carried to other regions that did not possess them. They prefer to believe that intellectual and material revolutions arose independently at a number of centers. "Backwardness," by this philosophy of development, was the result of oppression by more aggressive neighbors, who practiced either material or intellectual theft. "Forwardness," reciprocally, should be seen not as an index of racial or cultural superiority but as a function of force or fraud--force in robbing wealth-producers of their product, fraud in representing others' ideas as one's own.

The attack on the theory of cultural diffusion is politically correct in motivation, for the theory is very much a nineteenth-century European creed, and a triumphalist one. Its critics take as their starting point the undeniable fact that some civilizations have had flowerings that subsequently petered out. That of the Chinese is the most notable. China was the first very large cultural zone, as large in the last millennium B.C. as it is today, and much larger than any other with claims to equal its political or intellectual level of advancement--Rome, say, or Persia. From that high point, over the next two millennia, China declined relatively. By the nineteenth century it had fallen into economic and intellectual poverty. The politically correct explanation of its fall blames outsiders, particularly Europeans, who are accused of subverting its system of government, despoiling its trade, and trivializing its intellectual and artistic contributions to world culture.

A similarly politically correct theory explains the decline of Islamic civilization. In the eighth century after Christ, the Islamic caliphate was China's only competitor as a world power and easily outstripped Christian Europe as a source of invention and ideas. Then it lost its dynamism. Arabs ceased to be thinkers, mathematicians, traders, and travelers and became smokers of the hookah. Europe is again to blame. Its armored knights, inflamed by the idea of the Crusade, forced Islam to waste its strength in defending Spain and the Holy Land, until it lost the capacity to resist real barbarians from the steppe, Turks and Mongols.

One has considerable sympathy with Mr. Sowell's impatience with these crude theories. Crude they are. China's troubles had their origins not in the penetration of its seaboard by European mariners but in invasions from the steppe. Its traditional means of dealing with the problem--Sinifying the conquerors--worked well for hundreds of years. Some of the most dynamic dynasties were originally outsiders. What eventually undid China was conquest by barbarians, the Manchu, who not only resisted Sinification but banned all cultural adaptation. Their policy of "no change" froze Chinese civilization in a pre-Renaissance, pre-industrial state, from which it has perhaps only just now begun to emerge. The fossilization of Arab civilization, equally, was the fault of the Ottoman Turks, not the Europeans, though also of the apparently incurable tendency of the Arabs to waste their energies in theological dispute, into which all other forms of differences are resolved.

The author is principally concerned to show that the reason for the relative advancement of one civilization over another has to do with specific and local factors, rather than any conspiracy by white Europeans to push other races down. He accepts that Europe did come to dominate the world, to such an extent that, in the early twentieth century, most of the globe was either ruled by European states or occupied by European peoples who had escaped colonial rule. He sees no conspiracy in that at all. What happened, he suggests, was that the undeniable phenomenon of cultural diffusion worked better in the case of some peoples than of others.

The British, for example, were not in on the beginning of civilization. Before the coming of the Romans, they were the backward inhabitants of an island at the fringe of the world. After the departure of the Romans they again lapsed into backwardness, a condition imposed on them by Teutonic sea-raiders and settlers from beyond the borders of the Roman empire. Enough of Rome, however, persisted to make Anglo-Saxon England a centralized state, and it survived as one, under Norman rule, when the rest of Europe lost central government. England's rulers profited from the island's geographical inheritance--its position athwart the northern European sea routes and points of departure to the wider world--to win commercial and then imperial benefit in regions far distant from its shores. At the same time, it developed the legacy of Roman civilization-administrative efficiency, legal probity, scholarly acumen--into a system that offered services to its continental neighbors. The English became ruthless at seizing whatever was not actually defended against their maritime predators. They also became sinuous middlemen, fixers of deals in far distant trading centers, dependable providers of credit, and trustworthy bankers and brokers.

Geography and culture go together. That seems to be Thomas Sowell's point. It is no good being the possessors of rich natural resources, as the Slavs were, if there is no means of moving the extracted product to a market. It is no good being muscular and hardworking, as Africans are, if the climate nullifies one's efforts. It is no good being ferociously brave and warlike, as the Plains Indians were, if the environment denies one any means to refine one's military technology. What is needed for success is some combination of favorable environment and access to the wider world in a two-way flow--inward to bring in novel ideas and techniques, outward to facilitate exchange of goods on a basis profitable to both sides.

This is a thesis with which it is difficult to disagree. What remains outside the author's system of explanation is why, when material factors seem to balance out, as they do in any estimation of the relative economic and industrial success of France and Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one achieves dominance and the other does not. Britain was, in 1870, undeniably the most important country in the world. Its industrial output had not yet been overtaken by that of the United States, its navy was equal in size to the next six put together, its empire was the largest the world had ever seen, its prestige was stupendous.

Yet its land area was half that of France and its population no more than equal while, in cultural terms, France still dominated the globe. French was still the international language and French ideas were paramount. How had Britain, after a century and a half of struggle for primacy, outstripped France in material terms?

It is at this point that one begins to doubt whether Thomas Sowell's painstaking geographical and economic analysis really provides answers to the questions he raises. Political correctness supplies a deeply boring and unproductive approach to the problem of why some peoples are more advanced than others. The theory of cultural diffusion, anathema as it is to the politically correct, is the obvious explanation, and military conquest must be recognized as one of its means. Why, however, some centers of culture were more successful than others still remains mysterious. Anyone who had sensibly laid out money at the beginning of the eighteenth century on whether France or Britain would become Europe's leading imperial power would have bet on France. His money would have been lost. Can Mr. Sowell explain that away?

Mr. Keegan is the author of A History of Warfare and Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America (both from Vintage), among many other books.