Civilization: The West and the Rest (85 page)
Woodruff, Robert W.
243
Woolwich Academy of Engineering and Artillery
85
definition
13
Wren, Christopher
69–70
Wu, Y. T.
283
Yersin, Alexandre
169
Young, Brigham
241
young people
as consumers
see
consumerism
Islamic organizations for
290
Yuan Zhiming
287
Zhang, Hanping
285
Zhao Xiao
287
Zhou Enlai
283
Zhou Shixiu
26–7
Zhuo Xinping
287
Zong
(slave ship)
132–3
*
Which he called ‘the first English newspaper for which the word “news” lost its old meaning of facts which a reader ought to know … and acquired the new meaning of facts, or fictions, which it might amuse him to read’.
†
After he was briefly arrested for defying her father, she quipped: ‘John Donne – Anne Donne – Un-done.’ No wonder he loved her.
*
The eleven were Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Of these only France, Portugal and Spain existed in 1500 in anything resembling their early twentieth-century form. For Russia’s claim to be considered a part of the West, see below.
*
This question was indeed being posed in non-Western empires in the eighteenth century. In 1731 the Ottoman writer İbrahim Müteferrika asked: ‘Why do Christian nations, which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations, begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies?’
*
It is an idiosyncratic notion that one of the world’s most venerable civilizations should have a name that no one but a political theorist has ever heard of. In his original 1993 essay, Huntington used ‘Confucian’.
*
There was a seventh voyage in 1430–33. It has been claimed by Gavin Menzies that Chinese ships rounded the Cape of Good Hope, sailed up the west coast of Africa to the Cape Verde Islands, crossed the Atlantic and then continued as far as Tierra del Fuego and the coast of Australia; and that one of Zheng He’s admirals may have reached Greenland, returning to China along the north coast of Siberia and through the Bering Strait. The evidence for these claims is at best circumstantial and at worst non-existent.
*
Crucially, the Ottoman claim to the caliphate was rejected and resisted by the Shi’a Muslims of Persia and by the less doctrinaire Mughals in India.
†
Suleiman’s full title was: ‘His Imperial Majesty The Sultan Süleyman I, Sovereign of the Imperial House of Osman, Sultan of Sultans, Khan of Khans, Commander of the Faithful and Successor of the Prophet of the Lord of the Universe, Protector of the Holy Cities of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, Emperor of The Three Cities of Constantinople, Adrianople and Bursa, and of the Cities of Damascus and Cairo, of all Armenia, of the Magris, of Barka, of Kairuan, of Aleppo, of Arabic Iraq and of Ajim, of Basra, of El Hasa, of Dilen, of Raka, of Mosul, of Parthia, of Diyarbakır, of Cilicia, of the Vilayets of Erzurum, of Sivas, of Adana, of Karaman, of Van, of Barbary, of Abyssinia, of Tunisia, of Tripoli, of Damascus, of Cyprus, of Rhodes, of Candia, of the Vilayet of the Morea, of the Marmara Sea, the Black Sea and also its coasts, of Anatolia, of Rumelia, Baghdad, Kurdistan, Greece, Turkistan, Tatary, Circassia, of the two regions of Kabarda, of Georgia, of the plain of Kypshak, of the whole country of the Tatars, of Kefa and of all the neighbouring countries, of Bosnia and its dependencies, of the City and Fort of Belgrade, of the Vilayet of Serbia, with all the castles, forts and cities, of all Albania, of all Iflak and Bogdania …’
*
Leopold embodied both the Habsburg family’s capacity for acquiring territory by marriage rather than war and its attendant difficulties arising from inbreeding. He was christened Leopold Ignaz Joseph Balthasar Felician von Habsburg, and his full titulature when he was elected holy Roman emperor was ‘Leopold I, by the grace of God elected Holy Roman Emperor, forever August, King of Germany, King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slavonia, Rama, Serbia, Galicia, Lodomeria, Cumania, Bulgaria, Archduke of Austria, Duke of Burgundy, Brabant, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, Margrave of Moravia, Duke of Luxemburg, of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Württemberg and Teck, Prince of Swabia, Count of Habsburg, Tyrol, Kyburg and Goritia, Landgrave of Alsace, Marquis of the Holy Roman Empire, Burgovia, the Enns, the Higher and Lower Lusace, Lord of the Marquisate of Slavonia [and] of Port Naon and Salines’. Afflicted with an especially pronounced lower jaw (the notorious ‘Habsburg lip’), Leopold married three times: first the Spanish Margarita Teresa, who was both his niece and first cousin, then the Tyrolean Archduchess Claudia Felicitas and finally Princess Eleanore of Neuburg. He had sixteen children in all, only four of whom outlived him.
*
The story may have originated with Alfred Gottschalk, author of the first edition of the
Larousse Gastronomique
(1938). At first he attributed the croissant to the siege of Budapest in 1686, when a baker supposedly alerted the authorities to the sound of Turkish tunnelling. In a later publication Gottschalk changed the setting to Vienna in 1683.
*
The Authorized Version (as the King James Bible of 1611 came to be known) stands alongside the plays of William Shakespeare among the greatest works of English literature. The team of forty-seven scholars who produced it were let down by the royal printers only once. The 1631 edition – known as ‘the Wicked Bible’ – omitted the word ‘not’ from the commandment ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’
*
Of the world’s most important scientific breakthroughs – 369 events that are mentioned in literally all reference works on the history of science – an astonishingly high proportion (38 per cent) happened between the beginning of the Reformation and the beginning of the French Revolution. The role of freedom of thought, both religious and political, is a key variable in Charles Murray’s remarkable but neglected theory of human accomplishment. Murray also identifies the positive contributions of urbanization and, perhaps paradoxically, military conflict. As we shall see, the relationship between warfare and scientific progress was very close indeed.
*
In their travels, Candide, Cunégonde and the Leibnizian Dr Pangloss and Cacambo suffer or witness flogging, war, syphilis, shipwreck, hanging, an earthquake, enslavement, bestiality, illness and death by firing squad.
*
Jerusalem was temporarily seized by Arab forces in 1948 after heavy fighting that saw the expulsion of the Jewish community and the destruction of the city’s old synagogues. However, by the time of the January 1949 ceasefire, Israel had staked a claim to the new city (West Jerusalem) and the old Jewish quarter. Transjordan claimed East Jerusalem, along with the West Bank of the Jordan. For nearly two decades the city was divided in two, much as Berlin was between 1961 and 1989, though without international recognition for the arrangement. But then, in the Six Day War of 1967, East Jerusalem was ‘liberated’ by the Israel Defence Forces, again in defiance of the UN. Under Mayor Teddy Kollek, large parts of Arab Jerusalem were destroyed, including the Maghribi Quarter. The policy of building Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem was also designed to make Israeli control permanent. Yet recurrent bouts of violence, notably the youth-led Arab
intifadas
, have tended to restore the division of the city, while persuading many Israelis that a return to the pre-1967 borders must be part of an enduring peace settlement. Nevertheless, Israeli law still asserts that ‘Jerusalem, completed and unified, is the capital of Israel’. Since 1988, meanwhile, the Palestinians have claimed the city (which they call al-Quds al-Sharif) as their capital. At the time of writing, any compromise on the issue is hard to imagine.
*
He might equally well have called the continent ‘Columbia’, but Vespucci’s 1504 book
Mundus novus
(‘New World’) had stolen some of Columbus’ thunder.
*
Specifically, the presumptive right of the male heir to inherit his father’s land, the distinction in terms of alienability between fee simple and fee tail, the distinction in terms of security of tenure between freehold and copyhold, the use of trespass and ejectment to determine title and the legitimacy of the ‘use’ and the ‘trust’ as a way of evading feudal dues or other impositions.
*
At the age of seventeen Washington was appointed as a county surveyor for the newly created frontier county of Culpeper. These skills stood him in good stead as an officer in the French and Indian War, as the colonists called the Seven Years’ War. In 1752 Washington began his career as a land speculator when he bought 1,459 acres along Bullskin Creek in Frederick County, Virginia. After victory in the War of Independence, he and his fellow veterans fell upon the lands west of the Ohio River as the legitimate spoils of war.
*
However, some clergy did support the independence movement, particularly in New Granada, where there was considerable dissatisfaction with Spain’s taxation of the South American Church. Against these dissident priests the royalists unleashed the Inquisition of Cartagena.
*
Angostura bitters were in fact invented by a German in Bolívar’s service, by the name of Dr Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Siegert, who first produced the alcoholic concentrate from a still-secret recipe in 1824. A Pisco Sour without a few drops of Siegert’s concoction is not worthy of the name.
*
Every stage of the process – cutting, carting, milling, boiling and drying – was physically demanding, and there could be no delay between them.
*
Dean Kamen’s simple but effective water-purifier could quite easily be distributed through the soft-drink company Coca-Cola’s unrivalled network of production facilities and sales outlets, which extends throughout the developing world. Considering the staggering number of lives lost each year to contaminated drinking water, this would surely lay to rest for ever the pejorative term ‘coca-colonization’.
*
The phrase alluded both to the skin colour of the continent’s inhabitants and to their relative economic backwardness (like the ‘Dark Ages’). Today Africa is still the Dark Continent in the sense that, viewed at night from space, there is comparatively little man-made light to be seen, apart from in the extreme north and south.
*
Burke failed only to anticipate the Revolution’s adoption of the guillotine as a characteristically rationalist solution to the problem of how most efficiently to terminate a human life.
*
Composed by Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle in April 1792: ‘Against us tyranny’s / Bloody standard is raised / … Can you hear in the fields / The howling of these fearsome soldiers? / They are coming into our midst / To cut the throats of our sons and consorts! / To arms, citizens, / Form in battalions, / March, march! / Let impure blood / Water our furrows! … [Spare] not these bloody despots / … All these tigers who pitilessly / Ripped out their mothers’ wombs!’
†
Now Slavkov in the Czech Republic, Austerlitz was the scene of the battle that prompted Napoleon to commission the Arc de Triomphe.
*
At the Ecole Militaire in Paris, Napoleon had been examined by Pierre-Simon Laplace, one of the pioneers of the mathematics of probability.
*
Compare Eugène Delacroix’s
Liberty Leads the People
(1830) with Egide, Baron Wappers’s
Episode of the Belgian Revolution of 1830
(1835) and (among many twentieth-century examples) the Mexican Diego Rivera’s
The Arsenal
(1928).
†
Wagner had, according to his autobiography, ‘conceive[d] the plan of a tragedy for the ideal stage of the future, entitled Jesus of Nazareth. Bakunin begged me to spare him any details; and when I sought to win him over to my project by a few verbal hints, he wished me luck, but insisted that I must at all costs make Jesus appear as a weak character. As for the music of the piece, he advised me, amid all the variations, to use only one set of phrases, namely: for the tenor, “Off with His head!”; for the soprano, “Hang Him!”; and for the basso continuo, “Fire! fire!” ’ The anecdote nicely captures the overheated spirit of 1848.
*
Pretentiously renamed the Ecole Nationale de la France d’Outre Mer in 1934.