A summary of "A thousand years of nonlinear history": the geological component and why the West dominates the World

Manuel De Landa ambitiously borrows the vocabulary and concepts from the science of nonlinearity and complex systems and applies them to the history of Europe from the year 1000 to 2000. The main goal of the book is to draft a possible schematic trajectory explaining the domination of Europe during that period over the rest of the world, especially the empire of Islam and China. The idea is that this domination came up because of the lucky congruence of multitude of complex and interacting economic, climatic, geographic and social processes that triggered auto-catalytic processes, that it is processes fuelling themselves via positive feedbacks, and not because of either the fate of History as Marx suggested, the sole power of some top-down political and economical concept as capitalism and its (really) "invisible hand", or a fundamental dominating aspect of the European people, such as a psyche or a religion shaped for "success". In this sense, De Landa follows the traces of many (western) authors who have been trying to re-equilibrate the idea that we have of the creative power of the different cultures in the History and put back the spoiled child 'Europa' to its right place, as Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (one of the best book and theory ever) successfully did.

The originality of De Landa is to avoid at every instant the use of any subjective concious or unconscious explanations by constantly using the scientific language, metaphors but also actual processes from the science of complex systems.

The first part deals on the geological aspect of the European society, its cities, institutions and economical system:

"From this point of view cities arise from the flow of matter-energy, but once a town's mineral infrastructure has emerged, it reacts to those flows, creating a new set of constraints that either intensifies or inhibits them. Needless to say, the walls, monumental buildings, streets, and houses of a town would make a rather weak set of constraints if they operated on their own. Of course, they do not. Our historical exploration of urban dynamics must therefore include an analysis of the institutions that inhabit cities, whether the bureaucracies that run them or the markets that animate them. Although these institutions are the product of collective human decision making, once in place they also react back on their human components to limit them and control them, or, on the contrary, to set them in motion or accelerate their mutation."

Manuel De Landa, A thousand years of nonlinear history, Geological history: 1000-1700 AD


Notice the vocabulary of dynamics employed and the numerous feedback loops considered in that explanation. One of the virtuous cycle that exists, according to De Landa, is the combination of markets and anti-markets. The first are actual markets, composed of small-scale and truly capitalistic companies where competition rules, while the second are composed of large-scale companies that are anti-capitalistic by preventing competition to exercise its force:

"Markets and bureaucracies, as well as planned and unplanned cities, are concrete instances of a more general distinction: self-organized meshworks of diverse elements, versus hierarchies of uniform elements. But again, meshworks and hierarchies not only coexist and intermingle, they constantly give rise to one another.
[...]Thus, once markets grew past the size of local, weekly gatherings, they were ranked and organized form the top, giving rise to a hybrid form:a hierarchy of meshworks. The opposite hybrid, a meshwork of hierarchies, may be illustrated by the system of power in the Middle Ages."

Manuel De Landa, A thousand years of nonlinear history, Geological history: 1000-1700 AD

The chance of Europe, that Islam or China did not have, was that it was never too anarchic nor too controlled. Its chance has been the presence of that multitude of people, competing each other over that relatively small piece of land, where the virtuous cycle of markets and anti-markets survived until invading the institutions and the psyche of Europe. In some sense, even without mentioning it, De Landa describes here the concept of the edge of chaos, the limit between too much order and too much randomness; only at the edge, life and creativity survive. Islam and China have both a too strong central commandment that prevented, according to De Landa, the local market-like processes to develop and bring the innovations to the high level necessary for a civilisation to win the evolutionary game:

"The emergence of powerful nation-states, and the concomitant decrease in the autonomy of the cities they absorbed (and even of the city-states that remained independent), could have brought the different forms of self-stimulating dynamics we have described to a halt. That this did not happen was due yet to one more form of autocatalysis unique to the West: continued arm races. [T]his type of self-stimulation depended in turn on the fact that the nations of Europe, unlike China and Islam, were never able to form a single, homogeneous empire, and have remained until today a meshwork of hierarchies. It was within this meshwork that advances in offensive weaponry stimulated innovations in defense technology, leading to an ever-growing armament spiral.
[...]
Many of the inventions that Europeans used to colonize the world (the compass, gunpowder, paper money, the printing press) were of Chinese origin, while Europe's accounting techniques and instrument of credits (which are often cited as examples of her unique «rationality») came from Islam. Thus, nothing intrinsic to Europe determined the outcome, but rather a dynamics bearing no inherent relationship to any culture. [A]n excess of centralized decision making in the East kept turbulent dynamics under control, while they raged unobstructed in the West. To be sure, at several points in her history Europe could have become a unified hierarchy, and this would have ground these dynamics to a halt. This happened in the sixteenth century with the Hapsburg Empire, and later on with the rise of Napoleon and Hitler. Yet all these efforts proved abortive, and European nations remained a meshwork."

Manuel De Landa, A thousand years of nonlinear history, Geological history: 1000-1700 AD

As again, those theories and trajectories are hard to proved. They are only suggestive but they have the merit to bring a more moderate albeit complex view of the world and to liberate ourself from the extremist, at times naive and too simplistic, visions that we have of our world. The Truth might lay somewhere in between.